Well, we are in the last week of Hebrews. Kind of hard to believe. It's always a strange thing to preach your last sermon in a book that you've been going through. So turn to Hebrews 13 and our passage starts in verse 18. I start off by getting our minds thinking about kind of the central focus of this text and also of the sermon itself, and I'm going to talk about invocations and benedictions, which are bookends to a worship service. They're how worship begins. They're how worship ends. And I don't know that a lot of people in our day take them seriously or think about them or know why you would even do them. But we do know that for many thousands of years, in the Old Testament, and in the New Testament, and in the Church, that the saints have gathered in the name of God with these blessings, and they're sent away with more blessings. When God comes to a people, when we gather together, it's because He invites us to come to Him. And when He sends us away, it's His peace that goes with us. There's something about gathering together as God's people in worship that's more than just a physical gathering, more than just listening to a sermon on a podcast in your car as you drive home, more than reading your Bible in your private devotion. Something takes place when we gather together. Now, curiously, I think that this is true whether we are in the realm of the secular or the realm of even non-Christian religion. And let me explain this for a minute. This past week, a black professional football player refused to stand for America's national anthem in a political protest. Whatever you make of his reasons, one person that I know stated this about that. He said, there's no real reason other than being told to and following the crowd that people should stand for such a thing. It means nothing and it does nothing. Now, I would argue that this comment is profoundly naive and is a result of a culture that has lost all touch with the past. In actuality, sporting events are secular counterparts to religious worship services. Listen to this. They have their own liturgy. They are filled with invocations, singing and music, public readings like when they introduce the players, ongoing commentary, sacramental food, have you ever bought your popcorn there? Proper times to stand and to sit, benedictions and so on. Basically, the National Anthem is the invocation of a sporting event. And it's this way not only in our country, but at every single place that you go in the world. Why would that be? It's because it's a kind of a secular, sacred time, if I can put those two words together, for most people. Even those from other nations, as we witnessed during the Olympics when the fastest man who ever lived made a reporter stop her interview while he paused in respect to the anthem being played from a country that wasn't even his own. Simply put, these rituals prepare people for gathering, and in some kind of a mystical way, even do something to them corporately while they're gathered. They create a kind of a bond, and if you don't think that's true, then you've simply never been to a game of any kind. Or you've not been anywhere near civilization this past week, because for some incredible reason, this football player's protest has been the ongoing number one news story. Don't mess with our invocation. That's what people are saying. Now if that's true in the world that pretends that there is no supernatural and does not believe in God, how much more true is it in a world that admits that there is even if they're not Christian? So the anthem reminded me of an invocation. Another story I heard a couple of years ago reminded me of the power of a benediction, and I want to give this. We move closer to Christianity, we have this secular realm, and then you have this religious but non-Christian realm. This is told by the late Leonard Nimoy, who gave us one of the most famous blessings in the world called the Vulcan greeting. Everyone has seen this thing, even if they've never watched a second of Star Trek. Here's the story of how this greeting came into being, and I want to give it to you in his own words so that you can hear how a secular Jew understood the power of a religious benediction. And this is Nimoy talking now. He said, it was in an orthodox shul, which is a Yiddish word for a synagogue or a school. It was there with father, grandfather, and brother. We were sitting in the bench seats. The women were upstairs. There came a point where five or six men get up on the bima, which is the stage, and they face the congregation. They have the tallit, which is a fringed garment on their, they put it over their head, and they start chanting. And my father said to me, don't look. So everybody has their eyes covered with their hands, or the talets covering their faces, or they turn with their backs toward the men. I hear this strange sound coming from them. They're not singers, but shouters. It's dissonant, discordant, and he makes this sound like an Indian chant. Wailing, not together. Suddenly, the leader started shouting something, and then, if I could speak Yiddish, I would do it, because the way he tells it, it's powerful. He said, it's chilling, and the people start chanting the very same thing back. And he said, I thought something major