The Letter to the Hebrews

William Barclay

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN:
  9780664225582
• eBook ISBN:
  9781611640199
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

At first glance, the letter to the Hebrews can seem difficult to comprehend, but William Barclay believed "that no New Testament book gives us such a glorious picture of Jesus Christ in all the splendor of his manhood and in all the majesty of his deity." So, amplified by Barclay's keen and vibrant commentary, this ancient letter emerges from apparent obscurity to be a vital resource of encouragement for Christians today. For almost fifty years and for millions of readers, the Daily Study Bible commentaries have been the ideal help for both devotional and serious Bible study. Now, with the release of the New Daily Study Bible, a new generation will appreciate the wisdom of William Barclay. With clarification of less familiar illustrations and inclusion of more contemporary language, the New Daily Study Bible will continue to help individuals and groups discover what the message of the New Testament really means for their lives.

HEBREWS

THE END OF FRAGMENTS

Hebrews 1:1–3

It was in many parts and in many ways that God spoke to our fathers in the prophets in time gone past; but in the end of these days he has spoken to us in One who is a Son, a Son whom he destined to enter into possession of all things, a Son by whose agency he made the universe. He was the very effulgence of God’s glory; he was the exact expression of God’s very essence. He bore everything onwards by the word of his power; and, after he had made purification for the sins of men, he took his royal seat at the right hand of the glory in the heights.

THIS is the most stylistically impressive piece of Greek in the whole New Testament. It is a passage that any classical Greek orator would have been proud to write. The writer of Hebrews has brought to it every possible skill and form of word and rhythm that the beautiful and flexible Greek language could provide. In Greek, the two adverbs which we have translated in many parts and in many ways are single words, polumerōs and polutropōs. Polu- in such a combination means many, and it was a habit of the great Greek orators, like Demosthenes, the greatest of them all, to weave such sonorous words into the first paragraph of a speech. The writer to the Hebrews felt that, since this letter was to speak of the supreme revelation of God, the ideas must be clothed in the noblest language that it was possible to find.

There is something of interest even here. The person who wrote this letter must have been trained in Greek oratory. When he became a Christian, he did not throw his training away. He used the talent he had in the service of Jesus Christ. The lovely legend of the acrobatic tumbler who became a monk is familiar to many. He felt that he had so little to offer. One day, someone saw him go into the chapel and stand before the statue of the Virgin Mary. He hesitated for a moment and then began to go through his acrobatic routine. When he had completed his tumbling, he knelt in adoration; and then, says the legend, the statue of the Virgin Mary came to life, stepped down from her pedestal and gently wiped the sweat from the brow of the acrobat who had offered all he had to give. When people become Christians, they are not asked to abandon all the talents they once had; they are asked to use them in the service of Jesus Christ and of his Church.

The basic idea of this letter is that Jesus Christ alone brings to men and women the full revelation of God and that he alone enables them to enter into the very presence of God. The writer begins by contrasting Jesus with the prophets who had gone before. He talks about him coming in the end of these days. The Jews divided all time into two ages – the present age and the age to come. In between, they set the day of the Lord. The present age was wholly bad; the age to come was to be the golden age of God. The day of the Lord was to be like the birth-pangs of the new age. So, the writer to the Hebrews says: ‘The old time is passing away; the age of incompleteness is gone; the time of guessing and feeling our way is at an end; the new age, the age of God, has dawned in Christ.’ He sees the world and human thought enter, as it were, into a new beginning with Christ. In Jesus, God has entered humanity, eternity has invaded time, and things can never be the same again.

