Historical Background

No other book of the New Testament has generated more speculation about authorship than the Epistle to the Hebrews. Though some, notably the early church, have attributed it to Paul and included it among his letters, the vocabulary and style is remarkably different than the thirteen Epistles that bear Paul’s name. Others have suggested an associate of Paul such as Apollos, Clement, Barnabas or even Luke wrote it, but the author remains a mystery because he did not include his name in the document. Whoever wrote it employed a highly literate Greek prose and demonstrated an extensive knowledge of the Hebrew Bible. It bears Paul’s theological stamp if not his linguistic likeness.

The date is also debatable, particularly whether it was written before the destruction of the Temple in AD 70 or after. An earlier date, however, seems more likely since the author appealed to Jewish believers not to turn back to the law, of which the Temple in Jerusalem was the heart. It seems unlikely that the author would not mention that the psychological epicenter of the Jewish sacrificial system had ended in a cataclysmic demolition, particularly since 10:2 indicates that the sacrifices were still being offered. The most likely timeframe, therefore, is that the letter was written somewhere between AD 50 and 70.

No matter the date or the author, the audience is clearly a congregation of Jewish believers who were tempted to retreat from trusting Christ alone and return to the works of the law as though they needed to supplement their faith with works. No doubt it must have been difficult for those reared in Judaism to walk away from a lifetime of religious habits, understanding that Jesus fulfilled all the law, that the type had been fulfilled by the antitype, the picture has been replaced by the Person, and the ritual had been supplanted by the reality. They had wrapped their lives around the observance of feasts and sacrifices, of sacred rituals and religious routines, so it must have been difficult to accept that, when they trusted Jesus as Lord, those observances no longer had a place in their lives. Though initially they had received the good news of the gospel, they found the free air of grace difficult to breathe and equally challenging to shed themselves of the crutches of performance and deeds.

Armed with the Old Testament and sanctified logic, the author carefully lays out the case that following Christ is an “all or nothing” proposition and that the only way to demonstrate saving faith is to persevere, trusting Jesus—to whom all the Old Testament points—alone.

Sermon Series

To state the obvious, Hebrews is a lengthy book of intricate arguments, Old Testament allusions, theological constructs, and stern warnings. An expositor can devote a lot of time to preaching through this book and still realize that half has not been told. The first issue, therefore, is to determine how much time to spend taking a congregation through Hebrews.

This decision is not unlike choosing an appropriate camera lens to take a picture. Photographers use different length of lenses to capture different levels of detail, depth of vision, and breadth of view. A wide-angle lens is ideal for large landscapes or environmental shots, while a 55-millimeter lens, the most commonly used, can take portraits that incorporate and highlight perspective. A zoom lens can zero in tightly on a subject and display detail that otherwise might be missed, but a close-up lens, like a magnifying glass, apprehends every nuance and brings out hidden textures and unseen details.

Pastors need to change lens from book to book, series to series. Rather than always preaching through books and texts at the same pace, pastors should alter their approach, considering factors such as how long the previous series was, their own length of tenure and preaching history at that church, the theological depth and conditioning of the congregation, biblical genre, and, frankly, how capable they are of holding the congregation’s interest and attention for a lengthy series. All Scripture is equally inspired, but it has varying degrees of profitability and theological content. Hebrews is especially high on the scale of theological density. Once all these factors are considered, the pastor can determine what kind of a preaching picture to present—landscape, portrait, closeup, or magnification.

Almost as important as deciding how many sermons to preach through the book is getting a handle on a unifying theme that is also applicable to one’s own context. Since I pastor a church that is almost exclusively Gentile, it would hardly make sense for me to warn my congregation about the dangers of trusting in the Jewish sacrificial system. No one in my church wrestles with whether to rigidly observe the Passover or even the Sabbath. Though written originally to an audience of Hebrew Christians, the letter is wonderfully versatile and its message lands in any heart that struggles to trust Christ completely, that mistakenly believes it can contribute anything toward its own cleansing. This book admonishes its readers to keep our faith facing forward rather than falling back from grace into law. That’s why “Keep Moving Forward” is a good unifying theme for these sermons.

