Dynamic Studies in Hebrews

BACKGROUND TO THE BOOK OF HEBREWS

Warren W. Wiersbe tells a story about a man from Leeds, England, who visited his audiologist to have his failing hearing evaluated. The man had already been wearing a hearing aid for over twenty years. In order to perform the test, the man needed to remove his hearing aid. His hearing immediately improved. This was not, as you might imagine, a miraculous spiritual healing. The man had simply been wearing the hearing aid in the wrong ear for most of his adult life.
This story dramatizes the problems that most non-Jewish believers have had in understanding the book of Hebrews over the centuries. The early Jewish believers had no trouble whatsoever understanding what this book was telling them. With their foundation in the Tanakh (the Old Testament), the illustrations, explanations, and teaching were all quite clear to them. However, since at this point in time most believers are not Jewish and do not have a strong foundation in the Old Testament, they have a very difficult time with this book of the Bible as a whole. In fact, the solution to this dilemma adopted by many denominations and seminary professors has been to either ignore it or incorrectly allegorize things so that they are understandable to their scholastically challenged and admittedly Gentile understanding of this material.
We, however, do not want to be guilty of this error. It is our goal to understand what God is telling us in this important portion of Scripture as fully as possible. To that end, we must continue to educate ourselves about the foundations of the book that lie in the Tanakh. This will enable us to better understand just what the author was saying then, while also helping us to more accurately apply it to our lives today.
This concept may sound strange to some, but it is not. The Judeo-Christian Scriptures are a fully integrated message system. Every word, every form of punctuation, every place name, is there by design. To fully appreciate the riches that await the reader, one must diligently avail oneself of the fullness of the documents themselves to see how they work together in a supernatural fashion to communicate God’s message to us.
Remarkably, the documents that make up the Judeo-Christian Scriptures were written over thousands of years, yet they validate one another from beginning to end. Any apparent contradictions disappear upon diligent study. This is even more amazing when we realize this group of writings was set down over thousands of years by at least forty different people. For the most part, they had no communication with one another, and yet what they wrote is unbelievably consistent. Add to that the fact that history, science, archaeology, linguistics, and experience all validate this book that we call the Bible, and it becomes all the more amazing.