was happening here. And so I peeked. I saw them with both hands outstretched beneath the tallit like this toward the congregation. Something got a hold of me. I had no idea what was going on. But the sound and the look of it was magical. So I learned how to do it. It wasn't very hard. Some people can't do that. Make your hands do it. He said he figured it out. Then he says, much later, I learned that this is the shape of the letter Sheen in the Hebrew alphabet. A very interesting letter in the language. It's the first letter of the word Shaddai, of Shalom, and of Shekinah. The Shekinah is the name of the feminine aspect of God. And now this is getting it from Kabbalah, and so it's not how we would think of the Shekinah. But he adds this strange thing, who supposedly was created to live amongst humans. Why you aren't to look came much later, much later. A rabbi friend of my wife told me, the legend is that during the benediction, the Shekinah comes into the sanctuary to bless the congregation. And you don't want to see that because it's so powerful it could injure or kill you. So you protect your eyes. He said, I survived. I never dreamed I would do that someday. But sure enough, a day came while making a Star Trek episode that amok time, Spock goes home to Vulcan to be married to his betrothed. The lady who conducts the service in the episode was a Jewish actress. I'm supposed to greet her as we exchange hellos. I thought, this is the first time we've ever seen other Vulcans. So I thought, we need some kind of a special greeting that Vulcans do. We humans do things like shake hands, or nod, or salute. What do Vulcans do? So I suggested this to the director. He said, OK. Within days on the air, people were doing this to me on the street. 50 years later, people are still doing it. It touched a magic chord. Most people have no idea what it's all about. There's just something intriguing to it, like a secret handshake. And he finishes, people don't realize they're blessing each other with this. If secularists and non-Christian religious people can get the power and importance of invocations and benedictions, then how much more beloved should we? This is the question before us as we come to the last section of Hebrews. The Christian tradition has had invocations and benedictions since the very beginning, as they understood the public worship of God to be a meeting, literally, where God is present. He invites us to come into his presence, and something happens when he does. Word invocation is from the Latin invocare, and it means to call or to invoke. God calls us to worship, and we invoke his presence, asking him to be in our midst, not magically, but covenantally, according to his promises in Christ Jesus. Likewise, he gives us his peace when we leave. Now this is indeed profoundly powerful. Nimoy could see it with physical eyes, but do you see it with the eyes of faith? Why would it be so? Because it is the word of life speaking the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit breathing powerful words into your hearts and mind at the benediction. The God who calls the universe into existence by his word is certainly doing something very special when he speaks to us at the beginning and the end of a service. The word benediction comes from the Latin bene, meaning well, and decare, meaning to speak. A benediction is a speaking well to the people. It's a word from the leader of the service, but who is a messenger to the people on behalf of God. And thus, in effect, it is God's word to the people. It is God speaking well to us, and he gets the last word as we gather together. It is gospel. It is his well-wishing. It is his peace going with you. Our passage today is the benediction of the letter of Hebrews, which is also itself quite interesting. Now, originally, we'll see this in just a moment in the actual verse, but Hebrews was meant to be read as a sermon in a worship service. And we actually did this ourselves the week right before we went into studying the book. We read the entire book as one of our services. That worship service would have had its own benediction outside of the sermon, but the letter or the sermon itself has its own separate benediction. Throughout the Bible we see these. You find benedictions in the Psalms. That was what we read for our invocation. You can actually have a benediction at the beginning or at the end. because God can send you his peace whenever he wants. May the Lord preserve you from all evil. The Lord shall keep your soul. The Lord shall keep you coming in and going out from now and forever. This means that our songs that we sing, if there's benedictions in the Psalms, the songs that we sing to God and to each other are tiny forms of a worship service, which is why they belong in worship. You find them in the law. May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord make his face shine upon you and be merciful to you. May the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace. This means that the reading of his law together is a form of worship as well. So we read his law together. We find them throughout many New Testament letters, again, including our letter, which is also the sermon. But it means that sermons are part of the worship of God. They are kinds