I chose to use the zoom lens and took most of a year to preach expositionally through the epistle. It wasn’t an 8-week overview (the wide angle) nor a 20-week portrait (the 55mm) nor a 5-year-250-sermon Martyn Lloyd-Jones style series (the magnifying glass). I spent forty-three weeks working through the arguments, the Old Testament allusions, the warnings, and the New Covenant implications of the book.

The exegetical mandate is to faithfully interpret the passage, but the pastoral demand was to make appropriate application to my 21st Century North American Gentile congregation who, like their First Century ethnically Jewish counterparts, often feel tempted to retreat from trusting Christ alone for salvation and to substitute their own works for his. Notably, I allotted ten weeks to the rich historical encouragement of chapter 11 because it robustly illustrates that faith’s reward is not always realized here on earth, but in God’s gift of his Son. I wanted the time spent in the chapter to be commensurate with its theological density.

Here is how I broke the entire book down into preaching units:

Series Theme: Keep Moving Forward

Week 1: Jesus Is Better (1:1-14)

• Jesus is worthy of our complete trust because he’s the better representative of God. He’s not just a prophet, he’s a son. He’s not created, he is Creator. He’s not merely like God, he is God. He’s not an angel, he’s God’s Anointed.

Week 2: So Great Salvation (2:1-4)

• We must pay attention to God’s word of salvation. Nothing could be more important than hearing it. Nothing could be easier than drifting from it. Nothing could be more dangerous than neglecting it.

Week 3: He Tasted Death for Everyone (2:5-9)

• Trust Jesus because of his condescension (lower than the angels), his coronation (crowned with glory and honor), his command (he was given dominion), and his cross (he tasted death for everyone).

Week 4: He Has Freed You (2:10-18)

• Trust Jesus because only he can free you from sin, death, slavery, and sin.

Week 5: More Faithful than Moses (3:1-6)

• Don’t turn back to the law, because Jesus is more glorious than Moses. Consider your calling, your confession, and your Christ.

Week 6: The Unbelieving Heart (3:7-19)

• The call to move forward is urgent! Israel provides a negative example and the Holy Spirit gives a positive exhortation to persevere. If God’s only requirement is faith, then unbelief is the greatest sin.

Week 7: There Remains a Rest for God’s People (4:1-11)

• The goal of salvation is to enter God’s rest and to cease from our own works. Since that is against our nature, so we “strive to enter that rest!”

Week 8: The Two-Edged Sword (4:12-13)

• Your relationship to the Word of God will make the difference in belief or unbelief, promise or punishment, rest or labor. True belief leads to true rest.

Week 9: Our Great High Priest (4:14-5:10)

• Cling to Christ (hold fast, draw near) because he is a gentle, faithful, perfect, and perpetual high priest who represents us to God and offers eternal salvation.

Week 10: The Danger of Falling Away (5:11-6:12)

• Keep moving forward in maturity, doctrine, and genuine faith or you prove yourself “worthless and near to be cursed, whose end is to be burned.” Genuine faith perseveres.

Week 11: A Better Guarantee (6:13-20)

• Knowing the promises and character of God keeps us moving forward in faith. His promise gives faith in his character, refuge from condemnation, and encouragement to continue.

Week 12: A Better Blessing (7:1-10)

• The Old Testament encourages us to go to Christ alone. Abraham’s encounter with Melchizedek paints a picture of Jesus’ eternal priesthood by which he blesses us and secures our salvation.

Week 13: A Better Hope (7:11-19)

• Since we can never attain perfection by the law, we must hope in Christ alone. The law separated us from God but through the priesthood of Christ we draw near to him.

Week 14: A Better Trust (7:20-28)

• We can have complete trust in Christ because he is confirmed as our High Priest by God’s oath. Because he saves completely, we can draw near to God knowing that Jesus always intercedes for us.

Week 15: A Better Covenant (8:1-13)

• Since we have a better covenant through the priesthood of Jesus, it makes no sense to go back to the old one which is now obsolete. The temptation is not to do bad things, but to trust in good things (the law) and miss the best thing (grace).

Week 16: A Better Sacrifice (9:1-14)

• Trust Jesus because he is real. The Old Testament sacrifices and priesthood were merely God’s pictures, but in Jesus we have the reality.

Week 17: A Better Mediator (9:15-22)

• The death of Jesus has enacted God’s will and given us an inheritance of eternal life. The Old Testament pictured Jesus’ death, but we trust in the reality of that death rather than a mere picture.

