This evening I want to attempt to do something that is quite difficult for the situation and for a thirty-minute presentation.
I need your help. I want you to stay with me, and I want you to think. I do not want your thinking to stop when we finish this lesson. I want you to think about this for at least several days.
I fully realize what I share with you this evening is an overview. In may ways it is an oversimplification. Hopefully, it is an accurate concept and continuum.
Let me begin by sharing a perspective. I think many in this audience know the basic Bible stories. However, I also think that we often have failed to connect the Bible stories we know to the overall story of the entire Bible.
Let me try to illustrate the problem and the need. I am not going to ask you to say anything, or share anything, or take a test. I just want you to raise your hand.
Many of us could tell those stories. Now let me ask you more difficult questions. DO NOT raise your hands--just think seriously to yourself.
The Bible is not a comprehensive declaration of all God did in ages past. It
is the record of how the God of goodness would not allow human failure to
destroy His purpose. It is a record of how the good God with great determination
and sacrifice restored our choice. It is the record of how the good God who
created all things good will return all who follow Him to that goodness. Do not place your confidence in our religious identity. Place your confidence
in the God who gave us Jesus as a Savior.
For it was fitting for us to have such a high
priest, holy, innocent, undefiled, separated from sinners and exalted
above the heavens; who does not need daily, like those high priests, to
offer up sacrifices, first for His own sins and then for the sins of the
people, because this He did once for all when He offered up Himself. For
the Law appoints men as high priests who are weak, but the word of the
oath, which came after the Law, appoints a Son, made perfect forever.
Now the main point in what has been said is this: we have such a high
priest, who has taken His seat at the right hand of the throne of the
Majesty in the heavens, a minister in the sanctuary and in the true
tabernacle, which the Lord pitched, not man. For every high priest is
appointed to offer both gifts and sacrifices; so it is necessary that
this high priest also have something to offer. Now if He were on earth,
He would not be a priest at all, since there are those who offer the
gifts according to the Law; who serve a copy and shadow of the heavenly
things, just as Moses was warned by God when he was about to erect the
tabernacle; for, "See," He says, "that you make all things according to
the pattern which was shown you on the mountain." But now He has
obtained a more excellent ministry, by as much as He is also the
mediator of a better covenant, which has been enacted on better
promises. For if that first covenant had been faultless, there would
have been no occasion sought for a second. For finding fault with them,
He says, "Behold, days are coming, says the Lord, When I will effect a
new covenant With the house of Israel and with the house of Judah; Not
like the covenant which I made with their fathers On the day when I took
them by the hand To lead them out of the land of Egypt; For they did not
continue in My covenant, And I did not care for them, says the Lord.
"For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel
After those days, says the Lord: I will put My laws into their minds,
And I will write them on their hearts. And I will be their God, And they
shall be My people. "And they shall not teach everyone his fellow
citizen, And everyone his brother, saying, `Know the Lord,' For all will
know Me, From the least to the greatest of them. "For I will be merciful
to their iniquities, And I will remember their sins no more."
Link to other Writings of David Chadwell