of little worship services that belong in the larger worship service. They are fit vessels for invocations and benedictions in and of themselves. Have you thought of these elements of a worship service as things that impart God's peace and well-wishing to you? But we need to be thinking this way, especially when the days are evil like ours are. We gather together to worship the risen savior and his mighty father. Now I was told growing up that worship is not about what you get, it's about what you give. To get anything out of worship, you have to come with a mind that is ready and prepared to enter into it. Worship doesn't just happen to you. You have to enter into it willingly and happily. But this saying goes much too far, I think, because indeed we do gather to receive and not just to give. In fact, what possible thing could we even give to this God who created everything? As someone has once said, we can bring Him our sin, that's about it, but we bring Him our sin so that He might forgive our sin. We come to worship Him not so that He will somehow change because of us, as if our worship makes Him happier or greater or something. We come because He alone is worthy. And amazingly, because He is worthy, He again, because of His covenant, has promised to do something to us when we gather together. And yes, worship is for us. It is for us to be sanctified and conform to the image of His Son together. And you need to see that this happens through every phase of our gathering together, including even the benediction. So the last few verses of the end of the sermon of Hebrews. This is actually where we learned that is a sermon, not just a letter. In verse 22, he calls it his word of exhortation. The phrase appears only one other time in the entire New Testament. In Acts 13, 15, Paul goes into a synagogue at Pisidia in Antioch and he gives them a word of exhortation. One commentator said of the phrase, the expression appears to have been an idiomatic designation for a homily or an edifying discourse that followed the public reading of the scripture in these synagogues. This makes our entire letter that much more appropriate to the subject of worship. So it's a sermon, it's a word of exhortation, but it gets even more interesting. Some have actually argued that the chapter that we're in, the last chapter of the book, is actually an early precessor to the ancient liturgies of the ancient church. Think about our own worship service in light of the following, all right? While we do not follow all the superstitious rituals that crept into these liturgies, we do have the basic skeleton of them. Verses 1 through 5 in chapter 13 would mirror the examination of your conscience, which leads to the confession of sin, because these verses are laws. They tell us what we are to do. And that naturally leads us to recognizing that we do not fulfill the law. I'll have more to say about this a little bit later when we look at the author's possible view of his own obedience towards that law. Verses five through six are from the Old Testament. They're quotation from the Old Testament, which mirror the reading of God's word in the service. And we have reading of the law and the gospel in our service. Some people read from the Old Testament and the New Testament in the liturgies. These follow that same basic idea. You read God's word in the service. The middle of the chapter, verses 7 through 17, are kind of the climax of our worship, which is the Lord's Supper. This section is all about food, and some have suggested that they may even be referring to wrongful views of the supper. This section also uses an interesting phrase, I think it's in verse 15, the sacrifice of praise, which is used in the fourth section of the chapter. And of course, praising God includes singing. The fourth section is all about remembering your brothers in prayers. That's where we'll start today. Now in the ancient rite, after the supper was over, but before you're dismissed, you have things like this. Remember, Lord, your people. Remember all of us gathered here before you. You know how firmly we believe in you and dedicate ourselves to you. We offer you this sacrifice of praise for ourselves and for those who are dear to us. We pray to you, our living and true God, for our well-being and redemption. Old liturgy that still goes down to this day. And then finally, you have the benediction. Which is the last word in all of the ancient liturgies and in our own. Why? Because God should have the last word in a service that he has called us to come to. The remaining verses are really just the end of any old letter and yet we find that it ends in a word of grace. at the very end. So we'll be going through this, our section here. The point of sharing that idea of the liturgy of chapter 13 is that this chapter that has all these ethical applications could be a very mini liturgy itself. So not only is the whole sermon itself something that fits into the larger worship service, but our chapter emulates the larger worship service. And the church very well may have even patterned its early worship services after something like this chapter. It's an amazing thing to think about next time you read the book, and especially this last chapter. It should lift you up to heaven in worship