He contrasts Jesus with the prophets, for they were always believed to be the confidants of God. Long ago, Amos had said: ‘The Lord God does nothing without revealing his secret to his servants the prophets’ (Amos 3:7). Philo had said: ‘The prophet is the interpreter of the God who speaks within.’ He had also referred to the prophets as ‘interpreters of the God who uses them as instruments to reveal to men that which he wills’. In later days, this idea had been turned into a mechanical exercise. The second-century Christian writer Athenagoras spoke of God moving the mouths of the prophets as someone might play upon a musical instrument and of the Spirit breathing into them as a flute-player breathes into a flute. At about the same time, another Christian scholar, Justin Martyr, spoke of the divine coming down from heaven and sweeping across the prophets as a plectrum sweeps across a harp or a lute. In the end, the prophets were seen as having really no more to do with their message than a musical instrument had to do with the music it played or a pen with the message it wrote. That was making it all too mechanical, for even the finest musicians are to some extent at the mercy of their instruments and cannot produce great music out of a piano in which certain notes are missing or out of tune, and even the finest writers are to some extent at the mercy of their tools. God cannot reveal more than human beings can understand. His revelation comes through human minds and hearts. That is exactly what the writer to the Hebrews saw.

He says that the revelation of God which came through the prophets was in many parts (polumerōs) and in many ways (polutropōs). There are two ideas there.

(1) The revelation of the prophets had a magnificent diversity which made it a tremendous thing. From age to age, they had spoken, always fitting their message to the age, never letting it be out of date. At the same time, that revelation was fragmentary and had to be presented in such a way that the limitations of the time would understand. One of the most interesting things is to see how, time after time, the prophets are characterized by one idea. For instance, Amos is ‘a cry for social justice’. Isaiah had grasped the holiness of God. Hosea, because of his own bitter home experience, had realized the wonder of the forgiving love of God. Out of their own experience of life and out of the experience of Israel, the prophets had each grasped and expressed a fragment of the truth of God. None had grasped the fullness of truth in its entirety; but with Jesus it was different. He was not a fragment of the truth; he was the whole truth. In him, God displayed not some part of himself but all of himself.

(2) The prophets used many methods. They used the method of speech. When speech failed, they used the method of dramatic action (cf. 1 Kings 11:29–32; Jeremiah 13:1–9, 27:1–7; Ezekiel 4:1–3, 5:1–4). The prophets had to use human methods to transmit their own part of the truth of God. Again, it was different with Jesus. He revealed God by being himself. It is not so much what he said and did that shows us what God is like; it is what he was.

The revelation of the prophets was great and came in many forms, but it was fragmentary and presented by such methods as they could find to make it effective. The revelation of God in Jesus was complete and was presented in Jesus himself. In a word, the prophets were the friends of God; but Jesus was the Son. The prophets grasped part of the mind of God; but Jesus was that mind. It is to be noted that it is no part of the purpose of the writer to the Hebrews to belittle the prophets; it is his aim to establish the supremacy of Jesus Christ. He is not saying that there is a break between the Old Testament revelation and that of the New Testament; he is stressing the fact that there is continuity, but continuity that ends in consummation.

The writer to the Hebrews uses two great pictures to describe what Jesus was. He says that he was the apaugasma of God’s glory. Apaugasma can mean one of two things in Greek. It can mean brilliance, the light which shines out, or it can mean reflection, the light which is reflected. Here, it probably means brilliance. Jesus is the shining of God’s glory among us.

He says that he was the charactēr of God’s very essence. In Greek, charactēr means two things – first, a seal, and, second, the impression that the seal leaves on the wax. The impression has the exact form of the seal. So, when the writer to the Hebrews said that Jesus was the charactēr of the being of God, he meant that he was the exact image of God. Just as, when you look at the impression, you see exactly what the seal which made it is like, so when you look at Jesus you see exactly what God is like.

In his commentary, the nineteenth-century scholar and churchman C. J. Vaughan has pointed out that this passage tells us six great things about Jesus.

(1) The original glory of God belongs to him. Here is a wonderful thought. Jesus is God’s glory; therefore, we see with amazing clarity that the glory of God consists not in crushing men and women and reducing them to miserable submission and slavery, but in serving them and loving them and in the end dying for them. It is not the glory of shattering power but the glory of suffering love.

(2) The destined empire belongs to Jesus. The New Testament writers never doubted his ultimate triumph. Think of it. They were thinking of a Galilaean carpenter who was crucified as a criminal on a cross on a hill outside the city of Jerusalem. They themselves faced savage persecution and were the humblest of people. As the Yorkshire poet Sir William Watson said of them:

So to the wild wolf Hate were sacrificed
The panting, huddled flock, whose crime was Christ.

