The Old Testament in the Book of Hebrews

This series of sidebar articles from Dennis Johnson is adapted from the presidential address atthe annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society Far West Region, “From All the Scriptures (Luke 24:27): Preaching Jesus from the Old Testament” (April 2012). Dennis Johnson is professor of practical theology at Westminster Seminary California in Escondido.

1. The Sermon to the Hebrews

The Epistle to the Hebrews is an especially helpful example of the ways in which the New Testament writers drew on the Old Testament (OT) as a redemptive-historical text, while also being careful not to disregard the way God spoke his word into the original audience’s immediate horizons. This means that one purpose for which God’s Holy Spirit gave us Hebrews is to provide an authoritative model for reading the OT in the way that Jesus taught his disciples to do so.

The author describes it as a “word of exhortation” (Heb. 13:22). The same expression appears in Acts 13:15, in which synagogue leaders invite Paul and Barnabas to bring a “word of exhortation” to the congregation. Paul responds with a survey of Israel’s history, leading to Jesus the Messiah. This parallel, along with extrabiblical evidence from Second Temple Jewish sources, favors the conclusion that first-century Jewish Christians would view a “word of exhortation” as referring to an address that follows the public reading of portions of Scripture to explain and apply their meaning.

Hearing Hebrews as a sermon helps to explain certain striking features of this discourse, especially when compared to the epistles of Paul. For example, it lacks the customary epistle preliminaries (e.g., identification of author, recipients, greetings, and blessings); the scriptural quotations are typically introduced with verbs of speaking (in contrast to writing); and the preacher shows sensitivity to his audience’s stamina as listeners (e.g., urging them to “bear with the word of exhortation, for I have written to you briefly,” 13:22). Even more important than these stylistic details is the insight that Hebrews illustrates how preaching in the apostolic era opened up the OT’s witness to Christ.

Hebrews exposits a series of OT texts, each enlisted and explained to demonstrate one unified theme: Jesus is better. The preacher to the Hebrews is a master at Christ-centered interpretation of the ancient Scriptures that God gave to Israel. He draws lines of connection between the words that “God spoke to the fathers by the prophets” and the new word that he has spoken “in these last days to us by his Son” (1:1-2). In the process, he does not flatten out the biblical landscape, ignoring the contextual contrasts between God’s ancient prophet-speech and his recent Son-speech. In fact, he capitalizes on the contrasts to show that the OT Scriptures themselves testify to the superiority of Christ and of his prophetic, priestly, and royal mission of mediation.

The preacher reads the OT as the voice of God, testifying both to its original audience in the era of promise and to new covenant believers in “these last days.” The sermon to the Hebrews preaches Christ as the supreme Word from God, excelling God’s servants the prophets and the angelic attendants who accompanied the delivery of the Law to Moses, God’s faithful servant. The sermon preaches Christ from the OT as the great high priest, excelling Aaron and sons in the permanence of his tenure in office; it extols the purity of his sinlessness, the once-for-all sacrifice he offered and its conscience-cleansing, perfection-producing efficacy, and the heavenly sanctuary in which he serves. The sermon preaches Christ from the OT as a priest who is also, like Melchizedek, a king, reigning at God’s right hand.

The preacher insists that OT Scriptures themselves show that God’s institutions for Israel’prophets, priests, kings, sanctuaries and sacrifices, inheritance and rest from enemies’were designed to direct faith’s eyesight forward, to fix our hearts’ gaze on “Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God” (Heb. 12:2).

2. From Lesser to Greater: How the Preacher Shows Us the Old Testament’s Testimony to Christ

Our preacher challenges us to pay close attention not only to the words of various OT passages, but also to the contexts and the implications of those words. He wants us to see that when we really listen to what God said through the prophets to the fathers, we can discern clues embedded in the ancient Scriptures designed to whet Israel’s appetite for the coming priest-king, and the access into God’s presence that his sacrifice would open.

The prologue (Heb. 1:1-4) overtly grounds the preacher’s discussion of the saving work of the Son in Israel’s Scriptures in two ways. First, the God who spoke to previous Hebrew generations through prophets is the same God who has now spoken in the Son. This God secures his promise with his oath, so it is impossible for God to lie (as we will hear in 6:17-18). Therefore we can expect the prophetic word spoken long ago and the Son-word spoken recently to be consistent with each other.

Second, Hebrews 1:1-2 highlights the contrast between “long ago” and “these last days.” In the OT “the last days” referred to a future era in which God would intervene decisively in history to bring justice and salvation. (1) Since “these last days” designates the era in which God has now spoken in his Son, they are the era of redemptive history in which he and his first-century hearers live, the age that we associate with the New Testament, which began at Christ’s first coming two thousand years ago and continues into our time.

