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After finishing a year teaching through the Book of Hebrews at my church, I stumbled upon some of my old notes I hadn’t seen in almost two decades—from the last time I spent a year teaching through that book, back in 2007. I was struck by how radically different the two sets of notes were, almost as though they were by two completely different people. And then I realized that was exactly what had happened. The Bible is still the same, but I am different. That realization shook me into thinking about how the Bible actually works.
In looking through those 2007 notes, I realized I disagree with almost nothing there. I was convinced then, and still am, that the Book of Hebrews is a brilliant key to interpreting the rest of the Bible. I am still convinced that the book gives us a brilliant argument for the superiority of Christ—over the angels, over the Devil, over Moses, over the priesthood, over the sacrificial system, over the tabernacle, over our own temptations.
But what I noticed in those old notes is not so much what I was arguing for as what I was arguing against. I had recognized the call to avoid drifting backward, but I saw that mostly in terms of two primary problems: doctrinal error and moral laxity.
Reading through my notes now, I can see that what I thought would hold people back was lacking the right theological concepts about who Christ is and what he did and being pulled toward the temptations of the world. Even more fundamentally, I seem to have concluded that the chief problem the book (and I teaching it) was facing was too much confidence and complacency in the hearer—presuming on the grace of God, for instance, without seeing the warnings of a God who is a consuming fire.
I still agree with all that, of course. Hebrews offers sophisticated theological reflection and warns repeatedly that it is “a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (10:31, ESV throughout). That’s all there. What I missed, though, is the major problem the book addresses, which is not too much confidence but too little. I was basically right that the people this book addressed wanted to slide backward, but what I couldn’t see was why.
The original hearers of this book were disillusioned and exhausted. Their pull backward—to the old systems they once knew—was not primarily about their cognitive worldview or their desire to sin with more impunity. It was about the fact that they were shaken. They were disappointed by grace because it didn’t seem to “work.” Everything around them seemed shaken, and what they wanted was stability—something that could last. That sense of disillusionment was earned, by all the evidence they could see, and the writer of Hebrews doesn’t deny that.
As the writer of Hebrews notes, the Bible tells us that God has crowned humanity with glory and honor, placing everything under their feet (Heb. 2:5–8). But look around: Even the things that seem to be in our control don’t stay that way. Everything is shaking—and we’re pulled toward hopelessness, leaving behind what’s not working to try to find what will.
For some people, that means an endless search for novelty. These are the people who move from one spiritual or psychological or ideological fad to another, always thinking that this time they will get the results they want. For others, losing hope means retreating to nostalgia—trying to find what worked in the past to re-anchor there.
But ultimately, those paths to stability also shake apart.
When I first taught through Hebrews, I understood doctrine and discipline. I did not understand disappointment and disillusionment. I understood that I was to be on a pilgrimage homeward, but I’d never felt what it was like to be homeless. I had a stable religious community—the same one into which I’d been born and raised. I knew all our past history, I was in many rooms planning our present reality, and I spent my days training our future leaders. I thoroughly belonged, and I knew I always would. My life would move from a Southern Baptist childhood through a Southern Baptist adulthood to a Southern Baptist heaven at the other end of it all.
That was true not only of the church but also of the world. No matter how much I talked about culture wars, they too were a source of stability. We knew who the two “sides” were, and though the issues might change a little, those categories would always hold.
And then they didn’t.
The entire world seemed to undergo tremor after tremor. What was conservative in 2007 was considered “radical left” a decade later—and vice versa. Some of the people whom I thought had wrong ideas turned out to have a better commitment to some of the basics—human decency, moral character, the importance of a democratic constitutional republic, and so on. And some of those whom I thought voted the way they did because of their Christian worldview turned out, it seems, to have held the faith because it supported who they voted for, so they were able to exchange their worldview like currency at an international airport.
Every institution has gone through shock. Virtually every denomination has been rent apart by larger global cultural forces—but also by internet trolls and those who want to pacify them. In almost every category—from political parties to congregations to family dinner tables—old alliances are broken, new ones struggling to be born. And lots of people respond to all this with either a search for something new or a retreat to the way things used to be.
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What was different this time around in teaching Hebrews is that the first time I thought I was standing in the place of the book’s author—warning people to “hold fast to the hope set before us” (6:18). This time, I also taught as one being addressed—one who, like Abraham, was going out “not knowing where he was going” (11:8). I was too much inside the camp to imagine what it would be like to even start to “go to him outside the camp and bear the reproach he endured,” precisely because I knew cognitively but not experientially that “here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come” (13:13–14). I knew the force of the argument for the superiority of Melchizedek over Levi, but I passed right over the radical nature of the last sentence of the book: “Grace be with all of you” (v. 25).
This time it hit me harder that the major theme in this book is the contrast between the visible and the invisible: “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (11:1). And it always has been. Hebrews’ list of fathers and mothers of the faith was about not heroic virtue but a different way of perception. The things we can see are not the things that are most real, and the things that are most real are not those we can see. The visible was patterned after the invisible, not the other way around.
Now as then, the disillusioned should not conclude that faith doesn’t “work” because we don’t see stability and belonging. It never worked that way! All those commended for their faith “died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth” (v. 13).
Twenty years ago, I could talk about how God must remove all the things that are shaken “in order that the things that cannot be shaken may remain” (12:27), but I had never been shaken. And I couldn’t then imagine what it would be like to be the person on the verge of giving up because somehow he expected faith to be predictable and stabilizing, without ever knowing that around him is a cloud of witnesses who all experienced the same thing—that we all share the same “founder and perfecter of our faith” (v. 2). There must have been people who did feel that back in 2007, but they were like angels of whom I was unaware.
The Bible didn’t change. I did. And that makes me think about how the Bible speaks to us. It doesn’t conform to our expectations. Instead the Word calls us and shapes us, guiding us through the whirl of a wayfaring providence to find us on the other side with yet more words, those that are new every morning.
Maybe, if God permits, I will teach through Hebrews again 20 years from now. I don’t want to know everything that will be shaken between now and then. What I know is that the voice calling from the Bible will still be speaking, and only on the other side of everything in flux will I really see that “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (13:8).
Russell Moore is editor at large and columnist at Christianity Today as well as host of the weekly podcast The Russell Moore Show from CT Media.
The post What I Learned Teaching the Same Book Twice—20 Years Apart appeared first on Christianity Today.
