Is one view of it, the Epistle to the Hebrews may be said to be, a divine testimony to the truth of this short verse: “Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, and today, and forever.” For the thought of the Lord’s stability pervades the epistle, the stability of all that He deals with, and of all who trust in Him; in other words, His perfection.
Over this epistle, read in this light, the believing soul might breathe out the words of the 90th Psalm: “Lord thou hast been our dwelling-place in all generations!” For it is a Psalm which recognizes the vanity or perishableness of everything, by reason of sin, and that through Christ alone is anything to be “established.” He imparts “glory” and “beauty,” according to that Psalm, but stability also.
It is like the Apostle’s thought in 1St chapter of 2nd Corinthians. However uncertain other things may have been (even, if the Corinthians pleased, his purposes concerning them), yet the gospel was firm; the promises of God to the believer, yea, and Amen; and the believer himself, an established, anointed, and sealed one forever.
“Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, and today, and forever.”
His person is thus fixed and stable for eternity. The anointed Jesus is still “the same.” But so is all that He deals with or handles, as this epistle, in the progress of it, also discloses; whether it be His blood, His priesthood, His covenant, or His kingdom. There is no principle of decay, no blemish or cause of death, anywhere. No taint or uncertainty is found here, but stability is attached to each and all― “the same yesterday, today, and forever.”
His blood or sacrifice, as the Lamb of God, “is established” on the inadequacy of every other. It has been offered “through the eternal Spirit” (9:14). In token of which, Jesus has sat down in the heavens, with a thought about an entirely different thing. God has promised Him that His enemies shall be made His footstool, and He is expecting that event. That is—so fully has His sacrifice discharged His business, and secured the way of the grace of God, that the mind in heaven can now be occupied with glory and the kingdom, or the judgments that lead to it. There is “no more offering for sin.”
And, accordingly, the sinner that pleads this blood is “perfected forever.” His sins are purged, and he is sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all (see chap. 10).
His priesthood is “untransferable” and “continual.” He is “a priest forever,” and made “after the power of an endless life.” And this is witnessed by His being ordained by the oath of God, the expression or language of an unrepentable purpose. He “ever liveth to make intercession.”
And, accordingly, the believer who looks to such a priest is saved to the uttermost. He can never fail him. Years and generations find Him the same, as the beginning had made Him and left Him (see chap. 12).
The covenant which He ministers, in like character, is stable; it is never “old.” God never finds fault with it, so as to call forth another to succeed it, and thus make it old, and “ready to vanish away.” It abides always “new.” It is called “the everlasting covenant.”
And, accordingly, the blessings conferred by it are eternal; the sins and iniquities it remits are remembered “no more” (see chap. 8).
The throne which He takes is “forever and ever.” It is untransferable and eternal. And, accordingly, the kingdom which, by-and-bye, the saints receive, is a kingdom that “cannot be moved.” The earth has already been shaken―heaven and earth will by-and-bye be shaken―but the kingdom which the saints receive “cannot be moved.” The consuming fire can never reach it, though it may burn up all beside. The saints are heirs of such a kingdom: they have in subjection to them “the world to come”―a world not destined to pass, but still to come, and to abide (see 1:8, 2:5; 12:28).
Such is the illustration of this short verse afforded by the epistle. The practical word for us is this—not to change our confidence, or transfer it from Him, seeing that He changes not, nor transfers His things to any other. In the sight of all this glorious stability, in Christ our faith is to be stable. This is the characteristic exhortation of this epistle, as the other is the characteristic doctrine. This is the exhortation suited to the doctrine; and, therefore, the Apostle is seen throughout the epistle to be in dread of the Hebrew believers changing the ground of their confidence, and surrendering their souls to the keeping of some religious provisions, in departure from the perfection and sufficiency of Christ. This is the fear which pervades the epistle, as the stability of Christ and all that he touches is the doctrine that pervades it. He sounds an alarm. He blows one of the silver trumpets of the house of God; and, in a different spirit from that in which it was uttered of old, He says, “Let the Hebrews hear.” For He says, “Whose house are we, if we hold fast the confidence and the rejoicing of the hope firm unto the end.” And, again: “We are made partakers of Christ, if we hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast unto the end.” And, again, speaking as in the person of God himself, “If any man draw back, my soul shall have no pleasure in him.” And the solemn words, in chapter 6 and 10, are all upon the giving up of Christ, the “falling away” from the confession of His sufficiency, or the doing “despite to the spirit of grace.”
Thus, then, the Lord Jesus stands strong, and all that he deals with. But He alone. “The earth and its inhabitants are dissolved. I bear up the pillars thereof.” His blood, His priesthood, His covenant, His kingdom, never wax old. And, blessed (had we but hearts softened to receive the form of such a truth) He communicates all this stability to us, as we have seen. Faith appreciates and appropriates it.
Thus, what Abigail said to David, that his life was bound up in the bundle of life with the Lord his God, this epistle says to us all―we are interested in Christ’s stability. He shares His eternity with us.
‘Jesus shall our treasure be
Through His own eternity.’
It is our blessing, as it is to His praise, that the admiring Apostle says, “Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, and today, and forever.”