And yet they never doubted the eventual victory. They were quite certain that God’s love was backed by his power and that in the end the kingdoms of the world would be the kingdoms of the Lord and of his Christ.

(3) The creative action belongs to Jesus. The early Church held that the Son had been God’s agent in creation, that in some way God had originally created the world through him. They were filled with the thought that the one who had created the world would also be the one who redeemed it.

(4) The sustaining power belongs to Jesus. These early Christians had a tremendous grip of the doctrine of providence. They did not think of God as creating the world and then leaving it to itself. Somehow and somewhere, they saw a power that was carrying the world and each life on to a destined end. They believed, as Tennyson wrote in In Memoriam:

That nothing walks with aimless feet;
That not one life shall be destroy’d,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete.

(5) To Jesus belongs the redemptive work. By his sacrifice, he paid the price of sin; by his continual presence, he liberates from sin.

(6) To Jesus belongs the exaltation as mediator. He has taken his place on the right hand of glory; but the tremendous thought of the writer to the Hebrews is that he is there not as our judge but as one who makes intercession for us, so that, when we enter into the presence of God, we go not to hear his justice prosecute us but to hear his love plead for us.

ABOVE THE ANGELS

Hebrews 1:4–14

He was the superior to the angels, in proportion as he had received a more excellent rank than they. For to which of the angels did God ever say: ‘It is my Son that you are; it is I who this day have begotten you’? And again: ‘I will be to him a Father, and he will be to me a Son.’ And again, when he brings his honoured one into the world of men, he says: ‘And let all the angels of God bow down before him.’ As for the angels, he says: ‘He who makes his angels winds and his servants a flame of fire.’ But, as for the Son, he says: ‘God is your throne forever and forever, and the sceptre of righteousness is the sceptre of your kingdom. You have loved justice and hated lawlessness; therefore God has anointed you, even your God, with the oil of exultation above your fellows.’ And, ‘You in the beginning, O Lord, laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands. They shall perish but you remain unalterable. All of them will grow old like a garment, and like a mantle you will fold them up and they will be changed. But you are ever yourself, and your years will not fail.’ To which of the angels did he ever say: ‘Sit at my right hand till I make your enemies your footstool’? Are they not all ministering spirits, continually being despatched on service, for the sake of those who are destined to enter into possession of salvation?

IN the previous passage, the writer was concerned to prove the superiority of Jesus over all the prophets. Now he is concerned to prove his superiority over the angels. That he thinks it worth while to do this proves the place that belief in angels had in the thought of the Jews of his day. At this time, such a belief was on the increase. The reason was that people were more and more impressed with what is called the transcendence of God. They felt more and more the distance and the difference between God and themselves. The result was that they came to think of the angels as intermediaries between God and human beings. They came to believe that the angels bridged the gulf between God and men and women; that God spoke to them through the angels and the angels carried their prayers into the presence of God. We see this process particularly in one instance. In the Old Testament, the law was given directly by God to Moses, without the need of an intermediary. But, in New Testament times, the Jews believed that God gave the law first to angels who then passed it on to Moses, direct communication between human beings and God being unthinkable (cf. Acts 7:53; Galatians 3:19).

If we look at some of the basic Jewish beliefs about angels, we will see those beliefs reappearing in this passage. God lived surrounded by his angelic hosts (Isaiah 6; 1 Kings 22:19). Sometimes the angels are thought of as God’s army (Joshua 5:14f.). In Greek, the word for angels is aggeloi, and in Hebrew it is mal’akim. In both languages, the meaning is messenger as well as angel. In fact, messenger is the more common meaning. The angels were really the beings who were the instruments in the bringing of God’s word and the working of God’s will in the world. They were said to be made of an ethereal fiery substance like blazing light. They were created on either the second or the fifth day of creation. They did not eat or drink, and they did not have children. Sometimes they were believed to be immortal, although they could be annihilated by God; but there was another belief about their existence, as we shall see. Some of them, the seraphim, the cherubim and the ofanim (-im is the plural ending of Hebrew nouns), were always around the throne of God. They were thought of as having more knowledge than human beings, especially of the future; but they did not possess that knowledge by right but rather because of ‘what they had heard behind the curtain’. They were thought of as the kind of entourage, the familia, of God. They were thought of as God’s senate; God did nothing without consulting them. For instance, when God said: ‘Let us make humankind’ (Genesis 1:26), it was to the angel senate that he was speaking. Often, the angels remonstrated with God and laid objections to his purposes. In particular, they objected to the creation of human life, and at that time many of them were annihilated; and they objected to the giving of the law and attacked Moses on his way up Mount Sinai. This was because they were jealous and did not want to share their position or privileges with any other creature.