of the great God. So let's come to our text, verses 18 through 25. This would be that fourth part of chapter 13, near the end of the service after the supper. Now this is a call to remember your brothers. The idea would be that as soon as his sermon is concluded in their hearing, that they would then stop and take some time to do what he requests them to do. The form of remembering the apostle asks for here is the last command of the chapter and of the letter. He says, pray. Prayer. Everybody prays. But what is prayer? Well, Christian prayer is that means of communicating with the living God through the only mediator between God and men. whereby we approach the throne of grace with words of adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication. That's that famous AXE acronym. If you do not go through Jesus, you simply are not doing Christian prayer, and there is a temptation out there in the world to not pray in the name of Jesus. Do not give in to that temptation. Otherwise, you're praying in the name of another God, and that is blasphemy. All right? To adore God is to praise Him. You praise Him in your prayer, you adore Him. To praise Him is simply to tell Him how wonderful that you know that He is. You praise Him for His power, His might, His wisdom, His works, His goodness, His faithfulness, His kindness, and His grace. You praise Him for whatever you know He's worthy of praise. If you can even make it beyond this in your prayer, you confess your sins to him, humbling yourself, realizing that he is a God and you are not. You become contrite in your spirit and your heart so that he might work a work of renewal in your heart by his spirit because you've confessed your sins to him. God hates the prideful, but he gives grace to the humble. You thank him in your prayers. Thanking God can go on as long as praising him. thanking him for salvation, for life, for health, for suffering, for everything he brings to your life. Giving him thanks makes you thankful, and it makes you a less angry and bitter person. And it keeps him from giving you over to your sin because of your thanklessness. But the form of prayer that is in mind here is the last one. It's supplication. He says, pray for us. Prayer for your brother is the final way that you show love to your brother, if you go back to the very first verse of the chapter. Now he says us, obviously it includes the apostle who wrote the letter, it perhaps also includes those with him, that travel with him as companions. What does he ask for? What is his request? And yes, even pastors can give prayer requests for themselves. Verses 18 through 19, for we are sure that we have a clear conscience desiring to act honorably in all things. I urge you the more earnestly to do this in order that I may be restored to you sooner. So two verses, the first verse is a desire for prayer for their behavior and their faith. The second verse is a prayer for their restoration. Let's look at them one at a time. The first verse explains their clear conscience. Now, there's two points here. The first is the how. How does he have a clear conscience? You read this verse, you go, I know he has a clear conscience, because you read the rest of the verse. Not so fast. Actually, I think this is a really important point, because he's brought up a conscience several times in this letter already. So the question I have for you is, do you have struggles with a clear conscience? Do you ever struggle with that because of your sin? What do you look to to find a clear conscience? Do you look to your obedience? Listen to what he said earlier in the letter. He said that the old covenant gifts and sacrifices cannot perfect the conscience of the worshiper. Then he said that the blood of Christ through the eternal spirit purifies our conscience from dead works to serve the living God. And then he said, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Now isn't that interesting? Is that different than what you would have thought? He gives an answer for a clear conscience. Where does he seem to get his clear conscience from? From himself? His righteousness? His goodness? No, it comes from the blood of Jesus. And perhaps that explains the second point of the verse. What is this about his desire? So he or they are asking for, praying, their desire to act honorably in all things. This is also fairly interesting to me. Someone pointed out what this does not say. And it seems pretty relevant to what I just said. It does not say that they have acted honorably in all things. It says they desire to. They desire to because they're Christians. And Christians desire to act honorably in all things. Now, we really need to say a couple things about this. First, if I say it that way, does that bother you? Am I reading too much into that? Some people have this strange notion that pastors and leaders are holier than everyone else. If you don't believe me, just next time somebody asks what you do for a living, tell them you're a pastor. And watch how their behavior changes instantly. And don't worry, God will forgive you for lying about it. But if you hear this and somehow a suggestion that pastors are supposed to be sinful, like some kind of an antinomian, then you badly missed the point I'm making. He said that they