This is only the first of several signals that our preacher uses to call our attention to the unfolding progress of God’s special revelation from promise to fulfillment. In 9:26, for example, we hear that Christ appeared “once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.” Here, the preacher’s description of the era that dawned with the incarnation, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus as “the end of the ages” resembles the comment of the Apostle Paul that Israel’s ancient Scriptures were “written down for us, on whom the end of the ages has come” (1 Cor. 10:11).

The “eschatological trajectory” of God’s special, redemptive revelation in Scripture and the Son reflects our preacher’s conviction that the unfolding of God’s redemptive works and the unveiling of his revelatory words are moving in a positive direction, from good but imperfect structures for God’s engagement with his people toward better access to unimpeded, uninterrupted, and ever deepening covenant communion with God. In keeping with God’s sovereign and saving purpose, the trajectory of history is to move from the provisional to the permanent, from the good to the better’in fact, to the best.

The preacher demonstrates this move from good to best in Hebrews 10:1, where we hear that the law was but a shadow of “the good things to come” and not the “image”‘that is, the substantial reality’of those things themselves. The shadows are the animal sacrifices, which cannot cleanse the human conscience of guilt. The “good things” that were “to come”‘that is, they were future from the standpoint of ancient Israel’include the conscience-cleansing sacrifice of Christ’s body (10:10) and our resultant reception of forgiveness and access into God’s presence (10:19). (2)

Biblical revelation is not timeless, but grounded in history. And that history is not cyclical, but linear. The line of this history, despite the disastrous effects of sin, is not a steady decline from pristine paradise lost in depravity and destruction; rather, the linear advance of history, in the hand of the God of power and mercy, is directed toward a better paradise to come, to which Christ has opened the gates through his death and resurrection.

3. How Expositions of Old Testament Passages Structure the Sermon

Although scholarly opinion is divided over Hebrews’ structure, I see six movements in this magnificent expository sermon, each grounded in one main OT text. Conveniently, the six movements fall into three couplets. Even more conveniently, the couplets can be assigned alliterative labels in English: revelation, reconciliation, and rest. The six movements show that these OT texts, read carefully and contextually, testify that Jesus is superior to the means of prophetic, priestly, and royal mediation by which God had related to Israel in the era of promise:

1 Revelation‘Christ is superior to the angels as an agent of revelation (1:4-2:18). Seven OT texts show that the Son is better than the angels, leading to the main passage for this section, Psalm 8:4-6, which affirms that the Son became lower than the angels “for a little while” in order to rescue us from death and bring us to glory.

2 Revelation‘Christ is superior to Moses as an agent of revelation (3:1-4:13). Both Moses and Christ were faithful spokesmen of God, and Psalm 95:7-11 calls us to hear God’s voice with faith, and so to enter God’s rest (unlike the wilderness generation who disregarded God’s voice speaking to and through Moses).

3 Reconciliation‘Christ is superior to Aaron as the priest who perfects worshippers forever (4:14-7:28). Psalm 110:4 announces a priest to come in the order of Melchizedek, who will hold his priestly office permanently.

4 Reconciliation‘Christ is superior to the old covenant sacrifices as the one who cleanses consciences forever (8:1-10:31). Jeremiah 31:31-34 promises a better covenant than that established at Sinai. Christ mediates this new covenant and guarantees the blessings it promises: forgiveness of sins and access to God’s presence.

5 Rest‘Christ is superior to the patriarchs, Joshua, and David, bringing believers into the inheritance that the fathers greeted from afar (10:32-12:17). Habakkuk 2:3-4 promises that God will come to lead those who persevere in faith into a heavenly homeland and an eternal city.

6 Rest’Christ is superior to Moses as the mediator of worship, bringing believers into the heavenly assembly on Mount Zion (12:18-29). The descriptions of Israel’s experience at the earthly Mount Sinai in Exodus 19 and Deuteronomy 4 stress God’s dangerous, terrifying holiness; but through Jesus and the new covenant he mediates, we enter the joyful worshiping congregation in the heavenly Jerusalem.

4. Psalm 110 in Hebrews

Psalm 110 runs like a golden thread throughout the tapestry of this sermon, and we can hear Hebrews as a sermon expounding this one central biblical text. (3) The preacher calls our attention especially to verses1 and 4 of Psalm 110:

The Lord says to my Lord: “Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.”

The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind, “You are a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.”

Citations of or allusions to these verses run from the prologue into the twelfth chapter. In the prologue, Psalm 110:1 is alluded to in the statement that the Son, “after making purification for sins…sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high” (Heb. 1:3). Then a series of OT passages that show that the Son is superior to the angels concludes with the quotation of Psalm 110:1. The point is that no angel, only the Son, has been invited to sit at God’s right hand (1:13).

