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 By an act of faith, Enoch skipped death completely. “They looked all over and couldn’t find him because God had taken him.” We know on the basis of reliable testimony that before he was taken “he pleased God.” It’s impossible to please God apart from faith. And why? Because anyone who wants to approach God must believe both that he exists and that he cares enough to respond to those who seek him.

Faith prays.

Enoch prayed. He walked with God. At its heart, prayer is a relationship with God.

Someone said that Enoch walked so far with God, that one day the Lord said to him, ‘You’ve come all this way; there’s no point going back!’

Enoch and all the other people of faith listed in this chapter sought God earnestly, and they did so with the confidence that He would reward them. Raymond Brown notes that God not only reveals His existence to us, but also proves His generosity. Those who seek Him in every day life can testify to His goodness.

He also points this out:

‘The brief Genesis account of his long life contains the fascinating detail that Enoch did not always walk with God. There was a time, it appears, when the walk began. He ‘walked with God after the birth of Methuselah’. It may not be too much to assume that the responsibilities of parenthood forced Enoch to recognise his serious moral and spiritual limitations, and in this experience of inadequacy he may have felt himself cast upon God for help.’ (‘Christ above all’, p.200).

”You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart” (Jer.29:13);

”Come near to God and he will come near to you” (James 4:8).

What promises praying people have to feed their faith. The above are just two of many.

By faith Abel brought God a better offering than Cain did. By faith he was commended as righteous, when God spoke well of his offerings. And by faith Abel still speaks, even though he is dead.

It is correct to observe, I believe, that faith gives. Indeed, that faith is willing to give its very best. Faith is always involved in giving. This includes trusting God to meet our needs, and also trusting Him to use what we have given for His own purposes.

But the most important point to make here is that it is by faith (in Jesus) that we also come to be regarded as ”righteous” before God. In Scripture faith and righteousness always go together. They are conjoined – inseparable. On this point Abel speaks to us today, even though he is long dead.

We can no doubt think of others today who, although are no longer with us, still speak to us. We remember them with gratitude.

Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. ² This is what the ancients were commended for.

³ By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.

“I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in.” George Washington Carver

As we work our way through this chapter we are going to see what faith does.

First of all, faith understands. The world says, ‘Seeing is believing’, but for people of faith ‘believing is seeing’.

Like Moses, paradoxically, we see the invisible (verse 27).

‘Faith sees the invisible, believes the unbelievable, and receives the impossible.’ Corrie Ten Boom.

Every preacher – or so it seems to me – should take heart from understanding that God created the universe by His almighty Word. What worlds of beauty might He continue to create (and sustain) in the hearts of those who hear His Word expounded?

You need to persevere so that when you have done the will of God, you will receive what he has promised. ³⁷ For,

‘In just a little while,
    he who is coming will come
    and will not delay.’

³⁸ And,

‘But my righteous one will live by faith.
    And I take no pleasure
    in the one who shrinks back.’

³⁹ But we do not belong to those who shrink back and are destroyed, but to those who have faith and are saved.

Here, at the end of chapter 10, we see clearly that in spite of his earlier severe warning, the writer to the Hebrews has every confidence that these believers will keep going. One incentive for them (and for us) is that Jesus will come again. The suffering will not continue for ever. Tom Wright points out that Christians are out of tune with this world because they are in tune with the future one. Therefore persecution in some form is to be expected. But Jesus will have the last word in human history. Those who know Him have every reason to hold on and keep going.

In the next chapter, we are going to be introduced to a catalogue of faith heroes who held on and kept going through thick and thin. How they inspire us (and even cheer us on from the stands!)

You need to persevere so that when you have done the will of God, you will receive what he has promised.

They needed to persevere; I need to persevere; and so do you. It is those who persevere to the end who will be saved.

I have long believed that perseverance (or endurance) is a seriously under-rated quality in the Christian life. (It’s been referred to as ‘stick-to-it-iveness’), It’s not spectacular. It doesn’t have connotations of spiritual fireworks. It’s just about putting one foot in front of another and keeping going.