desire greatly to honor God. And their conscience is cleansed by the blood of Christ, drives them to that desire. Recall what he said earlier in the chapter. This goes back up to verse seven. One of the earlier commands was to remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. And then he said, consider their outcome in the way of life and imitate their faith. Now, while it doesn't necessarily mean that they're acting perfectly, clearly their faith includes their behavior. That's the context that it's written in. So anyone who would justify sin and say that God approves of it does not know God and is a deceiver. The command here to pray for leaders follows on the heels of two other commands, to obey your leaders and submit to them in the verse right before this. So what is clear is that he is now letting them know that even though God has put leaders over them in terms of authority, they're in just as much need of prayer as anyone else is if they are to live a life pleasing to God. Let the law do its work convicting them. It also seems clear that he's not just saying that they want to do something, but they haven't, but they're trusting in Jesus. He's not saying that. He's saying that they honestly don't know of any place where they have not sought to honor Christ among them, either in word, perhaps the sermon itself, or in their behavior. He greatly desires prayer that if they might be deceiving themselves that it would be revealed so that their conscience in Christ would line up with their behavior so that they so greatly desire. For what Christian is there who doesn't want to obey his master even when he falls? I believe the way that he has written this certainly leads to that kind of an application. Now next he says in verse 19, I urge you the more earnestly to do this in order that I may be restored to you sooner. Now there isn't a lot said about the author of this book. This verse makes it clear that they know who he is, and more, that he's part of their fellowship. He didn't need to tell them who he was, they knew him. But it also shows that his own conscience is so clear that he wants to be with them very badly. This is not something you want if you're actually guilty of much misbehavior among a group of people. If you're far away from them and you haven't been acting well, then you're never gonna write something like, I can't wait to come and see you again. The relationship of this verse to the previous may be circumstantial, okay? To see those circumstances, we need to go to verses 22 and 23. So I'm gonna skip the benediction for a moment. Thematically, these really do belong in many ways to 18 and 19. So in those verses, he first appeals to them. I appeal to you, brothers, bear with my word of exhortation, for I have written to you briefly. His letter is, at the end of the day, just a short letter after all. It takes all of 45 minutes to read Hebrews out loud. Given that it's a sermon, to me, it's interesting that it's not 10 minutes and it's not two hours. Some in our day seem to love to speak for as short a time as they can. The shorter the better so that we can get to the real worship, the music. Some people seem to pride themselves on how long they can preach or how long they can listen to a sermon, as if that makes you holy. A pastor friend of ours, James Grizzly Adams, once told me, a good sermon need not be long. A long sermon need not be. Think about how much amazing information is packed into Hebrews for a minute. And it's a sermon. This is a sermon. It could literally take you 10 lifetimes of study to even begin to understand what this guy is saying. Some people don't like deep sermons. Hebrews is a profoundly deep sermon. And he expressed, and he expected that the Christians that he was writing to could understand what he was talking about. He had taught them well. He clearly took a lot of time writing this book as the theology and the structure and the literary style have all showed us. Now, like a deep sermon that you might hear in our day, you need to bear with his sermon if you don't understand it all. That's what he's saying. One little step at a time, bear with our word of exhortation. Grasp one thing in the sermon first, then move on. Persistence, you need to stick with it and try to understand it. You need to talk about it with your friends and let it enter your soul because it's telling you about the riches of Christ. of whom there is no end of the depth. When you get hold of him, he changes your life. The sermon should not end once you bow your head in prayer and walk out the door. It should last. And my prayers at Hebrews would last and last and last in your heart and mind. Verse 23, he says, you should know that our brother Timothy has been released with whom I shall see you if he comes soon. So this is pretty clearly the Timothy that Paul knew, who became the pastor of the church at Ephesus, and who has two books of the New Testaments named after him. Now that fact that he knows Timothy is one of the major reasons that some think Paul is the author of Hebrews, but obviously Timothy didn't only have one friend, plenty of other people knew Timothy. And many other suggestions for the authorship would have met that criteria, including Luke, who journeyed with Paul and is my