CRITICAL AND EXEGETICAL NOTES
Hebrews 12:22. Mount Sion.—The spiritual or heavenly mount. Not Jerusalem, but what is represented by Jerusalem. “The mountain and city of a living God.” Innumerable company.—Lit. “myriads, the joyful company of angels.”
Hebrews 12:23. Church of the firstborn.—The saints from the older dispensation. Some regard it as meaning the Christian saints who had gone to glory; but the spiritual association of spiritual Christian Jews with spiritual Jews of all the ages is prominently before the writer’s mind.
Hebrews 12:24. Blood of sprinkling.—A figure taken from the blood-sprinklings of the old covenant (Exodus 24:8: see 1 Peter 1:2). That is done spiritually by Jesus which was materially represented in the old blood-sprinklings. See Hebrews 9:14.
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.— Hebrews 12:22-24
Emblems of the Spiritual Dispensation.—These verses give the antithesis to all this scene of terror which accompanied the introduction of the ancient law. Worshippers, under the new dispensation, approach a scene of a very different nature. There should not be sought anything material to answer to these emblems; the suggestion of them, and explanation of them, lie wholly in the spiritual range. Dr. Moulton quotes a valuable and helpful passage from Delitzsch: “What it was to which Israel in the time of the old covenant drew nigh we have now heard. Their drawing nigh was at the same time a standing afar off; the mount of the revelation might not be approached by them; the voice of God was too terrible to be borne; and yet it was only tangible material nature in which God at once manifested and concealed Himself. The true and inner communion with God had not yet been revealed; first must the law lead to the painful consciousness that sin prevents such communion, and intensify the longing that sin may be taken out of the way. Under the new covenant, no longer is a tangible mountain the place of a Divine revelation made from afar; but heaven is thrown open, and a new super-sensuous world, in which God is enthroned, is opened to admit us—opened through the Mediator of the new covenant, accessible in virtue of His atoning blood.” Sinai and Zion are contrasted in six particulars, as emblems of the respective dispensations.
I. An immaterial mountain.—A mountain still, because Zion as truly conserves the impressions of the eternity, stability, and sublimity of God. Zion is not the familiar mount at Jerusalem. It is the name for the heavenly abode, the spiritual abode of God.
II. An intangible city.—The heavenly or spiritual Jerusalem. Jerusalem which is above. The city which in his vision St. John saw descending from God. The place where are gathered all who are spiritually quickened, whether they be alive or, as we say, dead.
III. A company of angels.—Conceived of as spiritual beings, and therefore kin with men when men are spiritually quickened.
IV. A Church of firstborn souls.—“To myriads of angels, and to a festal assembly and Church of the firstborn.” The reference is meant to appeal directly to personal feeling. The firstborn are those who first received Christ, and eternal life in Him. They had passed from the mortal sphere; but they formed a festal, happy company in the spiritual spheres. “Spirits of the just made perfect.”
V. A satisfying relation with God.—“And to God the Judge of all.” Intimating the absence of all fear of the Judge, seeing that the Judge is their Saviour. They can come unhesitatingly to Him.
VI. A living and spiritual Redeemer, whose work is a spiritual work in souls. There is no intended reference to the Church, or to any Church on earth. “It is to the living, the universal Church that the words are from age to age addressed. They describe the blessed, heavenly fellowship to which each servant of Christ now toiling on earth is joined; when he has run the race set before him, he will, through the blood of sprinkling and through Jesus the Mediator, reach the company of the just made perfect, and stand before the God of all.” So constantly and so seriously are spiritual men being enticed back to material conceptions, material relations, and material religion—as Christian Jews were to formal Judaism—that it needs to be ever freshly impressed upon us that, though the material will ever seem to be the real so long as we continue imprisoned by the senses, the spiritual is the real; and this we shall fully apprehend when we are free to be the spirits that we are, and free to exercise the spiritual powers that we have.