In Hebrews 5:6-10, Psalm 110:4 comes into play to show that just as God summoned Aaron into his priestly privilege, so also Christ was appointed by God, who said to him: “You are a priest forever, after the order of Melchizedek.” This alternative order of priesthood’linked to Melchizedek, the king of ancient Salem, rather than to Israel’s high priest Aaron’is the topic of an extended discussion that runs from Hebrews 6:19 through Hebrews 7.

At Hebrews 8:1-5, the preacher brings together the themes of Psalm 110:1 and 110:4. Jesus serves as priest forever and he does so “at God’s right hand”: not in an earthly sanctuary’the wilderness tabernacle or the Jerusalem temple’but in heaven itself. In Hebrews 10:12-13, we see that even Christ’s present posture’not standing but seated’is significant. Priests in the line of Levi and Aaron, who offer animal sacrifices, always stand: their work is never done because the blood of bulls and goats cannot cleanse the conscience. But God has invited our high priest, “Take your seat.” Christ has “offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins.” His atoning task is complete, never needing to be repeated. Finally, in Hebrews 12, the preacher admonishes his congregation to fix their gaze on Jesus, faith’s pioneer and perfecter, who endured the cross and now sits at the right hand of God’s throne (12:2).

Would we have noticed all these implications in Psalm 110? I doubt that I would have, but now that the preacher has pointed them out, I can see where and how he found them in the OT text.

5. Planned Obsolescence

Our preacher shows us how the OT Scriptures, when read carefully in the context of their own era, demonstrate the eschatological directionality of redemptive history. God, embedded in Israel’s ancient Scriptures, hints that he had planned all along for Israel’s institutions to become obsolete, to be transcended and replaced by better forms of revelation, reconciliation, and rest.

At several points the preacher employs a distinctive argument to demonstrate that OT passages themselves sent signals of the insufficiency of the OT order. The texts in question are Psalm 95 (explained in Heb. 3-4); Psalm 110 (interpreted in Heb. 7); and Jeremiah 31 (treated in Heb. 8). Just from pondering the implications of those ancient texts, our preacher implies, ancient Israelites should have anticipated something better to come.

The preacher draws out the implications of these passages, reasoning that God would not have spoken as he so evidently did in these OT texts, if, when those texts were spoken, Israel were experiencing all the blessing that God had in store for his people. The comment on Psalm 95 in Hebrews 4:6-8 illustrates our preacher’s logic:

Since therefore it remains for some to enter it, and those who formerly received the good news failed to enter because of disobedience, again he appoints a certain day, “Today,” saying through David so long afterward, in the words already quoted, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.” For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken of another day later on.

Psalm 95 looks back to the wilderness generation who exited Egypt under Moses. At Kadesh-Barnea they refused to believe that God could defeat the Canaanites and give them the Promised Land, so God took an oath that they would not enter his “rest”‘that is, the land (Num. 14:20-35). The next generation entered the land of promise under Joshua’s leadership, and the book that bears Joshua’s name records that the result of the conquest was that “the Lord gave them rest on every side just as he had sworn to their fathers” (Josh. 21:44).

But that was a very temporary rest. The era of the judges was anything but restful! Our preacher reasons that Psalm 95, spoken through David to Israelites in the land long after the conquest, implies that Joshua had not given Israel all that “God’s rest” entails. If Joshua had given them “God’s rest,” forever vanquishing Israel’s enemies, God would not have spoken as he did in Psalm 95, warning David’s contemporaries that they must not harden their hearts when they hear God’s voice. A better “rest,” a better inheritance than Canaan, is in store for God’s people. Later, that “rest” will be identified with the city built by God for which Abraham longed (11:10), the heavenly country for which the patriarchs hoped (11:16), and the city to come that Christian believers seek (13:14).

We see further examples of this reasoning in the interpretation of Psalm 110:4 in Hebrews 7:11 (promising a better priesthood than Aaron’s), and again in the interpretation of Jeremiah 31 in Hebrews 8:7 (promising a better covenant than Sinai’s).

So the preacher to the Hebrews shows that the OT Scriptures’read in their original historical setting’testify to the insufficiency of the “rest” that Israel received when they occupied Canaan, of the Levitical priests and sacrifices that could not deeply purify, and of the covenant at Sinai that could not secure Israel’s fidelity and God’s forgiveness. His argument is that the ancient Scriptures themselves called their original recipients, no less than his own contemporaries in the new covenant era, to look and long for the champion who would bring a better rest than Joshua could provide, the priest who would effect a deeper purification than Aaron could perform, and the Mediator who would bind God’s people more closely to their Lord than Sinai’s covenant could.