In the best Light . . .

Hebrews 12 starts out, “Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us.”

Jordan explains, “Faith just takes God at His Word in spite of all of the opposition and obstacles that come against the person. And what the author does in Hebrews 11, especially beginning in verse 8, but really in the whole thing starting with Abel, is he begins to demonstrate how taking God at His word can overcome obstacles that are placed into peoples’ way of faith, and he especially deals with examples here that have to do with the condition and situation Israel’s going to be facing in the tribulation period.

“Hebrews 11:20 says, ‘By faith Isaac blessed Jacob and Esau concerning things to come.’ He says that ‘by faith Isaac blessed Jacob’ and you kind of scratch your head just a little bit because when you go back to Genesis 27, you look at that and you say, ‘Whew, that doesn’t look much like faith!’ and it’s real obvious in the chapter that Jacob isn’t blessed by Isaac on the basis of faith.

“I’ve talked to you before about how the sins of the saints are kind of…the saints are presented in the best light you’ll ever see them in Hebrews. It’s one of those situations where God looks back, and when He looks back at their life back there, He doesn’t look at all of their sins and their failures and their difficulties. He looks back there and He sees their faith and that was the issue with God.

“You see authors, and you read commentaries, where they go through these passages and have a real problem about trying to go back into the lives of the saints in the Old Testament and sort of clean up their lives for them, and they do it on the basis of Hebrews 11. But you’ve got to understand that what Hebrews 11 is doing is looking at the elders and the saints back there through the eyes of the provisions that have been made for them through the blood of Christ.

“You remember the thing in Numbers when Balaam is trying to curse Israel. Balak has hired him to curse them and God looks out there and says, ‘He hath not beheld iniquity in Jacob, neither hath he seen perverseness in Israel: the LORD his God is with him, and the shout of a king is among them.’ There was all kind of sin they were committing but God is looking at them on the basis of His grace and the provision that the blood provides for Him to view them on that basis.

Hebrews 12:24 says, “And to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling, that speaketh better things than that of Abel.” II Timothy 2:5 says, “For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.”

“See the prepositions there?” says Jordan. “It’s through Him. It’s on the basis of this new and living way that He’s made through Calvary that we can come unto the Father and to do it by the Spirit. We have access. That’s a great word in our day with computer terminology. ‘I need to get access. I’ve got a hard drive with all the information on it but I can’t get access to it.’

“You and I have access; we can reach in and take the resources that God has given us and put it to use by the Spirit. It’s your faith resting in God’s Word that allows the Spirit of God to take that information and bring it into our experience and make it real.

“To have access means to be able to walk right in, shake hands and be there. And it’s the Spirit of God’s role in your life, based upon who God’s made you in Christ, to take you into the presence of the Father and make Him real to you. That’s a transaction that takes place in your heart, in your inner man, in the secrecy of your own communion with the Father that no one else ever enters into fully and completely. They only know about it when you tell them about it and you can only tell them about little parts of it, can you?

“God’s great desire is for His people to feel secure, to rest secure, in His love, His power, His purpose. Everything else in your life might be unstable—your health, your family, your job, the culture you live in, the church, whatever.

“Sometimes you feel like you’re out on a ledge 40 stories up and the wind’s blowing and you don’t know which way and every time you reach for a brick to hold onto, you feel like you grasp it and then it just slips out of the mortar that’s holding it to the wall. Yet He says nothing can separate you from the love of God in Christ. You need to rest in that.

“I think about the Apostle Paul and I read those passages and think, ‘What in the world could have made a guy who was so frequently subjected to danger, and to hunger, and sleeplessness. and to difficulties beyond things you and I could even imagine--what could take a guy in those kind of straits and have him be so stable and so powerful in his soul as to be able to carry, not only the weight of floundering churches of failing brethren, but to write letters that have changed the history of the world?!’

“And when he got to be an older guy he dreamed about traveling to Spain with the gospel. You say, ‘What could make a guy with that kind of stability?!’ Well, it was his great discovery: ‘Nothing can separate me from the love of God that’s in Christ Jesus.’ Why can’t it? Because the Father, the sealer, has sealed me, the sealee, with the seal of His Spirit.

“That makes me secure because the transaction’s finished. The ownership has changed. I’m His. My identity’s new and I can live in that identity in the details of my life and I have that communion with Him in my soul that isn’t affected by out there; it’s just affected by who He’s made me. That’s our sealing with the Spirit. It’s designed to make it all real to you for His glory.”