SUGGESTIVE NOTES AND SERMON SKETCHES
Hebrews 12:22-24. Privileges of the Christian.—Remember the great tenacity with which the Jews held fast to their historical faith; how, over and above pride and worldliness, there was what I might almost call a relentless tenacity in their religious convictions. Therefore apostles urged that, in accepting Christ, the Jew really gave up nothing. You do not abandon the Jewish law, the Mosaic economy, when you accept Christ. You fulfil it more perfectly than when you leave Christ out, and attempt to follow Moses. And, still better, you lose nothing. Under the old dispensation you were constrained, you were under bondage. We ask you not to abandon that in any such sense as to be recreant to its real spirit, but to accept it in the larger presentation which it has in the Lord Jesus Christ, so that you shall have a thousand times more. You lose nothing, you gain everything. Do not fear to accept Christ, for it gives you all that you had before, and a thousand times more. It advances you out of the twilight, and out of the storm-clad horizon of your past faith, into the glorious illumination of a more spiritual worship, where all forms of fear and ghastly motives of terror cease, and where companionship and Divine guidance and infinite blessings await you. And ye are actually come to these things. It is a part of the privilege which belongs to the earthly ministration of your faith. What, then, is the privilege of the Christian? Christians are heirs of a wonderful inheritance, which is already so far dispensed, portions of which are ministered in advance, in such a way that, if they but knew it, they would be transcendently happy.
1. “Ye are come unto … the heavenly Jerusalem”—God’s home. God takes us to His own home. We are surrounded by it. We touch it, or are touched by it. We are brought into such intimate relations, if we be true Christians, with Christ or with God, that, whether we know it or not, the kingdom of God is within us or around us.
2. “To an innumerable company of angels.” It is not that when we die we shall go where angels live, but that when we come into the new dispensation, by the true spirit of faith, we then come to the “general assembly.” Angelic ministration is a part, not of the heavenly state, but of the universal condition of men. Moreover, we come into junction and relationship with everything that has been on earth worthy of remembrance, of enunciation, of celebration. All the great natures of the world are ours, if they have been saved. “The spirits,” they are called, “of just men.” But they are the spirits made perfect in their beatified condition.
3. “To Jesus the Mediator of the new covenant.” This to the Jew meant nothing, but to the disciple meant everything. What are fitting applications of this passage?
I. We are come by virtue of our Christian life, not to self-denial, and to pain, and to repentance, and to sorrow, and to limitation.—A man who has been going in wrong courses must needs pass through the gate of repentance and the baptism of sorrow. But the popular impression, that to be a religious man is to enter upon a life of gloom, is a false impression. If a man becomes a Christian, he is simply a man that has been in an abnormal state, an out-of-joint state; and becoming a Christian, is merely getting back into joint with God, with his own spiritual being, with the universe. He comes into nature again—for a man that is living in a sinful way is out of nature—his higher and truer nature. Ye are not come to tears or to sorrow. Ye are come to triumph, to an illustrious company, to glorious heraldings. Ye are come to convoys and felicities, and radiant hopes and blessed fruitions. “May I not cry then?” Yes, just as the night does—and in the morning it is dew. True tears make men beautiful.
II. It is a great comfort, in the light of this truth, that nothing on earth has ever been lost that was worth keeping.—Everything has been gathered and garnered, and that for you and me. All the holy men that have lived in every age of the world are mine—every one of them. All the apostles, all the martyrs, all the confessors, all pure and true preachers of the word, all kings that deserved to be kings, all nobles that were nobles of heart as well as of name, all holy mothers and fathers, all great artists, all great benefactors, all the persecuted and despised, and crucified almost, all that have suffered for a principle, all that the dungeons had, and all that the hospitals had, and all that the sea has swallowed, and all that the earth has covered—all of them, though they have passed through so many and such various pains, although they are apparently destroyed, are no more destroyed than the seed that the farmer covers under the clod, that it may rise again in more glorious luxuriance. God has saved everything that was worth saving in this world.