choice, as you know, for the author of Hebrews. But the point is, Timothy has been in prison, and that brings up one last time a very serious but minor theme of Hebrews, which is that of persecution for the name of Christ. Life as a Christian in the first century was anything but like life as we know it is here. Nero, possibly at the time this was written, we don't know, but Nero murdered both Peter and Paul, and he did such absolutely unspeakable things to hundreds of Christians in Rome that I would have to make half the people in this room leave just to tell you what they were. Emperor Domitian at the end of the century was not much better than Nero. And let us not forget the crucifixions earlier in this, or the deaths earlier in the century, the crucifixion of Jesus, the stoning of Stephen, the beheading of John, the murder of James, the imprisonments of the earliest Christians in Israel by the Jews. It seems that anywhere you went as a Christian in the first century, trouble followed you. These people were labeled by the state as seditionists who met in secret, who had sex orgies because of their love feasts, who were cannibals because they eat the body of Christ, who are atheists because they only believe in one God. The rhetoric of liberals in America does not hold a candle to the Roman Empire and the Jewish elite of the first century. The temptations to give in or to forget one another, to keep yourself from such horrors was very real. And it's hard for us to imagine it. But you need to continually be preparing yourselves for what's coming. Into this, the circumstance then, might have been that the apostle of Hebrews was detained for some reason. Perhaps he, like Timothy, was being held by the state. Perhaps he was waiting for Timothy to be released and to finally get to him, and it took such a long time that it made his friends that he was writing to anxious or maybe even suspicious. We just don't know, but he's urging them earnestly in these verses, I think, to pray all the more so that they may be able to come back home. They should not take his absence as any kind of a sign that he's no longer acting honorably towards them. But they should entreat the throne of heaven knowing that their God is king and ruler of all and can deliver them if he is so moved to do so. He commands them to pray. Certainly all of our times of gathering together should be filled with prayer. Our service should have prayer time, multiple prayer times. Our small group should have prayer time. Our daily lives should have prayer time. Are you praying for one another? And do you know what you should even be praying for? The apostles' command and request here told them what to pray for. And that's how we know what we're to be praying for with others. If you don't tell somebody, they can't know what to pray for. At the end of the service, there is then this benediction. And that's a theme that we began with earlier. Now we get to see the power of a true benediction. Like the previous sections of our text today, this is just two verses, but these are amazing two verses. Verses 20 and 21, now may the God of peace who brought again from the dead, our Lord Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep by the blood of the eternal covenant, equip you with everything good that you may do as well, working in us that which is pleasing in his sight through Jesus Christ to whom be glory forever and ever, amen. So first, this benediction is God's goodwill towards you. And thus it begins with God, the God of peace. This is a common benediction in the New Testament to say that language, the God of peace be with you. Sending someone off with the peace of God is found throughout the Bible. Can you imagine being welcomed into God's presence, going through all the things that we go through in a worship service together, and then not having God's peace go with you. That's a horrible thought. And yet, this is exactly how it might be with some here this morning. Because you have to understand that God's peace does not just go with someone because of a benediction. It presupposes that you and God are at peace. We said this many times before, biblical peace is not just the absence of war. It's the presence of his goodwill towards you. Now we are born enemies of God. We're born under his wrath. You have to have God's wrath turned aside from you in order to be at peace with him. Are you at peace with God? You can be because he's the God of peace and he loves peace and hates hostility. That's why he sent the Lord Jesus. Now in this benediction, this God of peace is distinguished from our Lord Jesus later in the sentence. You see that? Kind of reminded me of our study on Wednesday night with the Trinity. So we'll talk about that for a minute. The God of peace brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus. Now this is one of the most common things to say in the New Testament. Peter's very first sermon says, this Jesus God raised up. And Paul says, God raised the Lord. But because they're distinguished, it's common to think of God here as the Heavenly Father. And it's certainly not wrong. In fact, Galatians begins this way, saying, through Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised him from the dead. The Father is called God, and