There were millions and millions of angels. It was not until quite late that the Jews assigned names to them. There were, in particular, the seven angels of the presence, who were the archangels. Of these, the principal ones were Raphael, Uriel, Phanuel, Gabriel, the angel who brought God’s messages to his people, and Michael, the angel who presided over the destinies of Israel. The angels had many duties. They brought God’s messages to individuals. In that case, they delivered their message and vanished (Judges 13:20). They intervened for God in the events of history (2 Kings 19:35–6). There were 200 angels who controlled the movements of the stars and kept them in their co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Foreword (by Ronnie Barclay)
• General Introduction (by William Barclay, 1975)
• General Foreword (by John Drane)
• Editor’s Preface (by Linda Foster)
• Introduction to the Letter to the Hebrews
• The End of Fragments (1:1–3)
• Above the Angels (1:4–14)
• The Salvation we Dare not Neglect (2:1–4)
• The Recovery of our Lost Destiny (2:5–9)
• The Essential Suffering (2:10–18)
• Greater than the Greatest (3:1–6)
• While Today Still Lasts (3:7–19)
• The Rest we Dare not Miss (4:1–10)
• The Terror of the Word (4:11–13)
• The Perfect High Priest (4:14–16)
• At Home with the World and with God (5:1–10)
• The Refusal to Grow Up (5:11–14)
• The Necessity of Progress (6:1–3)
• Crucifying Christ Again (6:4–8)
• The Brighter Side (6:9–12)
• The Sure Hope (6:13–20)
• A Priest After the Order of Melchizedek (7)
• The True King and the True Priest (7:1–3)
• The Greatness of Melchizedek (7:4–10)
• The New Priest and the New Way (7:11–20)
• The Greater Priesthood (7:21–5)
• The High Priest we Need (7:26–8)
• The Way to Reality (8:1–6)
• The New Relationship (8:7–13)
• The Glory of the Tabernacle (9:1–5)
• The Only Entry to the Presence of God (9:6–10)
• The Sacrifice which Opens the Way to God (9:11–14)
• The Only Way in which Sins can be Forgiven (9:15–22)
• The Perfect Purification (9:23–8)
• The Only True Sacrifice (10:1–10)
• The Finality of Christ (10:11–18)
• The Meaning of Christ for Us (10:19–25)
• The Threat at the Heart of Things (10:26–31)
• The Danger of Drifting (10:32–9)
• The Christian Hope (11:1–3)
• The Faith of the Acceptable Offering (11:4)
• Walking with God (11:5–6)
• The Man who Believed in God’s Message (11:7)
• The Adventure and the Patience of Faith (11:8–10)
• Believing the Incredible (11:11–12)
• Strangers and Nomads (11:13–16)
• The Supreme Sacrifice (11:17–19)
• The Faith which Defeats Death (11:20–2)
• Faith and its Secret (11:23–9)
• The Faith which Defied the Facts (11:30–1)
• The Heroes of the Faith (11:32–4)
• The Defiance of Suffering (11:35–40)
• The Race and the Goal (12:1–2)
• The Standard of Comparison (12:3–4)
• The Discipline of God (12:5–11)
• Duties, Aims and Dangers (12:12–17)
• The Terror of the Old and the Glory of the New (12:18–24)
• The Greater Obligation (12:25–9)
• The Marks of the Christian Life (13:1–6)
• The Leaders and the Leader (13:7–8)
• The Wrong and the Right Sacrifice (13:9–16)
• Obedience and Prayer (13:17–19)
• A Prayer, a Greeting and a Blessing (13:20–4)