Week 18: A Better Appearance (9:23-28)

• We must trust completely in Christ because he has presented his blood in God’s presence for our sins. Jesus’ appearance in heaven on our behalf is superior because it was once for all time rather than a repeated enactment like the Old Testament high priest.

Week 19: A Better Offering Pt 1 (10:1-10)

• Since no human deeds, even religious sacrifices and offerings, can take away sin, we must trust in the death of Jesus alone to cleanse us and establish our righteousness.

Week 20: A Better Offering Pt 2 (10:11-18)

• Jesus’ offering for sin is done once and for all-time, so he is worthy of our continuing trust.

Week 21: The Confident Christian Life (10:19-25)

• The work of Christ gives us complete confidence because of the access he’s given us, the value he’s placed on us, and the intercession he makes for us.

Week 22: Why the Hottest Part of Hell Is Reserved for Baptists (10:26-31)

• (Admittedly a sensational title, but with good reason. Feel free to substitute your own denomination’s name here!) Don’t turn back because those who have had great access to the truth, but have disregarded it, have “outraged the Spirit of grace.”

Week 23: Don’t Shrink Back (10:32-39)

• Keep moving forward because every professed believer will either be a “shrinker” who turns back and is destroyed or a “sticker” who endures and gets the great reward of faith.

Week 24: The Foundation of Faith: Abel, Enoch (11:1-6)

• If faith preserves our souls, we must know what it is, what is its object, what it looks like, what it accomplishes, and when it is rewarded. Abel is commended by God and he is murdered. Enoch is commended by God and he is translated. The commendation of God and the reward of faith, therefore, are not evidenced by what happens to us in this life.

Week 25: Building Faith: Noah (11:7)

• Noah illustrates how faith hears the inaudible, sees the invisible, believes the implausible, obeys the unreasonable, prevents the inevitable, faces the hostile, and accepts God’s approval.

Week 26: Moving Faith: Abraham, Sarah (11:8-12)

• True faith follows God’s leading even without knowing where, accepts God’s timing even without knowing when, and trusts God’s power even without knowing how.

Week 27: Seeking Faith: They died not having received the things promised! (11:13-16)

• Faith is both conviction, which accepts the voice of God above all other evidence, and assurance, which finds comfort in God’s promise above all other consolation.

Week 28: Tested Faith: Abraham Offering Isaac (11:17-19)

• Genuine faith trusts God’s leadership even without knowing God’s reasons.

Week 29: Future Faith: Isaac, Jacob, Joseph (11:20-22)

• Faith is always lived forward even though it bears witness of the past. Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph all invoked future blessings based on what God had said in the past.

Week 30: Personal Faith: Moses (11:23-28)

• True faith refuses the world’s measure of success and chooses to identify with the people of God.

Week 31: Corporate Faith: Israel, the Red Sea, Jericho (11:29-30)

• Though true faith is personal, it makes us part of the people of God and binds us to all those who are redeemed. It is convictional, contagious, and collective.

Week 32: Repenting Faith: Rahab (11:31)

• Genuine faith is marked by radical repentance that overcomes our past, establishes our future, and saves us from the wrath of God.

Week 33: Transcendent Faith (11:32-40)

• Faith is our only hope of winning life victories that really matter. Faith is not ultimately about an outcome or a reward in this life, but about resting in Jesus who won the victory for us.

Week 34: How to Keep Moving Forward (12:1-2)

• With so many examples of faith to encourage us, especially Jesus, we must lay aside anything that hinders us and run the race with endurance.

Week 35: Putting Suffering in Perspective (12:3-11)

• Don’t grow weary and give up because of suffering in life. God uses suffering to produce patience and holiness in the lives of his children.

Week 36: Responding to God’s Discipline (12:12-17)

• We must respond to God’s discipline in our lives individually and in community. We fight through the fatigue, striving for peace and holiness, always pointing one another to God’s available grace.

Week 37: Act Like Where You Are (12:18-24)

• When we realize our position in Christ, we can live out a holy life without fear of judgment or separation from God. We have come to Zion rather than to Sinai, to grace rather than to the law.

Week 38: The Inescapable Truth of the Unshakeable Kingdom (12:25-29)

• The blood of Christ speaks that justice has been satisfied and that grace is ours. To refuse him who speaks through his blood is to reject the only hope that we have. Worship is the only proper response to God’s unshakeable kingdom.