Jesus is given the title Lord, Kyrios. And yet it strikes me that most of the time we don't find the Father being specified when it gives this formula. It just says God. Why might that be? Well, we confess one God in three persons, don't we? It's not only the father who raised Jesus from the dead, Jesus himself said, destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up. And thus Jesus is called our Lord and God in Revelation. He's even called the Lord of Peace, giving him the very title God of Peace. Also we read, if the spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, And so the Spirit raised Jesus, which is why Ananias and Sapphira, when they lied to God, they lied to the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is God. So who raised Jesus, our Lord, from the dead? God did. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Hence, God raised him from the dead. Well, the resurrection is the focus of the work here in the initial part of the benediction, and that's because it's the central tenet of the Christian faith, other than maybe the deity of Christ. Jesus is not dead, and therefore he has great power, and in this case, that power is as the great shepherd of the sheep. The apostle here is but an under-shepherd of the sheep. Paul and Jude and others, or Peter and Jude, and Paul too, for that matter, refer to pastors as shepherds. But that's a term that they get from the Old Testament. You remember David talking about him as a shepherd, but then he also says, the Lord is my shepherd. The flock is not David's flock, it's God's flock, and he is but a sheep himself at the end of the day. And so that touches again on the way that leaders are to lead Christ's sheep. For if they lead his sheep astray, what can there be but wrath to pay? Peace belongs to those who are Christ's sheep. May the peace of God be with the sheep, he says. Then we ask, how do we have peace? Well, if Jesus is raised, it's only because he died. He has been brought again from the dead. And why did Jesus die? It was so that he might bring peace between you and God. God brings you peace through Jesus. Do you see? He's absolutely central to the benediction. Do you believe in that God of peace? Now it says specifically, by the blood of the eternal covenant. So he talks about an eternal covenant here at the end of the letter. He's taking up that theme, which has taken up so much of his time in Hebrews. and which we reformed Christians love to talk about because it organizes our thoughts about the Bible and it brings unity to the scripture. So I want to ask what covenant is this as kind of a way of doing a very brief mini covenant theology. Some people are tempted, as John Owen points out, to think of this as the eternal covenant of redemption in eternity past. But he rightly notices that that covenant had no blood in it. It was made in eternity with the members of the Trinity. The covenant of works with Adam is called by Isaiah an eternal covenant that everyone on earth has broken. Is that the covenant he has in mind? Well, kind of. Because Jesus died to redeem us from the curse of that covenant, which was broken, and he obeyed the covenant of works, and by his works we are saved. So there's certainly a relationship between the covenant of works and the covenant in mind here. The Noahic covenant is called an eternal covenant. But the promise there was to never again flood the entire earth with water. The promise did not involve blood, but water. The Abrahamic covenant is called an eternal covenant. But that covenant involved a physical land and a biological people. And the blood that was spilled in it is circumcision, which is no longer a sign performed in the church, because we're circumcised by the heart. So the Mosaic Covenant might be called an eternal covenant. It's difficult to tell in the place where you find that language, if he's talking about Moses or the priesthood. But it does say it's a covenant from the people. It makes me think that it's the Mosaic Covenant. But of course, they broke covenant with God. The Levitical covenant, the priestly covenant, is called an eternal covenant, but it focuses on the priesthood that has passed away. And then you have the Davidic covenant that's called an eternal covenant, but that is similarly, it's about the kingship of Israel. So did you know that they were all called the eternal covenant? I actually didn't know that until I looked it up this week, but they're all called that. Well, there's one more covenant in the future for the Old Testament prophets that's called an eternal covenant. It's interesting that all of the covenants that we've looked at here are about the seed to come. Noah, the promises to his seed. Abraham, the promises to his seed. Moses, the promises to his seed. Levi, the promises to his seed. David, the promises to his seed. And that all comes from the first promise to Eve in the garden, to her seed. Jesus is the seed. Now, not in themselves, but in the coming of Christ, we see these as eternal. Because in a shadow and type form, those covenants have passed away. But Jesus is the second Adam. Jesus is our ark. Jesus has fulfilled circumcision. Jesus obeyed the whole law. Jesus is the great high priest. Jesus is the king of David. You see, he fulfills them