III. No Christian on earth need be lonely.—If these truths are not poetical truths; if they are real truths; if the air is full of administering spirits; if time itself is but the Lord’s chariot, and He rides with those who ride therein; if everywhere, above us, beneath us, and on every side, and all through the world, good men are substantially united, who has had to do more than lift himself up into the consciousness of this essential union of noble natures, to feel that he is not without company?
IV. They also who put themselves into the way of Christ, and who sow in tears, who perform obscure duties, and duties that to others are disagreeable, who will not be reduced by ease from tasks of usefulness, who feel in themselves called to follow Christ in doing, in labouring, who are considered singular and remarked—are they not by these very things joined to this exceeding great company?—H. Ward Beecher.
Hebrews 12:23. The General Assembly.—When the florist gathers his seeds in the best way he can, and winnows them, giving them the best sifting he can, the poorest seeds are carried away by the wind with the chaff, and he loses them, unless he is a very acute seedsman, and goes after these poor seeds to bring them back again, that they may swell the bulk and quantity of his saleable material. But when the great Gardener shall save His seeds, the poorest seed of the whole, the most shrunken, if it only has a germ no bigger than a needle’s point in it, shall not be lost. Not the great, beauteous, plump seeds alone, but the little infinitesimal seeds—all these God has saved, and He will save them all.—H. Ward Beecher.
Heaven a State of Perfection.—“And to the spirits of just men made perfect.” The text expresses what the Christian Israelites were come, and were tending, to, the representation whereof hath a double reference: intermediate—to the state and constitution of the Christian Church; and final—to the heavenly state; the former being both a resemblance, and some degree, of the latter.
I. The perfection the spirits of the just do finally arrive to in their future state.—Being “made perfect” is an agonistical phrase. To it the idea of “running a race” plainly leads us. But it is a real, inward, subjective perfection, by which they all become most excellent creatures, that must be chiefly meant. Perfection, in a moral sense, doth contain a threefold gradation:
1. At the lowest, sincerity. The man is a resolved and thorough Christian.
2. An eminent improvement, greater maturity in Divine knowledge, and all other Christian virtues.
3. The consummate state of the Christian, when he is come “to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.” The felicity of the future state depends upon such perfection of the subject of it. Concerning the object of felicity, we are agreed it can be no other than the blessed God Himself, the all-comprehending God, fully adequate to the highest and most enlarged reasonable desires. But the contemporation of our faculties to the holy, blissful object is so necessary to our satisfying fruition, that without that we are no more capable thereof, than a brute of the festivities of a quaint oration, or a stone of the relishes of the most pleasant meats and drinks. We are too apt to fill our minds with ideas of a heaven made up of external, outside glories, forgetting we must have the “kingdom of God within us,” hereafter in its perfect, as well as here in its initial, state. The internal perfection of the spirits of just men is thus indicated—“We shall be like Him; for we shall see Him as He is”; it includes likeness to God, and the vision of Him. This likeness to God may be considered as preparative for the vision of Him; or the vision of Him may be considered as an argument for our seeking to grow like Him. Ultimate perfection is virtually contained and summed up in knowledge.
1. The true and proper object of knowledge must be whatever is requisite to their duty and felicity—all that lies within their compass, but especially the blessed God Himself.
2. The manner of knowing is not that slight, ineffectual, merely notional, insipid knowledge, which unregenerate minds are now wont to have of the most evident truths, but a knowledge, or vision, that is most deeply and inwardly penetrative, efficacious, and transforming; admits a light which spreads and transfuses itself through the whole soul. Accordingly, the whole, even of practical religion and godliness, is in the Holy Scripture expressed by the knowledge of God. Likeness to God certainly ensues upon suitable preceding knowledge of Him; for the kind and nature of that knowledge being, as it ought to be, powerful, vigorous, transforming of the whole soul, and the will ductile and compliant, agreeable impressions do most certainly take place. But this likeness to God must be understood with exception to the Divine peculiarities.