Week 39: The Life of a Heavenly Citizen (13:1-6)

• Our citizenship in heaven, the new Jerusalem, shapes our behavior on earth. Every aspect of our lives is a response to the grace we have in Jesus Christ.

Week 40: The Leadership of Grace (13:7-10)

• Whom you follow and how you focus determines your destination. Follow leaders whose lives have demonstrated the reality of their faith.

Week 41: Outside the City Gate (13:11-16)

• Jesus was the ultimate outsider, rejected and crucified outside the city walls. To be faithful Christians, we must be willing to join him as outsiders in this world. The desire to be liked and accepted is death to the gospel.

Week 42: Spiritual Authority and Responsibility (13:17)

• God uses Christian leaders to help his people keep moving forward in faith. Leadership in the church is assumed, essential, called by God, affirmed by the church, and dependent on Scripture.

Week 43: My Desire for You (13:18-25)

• Faith is lived out and maintained through the mutual concern, exhortations, and prayers of believers living in community, the church.

An Alternate Approach with a Wider Lens

Most pastors may find a 43-week series daunting and would opt for shorter series through the book or within sections of the book. I suggest three alternate approaches. First would be to preach nine sermons on how Jesus is better than anything and makes life better. Though preaching every verse of every section would prove impossible, one could easily choose a pericope from each section and focus on that as representative of the larger argument.

Week 1: Jesus Is Better than the Angels (1:1-2:18)

• Focus text: 2:5-9
• Since Jesus, not angels or anything else, is the perfect revelation of God, he is worthy of our trust and faith. Jesus became lower than the angels so that he might redeem us.

Week 2: Jesus Is Better than Moses (3:1-4:13)

• Focus text: 3:1-19
• Since Moses and the law could never save anyone, faith in Jesus is the only way of salvation because he kept the law for us so we can rest from our own pitiful efforts to save ourselves.

Week 3: Jesus Is a Better High Priest (4:14-7:28)

• Focus text: 4:14-5:10
• We can trust in Jesus because he is the perfect high priest who represents us before God, makes an atonement for our sins, intercedes for us, and has opened a way for us to be in God’s presence.

Week 4: Jesus Is a Better offering (8:1-10:18)

• Focus text: 9:11-22
• Jesus is worthy of our trust because he is everything needed in our salvation. Not only is he the high priest, but he is the sacrifice and the one who ratifies the new covenant.

Week 5: Jesus Is a Better assurance (10:19-39)

• Focus text: 10:19-25
• True faith in Jesus shapes our attitudes and our actions. His atoning work gives us confidence to draw near to God, to hold fast our confession, and to consider how we may encourage one other.

Week 6: Jesus Is a Better Object of Our Faith (11:1-39)

• Focus text: 11:23-28
• Moses provides a great example for contemporary believers. As a child, his parents made a choice to save him, but when he grew up, he had to make a choice for himself. His value system was opposite that of the world. He chose the reproach of Christ and mistreatment with the people of God rather than the treasures of Egypt because he was looking forward to a reward outside of this world.

Week 7: Jesus Is a Better Motive for Holiness (12:1-17)

• Focus text: 12:12-17
• Every Christian should strive for holiness, not in order to obtain salvation, but in order to live it out. Holiness is the necessary goal and unavoidable consequence of genuine faith in Christ.

Week 8: Jesus a Better Mediator of a Better Covenant (12:18-29)

• Focus text: 12:18-24
• Jesus leads his followers into a covenant of grace in which we have acceptance and intimacy with God rather than into the law which brings fear and doubt because we can never measure up to its demands.

Week 9: Jesus Makes Every Aspect of Life Better (13:1-25)

• Focus text: 13:20-21
• The atoning blood and bodily resurrection of Jesus are the basis and the gracious means by which believers can obey God and persevere in faith and good works. This avoids the errors of a fearful faith and a false self-righteousness but rather gives a humble confidence rooted in the finished work of Christ.

Another approach would be to preach a series within the book. The ten sermons outlined above in chapter 11, for instance, could serve well as an admonition to faith. The five warning passages would be a short but weighty sequence of sermons, too. Even chapters 12 and 13 fit together nicely and can stand alone as a focus on Christian citizenship.