The missionary pioneer, William Carey, said about himself: ‘If he give me credit for being a plodder he will describe me justly. Anything beyond that will be too much. I can plod. I can persevere in any definite pursuit. To this I owe everything.

Some days it is a noble and courageous thing to just get out of bed and carry on with life:

• to be faithful for one more day in that challenging marriage;
• to continue to love that oh so difficult relative;
• to return to the workplace which causes you much stress and anxiety;
• to press on with that ministry in which you feel unappreciated, taken for granted, and where there are few visible results.

How encouraging, then, to consider C.H. Spurgeon’s perceptively wonderful comment:

”By perseverance the snail made it to the ark.”

 Remember those earlier days after you had received the light, when you endured in a great conflict full of suffering. ³³ Sometimes you were publicly exposed to insult and persecution; at other times you stood side by side with those who were so treated. ³⁴ You suffered along with those in prison and joyfully accepted the confiscation of your property, because you knew that you yourselves had better and lasting possessions. ³⁵ So do not throw away your confidence; it will be richly rewarded.

Following on from the severe warning we read yesterday, our writer reminds his readers of better days in the past, when they showed the fruit of genuine faith in their costly faithfulness to Christ and His church. Those were better days: days when the understood that they had ”better…possessions” in Jesus.

The hymn writer asked himself: ‘Where is the blessedness I knew when first I saw the Lord?’

Sometimes we may need to remind ourselves (or be reminded) of how it was with us in the earliest days of our Christian experience. If we can ‘get back to where we once belonged’ we surely will keep going, and not throw our true and lasting treasure away – even though, at times, we may be tempted to do so. The spiritual battle is real and fierce, and we have a ruthless enemy. He will steal precious things from us if he can. We need to always be alert, continually standing guard, living in prayer and nourishing our souls with God’s Word

PRAYER: Lord, renew in me my first love, and help me love you more and more.

THOUGHT:

‘Lord, it is my chief complaint
that my love is weak and faint;
yet I love thee, and adore;
O for grace to love thee more!‘ William Cowper (from the hymn: ‘Hark my soul it is the Lord’).

If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, ²⁷ but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God. ²⁸ Anyone who rejected the law of Moses died without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. ²⁹ How much more severely do you think someone deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God underfoot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified them, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace? ³⁰ For we know him who said, “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” and again, “The Lord will judge his people.” ³¹ It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

This is not the easiest passage in Hebrews, either mentally or emotionally, and its meaning is debated between sincere Christians. Is it possible for a believer to be saved and lost? It is beyond the scope of these daily devotional thoughts to go into all the details the arguments. But I will make two brief points:

1. These warning passages in the Bible should be taken seriously. We have all known people who once walked with Jesus and now do so no longer. Let those who think they stand take heed…! But the particular verses in our reading today seem to refer to more than what we might call ‘backsliding’. This looks like apostasy, where someone who has publicly confessed Christ now publicly disavows Him. (Remember the context, the author was writing to Jewish Christians who were tempted to go back from Christ to Judaism; from the church to the synagogue). But there is no salvation outside of trusting in Jesus. ‘The Message’ translation is helpful here, I think: If we give up and turn our backs on all we’ve learned, all we’ve been given, all the truth we now know, we repudiate Christ’s sacrifice and are left on our own to face the Judgment—and a mighty fierce judgment it will be! If the penalty for breaking the law of Moses is physical death, what do you think will happen if you turn on God’s Son, spit on the sacrifice that made you whole, and insult this most gracious Spirit? This is no light matter. God has warned us that he’ll hold us to account and make us pay. He was quite explicit: “Vengeance is mine, and I won’t overlook a thing” and “God will judge his people.” Nobody’s getting by with anything, believe me.
2. Although the warning is severe, the writer is confident of better things with regard to the recipients of this letter. We will see this in the remaining verses of chapter 10.