II. In what sense may sincere Christians be said to have already come to the spirits of the just made perfect?—
1. In a relative sense, as belonging to the “general assembly,” of which the spirits of the just form part.
2. In a real sense; by a gradual, but true participation of the primordia, the first and most constituent principles and perfections of the heavenly state.
The following reflections conclude the discourse:
1. It ought to be most remote from us to confine, in our narrow thoughts, sincere religion and godliness to a party, distinguished by little things, and most extra-essential thereto.
2. The spirits of the just on earth are in a great propinquity, and have a near alliance to heaven.
3. The just in this world are of the Church in heaven.
4. Angels must have kind propensions towards men, especially good men, in this world.
5. When we find any excellent persons in our world attain far and high towards the perfection of the heavenly state, it ought to be a great encouragement to us, and is an obligation, to aspire to some like pitch.—John Howe.
ILLUSTRATIONS TO CHAPTER 12
Hebrews 12:23. The Church Triumphant.—The πανήγυρις (pançguris) was a solemn assembly for purposes of festal rejoicing … the word having given us “panegyric,” which is properly a set discourse pronounced at one of these great and festal gatherings. Business might grow out of the fact that such multitudes were assembled, since many, and for various reasons, would be glad to avail themselves of the circumstance; but only in the same way as a “fair” grew out of a “feria” or “holy-day.” Strabo notices the business-like aspect which the πανήγυρεις commonly assumed, which was indeed to such an extent their prominent feature that the Romans translated πανήγνρις by the Latin mercatus, and this even when the Olympic games were intended. These, with the other solemn games, were eminently, though not exclusively, the πανἡγυρεις of the Greek nation. If we keep this festal character of the πανήγυρις in mind, we shall find a peculiar fitness in the employment of this word at Hebrews 12:23, where only in the New Testament it occurs. The apostle is there setting forth the communion of the Church militant on earth with the Church triumphant in heaven—of the Church toiling and suffering here, with that Church from which all weariness and toil have for ever passed away (Revelation 21:4); and how could he better describe this last than as a πανήγυρις, than as the glad and festal assembly of heaven?—Trench.
Hebrews 12:24. Blood better than Abel’s.—Abel stands forth before us as the first in a cloud of witnesses, bearing brave testimony, and prepared to seal it with their lives. He died a martyr for the truth, the grandly God-like truth that God accepteth men according to their faith. All honour to the martyr’s blood which speaks so effectually for precious truth. Our Lord Jesus Christ, being also a testifier and witness for the faith of God, spake better things than Abel, because He had more to speak, and spake from more intimate acquaintance with God. He was a fuller witness of Divine truth than Abel could be, for He brought life and immortality to light, and told His people clearly of the Father. Our Lord Jesus Christ had been in the bosom of the Father, and knew the Divine secret; this secret He revealed to the sons of men in His ministry, and then He sealed it by His blood.—C. H. Spurgeon.
Blood crying for Vengeance.—To us it seems a slight, and therefore a strange, commendation of the blood of the great sacrifice to say it speaks better things than vengeance. But to Hebrews who had shed their brother’s blood the case was widely different. Of the men who in the madness of their persecuting zeal had said concerning Jesus, “His blood be on us, and on our children,” imagine some brought afterwards to feel what they had done; what more natural apprehension in their awakened conscience than that their brother’s blood should cry for vengeance against them, as Abel’s blood cried against his murderer? It has been so. The Hebrew nation is a living Cain. Their brother’s blood crieth against them.… To the penitent believer, therefore, how needful, and how suitable, and how satisfactory, was the apostle’s assurance! His death in their hands was indeed the murder, but by the hand of God it had been turned into a mercy.—Hugh McNeile, D.D.