Application

Hebrews presents several challenges for any preacher daring to work through it. Perhaps more than any other New Testament book, Hebrews is saturated with OT quotations, illusions, and theology. Any adequate treatment will demand some explanation of the background passage. Chapter 1 alone has eight quotations from the Old Testament, including Psalms, 2 Samuel, Deuteronomy, and Isaiah. The challenge is to explain those passages without actually preaching them. The preacher must walk the fine line between adequate explanation and maintaining focus on the Hebrews passage. Each Old Testament reference is but a steppingstone in the logical argument, and the expositor must ensure that the pathway, rather than the individual footstones, stays in view. Finding the sweet spot between “enough” and “too much” is tricky, particularly since most pastors preach to members across the spectrum of biblical literacy.

Another complication for any contemporary preacher is preaching about Israel’s sacrificial system to a modern audience that has been hypersensitized to concepts like animal rights. Explaining the intricacies of the Israelite sacrificial system is difficult enough, but how does one preach on the Passover to people who are convictionally vegan? Sensitivity to a modern audience is one thing, apologizing for the worship that God himself prescribed for his people is quite another. Again, preaching Hebrews requires walking that line between sympathetically understanding people without tacitly passing judgment on God.

The greatest challenge, however, is the applicational move from the temptation to go back under the law that the original recipients of the letter faced to the similar-but-different circumstances that a contemporary largely Gentile audience faces. Preaching through Hebrews requires a faithful commitment to remaining as close to the author’s intent as possible while necessarily abstracting the application for a 21st century audience. In Chapter 1, for instance, the author makes an extensive biblical case that Jesus is better than the angels, suggesting that the Jewish-Christian believers were enamored with angelic beings. That won’t be true in many churches where Hebrews is preached, but the seven Christological affirmations that the author makes in 1:1-4 are needed anytime believers fail to see the sufficiency of God’s revelation in Christ and whatever thing distracts them.

Similarly, the Book of Hebrews lends itself to explaining how Christians should read the Bible as one grand story which culminates in Christ, not sixty-six different books from many different perspectives and with disparate purposes. Preaching through Hebrews enables a pastor to put on a hermeneutical clinic, demonstrating how Christians understand and interpret the Old Testament. That is a big task, but it should remind the expositor that preaching is not merely about explaining a text, but also about modeling hermeneutics so church members can become self-feeders. The way the pastor handles the Word in the pulpit will shape the way church members handle the Word in their lives, prayer closets, and Sunday School classes. That responsibility adds another layer of complexity and responsibility to the preacher’s task, but reaps great rewards when taken seriously.

My Encounter with Hebrews

Preaching through Hebrews provides the opportunity to unfold the metanarrative of God’s redemptive work through Christ, looking back to the Old Testament, but also forward to the consummation. Perhaps no other book of the Bible explains the past while leaning forward to the future as expansively as Hebrews. Joshua’s invasion of the Promised Land is counterbalanced with Christ’s coming to claim the world. The blood of Abel, crying for justice, is supplanted by the better word of the blood of Jesus, that justice has been served. The voice of God once shook the earth but will soon shake the heavens! Preaching these truths can invite unbelievers to trust Christ and encourage believers to fall in love with the Word of God as a means of faithful perseverance and patient endurance.

I preached these sermons during the final months before our 200-year old church relocated to a new campus. Aware of our past and excited about our future, the admonition to “Keep Moving Forward” strengthened and reassured us. I did not artificially bend the Scriptures to fit our circumstances; I demonstrated that our circumstances fit the text, that we were facing the same obstacles faced by our spiritual forbears two millennia ago. Our great need was not for a motivational speaker or an expert in church relocation. We needed to see how our story is a part of God’s grand story and how following Jesus into the future is always better.

Commentaries

Gareth Lee Cockerell, The Epistle to the Hebrews, New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012).

George Guthrie, NIV Application Commentary: Hebrews (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998).

Thomas R. Schreiner, Commentary on Hebrews, Biblical Theology for Christian Proclamation (Nashville: Holman Reference, 2015).

Hershael York is pastor of Buck Run Baptist Church in Frankfort, Kentucky, as well as professor of Christian Preaching and dean of Southern Seminary's School of Theology in Louisville, Kentucky.