PRAYER: Lord, you have kept me going to this point. Thank you for your amazing grace. Please keep me going to the very end. Sometimes I feel the winds blowing strongly against me, and I see the waves around me. Lord, I can feel I am sinking. Help me to keep on walking with my eyes fixed on you.

And so, dear brothers and sisters^] we can boldly enter heaven’s Most Holy Place because of the blood of Jesus. ²⁰ By his death, Jesus opened a new and life-giving way through the curtain into the Most Holy Place. ²¹ And since we have a great High Priest who rules over God’s house, ²² let us go right into the presence of God with sincere hearts fully trusting him. For our guilty consciences have been sprinkled with Christ’s blood to make us clean, and our bodies have been washed with pure water.

²³ Let us hold tightly without wavering to the hope we affirm, for God can be trusted to keep his promise. ²⁴ Let us think of ways to motivate one another to acts of love and good works. ²⁵ And let us not neglect our meeting together, as some people do, but encourage one another, especially now that the day of his return is drawing near. (NLT).

The call is to everyone in the church to, in a very real sense, pastor the church. It is not just for leaders to encourage the members of the church in good behaviour. This is a ministry entrusted to every believer. But how can we meaningfully participate in this if we’re not there (or not there all that often)?

‘So, then, we are to come to worship God – not just in private, though private worship and prayer is enormously important, but in public as well. The danger of people thinking they could be Christians all by themselves was, it seems, present in the early church just as today, and verse 25 warns against it. This may well not be due to people not realising what a corporate thing Christianity was and is, nor yet because they were lazy or didn’t much like the other Christians in their locality, but because, when there was a threat of persecution…it’s much easier to escape notice if you avoid meeting together with other worshippers. Much safer just not to turn up.’ Tom Wright: ‘Hebrews for Everyone’, pp.116/117.

Well, safer physically maybe, but not spiritually.

One thing we clearly should not do in the light of Jesus’ ever-nearing coming is to give up meeting together.

Even before the pandemic, the pattern of church attendance was changing. It appeared to be the case that for increasing numbers of professing Christians in the UK, regular involvement was becoming once a fortnight, or even once every three or four weeks – once every so often. But the pandemic seems to have accelerated that direction of travel. For us, this is not about playing it safe in a hostile environment. It is primarily about personal preference and convenience: about how we choose to spend our week-ends. It doesn’t look or feel very much like New Testament discipleship, and I have to say it just isn’t healthy.

And so, dear brothers and sisters, we can boldly enter heaven’s Most Holy Place because of the blood of Jesus. ²⁰ By his death, Jesus opened a new and life-giving way through the curtain into the Most Holy Place. ²¹ And since we have a great High Priest who rules over God’s house, ²² let us go right into the presence of God with sincere hearts fully trusting him. For our guilty consciences have been sprinkled with Christ’s blood to make us clean, and our bodies have been washed with pure water.

²³ Let us hold tightly without wavering to the hope we affirm, for God can be trusted to keep his promise. ²⁴ Let us think of ways to motivate one another to acts of love and good works. 

The next two exhortations, found in verses 24 & 25, have to do with what we might call a person’s ‘churchmanship’. The Cross has implications for not only our vertical relationship with God, but also our horizontal relationships within the church.

Verse 24 challenges us with regard to the amount of thought we put into our church life. ‘The Message’ says:

Let’s see how inventive we can be in encouraging love and helping out…

‘Every Christian needs the encouragement of every other Christian. Everyone who comes through the door of the place of worship, whether it be a house in a back street or a great cathedral in a public square, is a real encouragement to everyone else who is there. This is part of the way, along with an actual word of encouragement when necessary, in which we can ‘stir one another up’ to work hard at the central actions pf Christian living, ‘love and good works’ (a deliberately broad phrase to cover all sorts of activities.’ Tom Wright: ‘Hebrews for Everyone’, p.117.