all. And thus the covenant in mind, which is the eternal covenant, is the one that's cut in his own blood. that which fulfilled the shadowy covenants of the Old Testament, that which usher in true grace rather than works, that which brings about eternity of salvation that was thought about in the covenant redemption into time and space. It's his blood that makes this covenant eternal. It's eternal because it's always been in mind. It's as if the plan of God in his plan, the lamb was slain from the foundation of the world. It's eternal because God himself died for our sins. It's eternal because nothing can undo his work of redemption. It's eternal because nothing can take you out from under the peace of God. What a powerful benediction it is when you really start thinking about this. But I'm only done with one of the verses. We got a whole nother verse to go through. It goes on to say, may this God of peace equip you with everything good that you may do his will. May the God of peace equip you, the spirit of God equips his saints with the weapons of our warfare, with again spiritual principalities and with the fruit of the spirit by which we love our brothers. And so this is particularly a work of the Holy Spirit who was sent by God to do the very thing promised here. So if the God of peace is at peace with you through the blood of Christ, then may he equip you with everything good. Now these good things are given to you that you may do his will, it says. So what is God's will? Well, the Children's Catechism asks, can God do all things? And the answer is yes, he can do all his holy will. It's God's holy will to equip the saints to do his holy will. But the will of God here is not his power, his omnipotence, his sovereignty. The will of God here is his law. Working out that which is pleasing in his sight, it says. And what is that? Well, in this context, it's the commands to love our brother that we've seen throughout the chapter. So the benediction is now reminding you of what you've heard about the law of God, how it is holy, how it's good, how God wants you to obey it. And now it's giving you the power to do so. How? Through Jesus Christ. It's the work of our mediator in his life on earth as a man that is our power, for it is to him that we are united by faith. Christ had the power to obey, and he obeyed perfectly, and we are united with Christ in that power, like the head is one with the body, like the branch is one with the vine, like a wife is one with the husband, like a temple houses the God, like bricks that make up that temple, which the chief cornerstone is Christ. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. I can do his holy will. I can obey him for I have the desire to do so where I didn't have it before. So offer your bodies as living sacrifices. The focus of the benediction is no longer on your sin, which has been paid for. It's not on your constant struggles and falling short of his glory that you do throughout your life in the flesh. The focus is on the peace of God going with you now by the power of God and his spirit equipping you through union with God, the son who died for your sins and was raised to life so you could be justified. And therefore to him be glory forever. and ever. A proper benediction ends with praising God, for it is God's grace that does these things for a people who do not deserve them. The book actually ends on that word of grace. The verse immediately after the benediction, we'll look at these two really quickly, it's somewhat anticlimactic, right? You'd think that this would be the end of the book, but he says, greet all your leaders and all the saints. Those who come from Italy send you greetings. So our author is actually in Italy, the same place where Paul and Peter were put to death by Nero, but he's not dead yet. So he sends greetings because they're his brothers. It's just what you do in a letter. You finish a letter with greetings to people. But he ends with grace. We are saved by grace alone. And it's grace alone that gives us all the rich treasures throughout the book through Christ. Grace be with all of you. And so may God bless you as you've considered this greatest of all sermons ever written, I think, the book of Hebrews. May the God of peace go with you as you leave and consider all the blessings of Christ that he's done for you. The one who is greater than angels, remember? Greater than Moses, greater than Aaron, greater than the temple, greater than the sacrifices, greater than all the covenants of old. And may grace go with you and be on your lips as you praise his name together with one another. as you bear each other's burdens, as you pray for one another, as you praise God together. This is the power of worship. This is the power of the benediction. This is the power of God being with you through our Lord Jesus Christ and all God's people said. Let's pray together. Father, I thank you for the privilege to be able to preach through this sermon of Hebrews. To your people, I thank you that this is a people that desires to hear your word and to go through it, to know what it is that you have to say to us. We would pray that you would indeed be with us in power as we have read the benediction several times today, as we'll finish even off with our sermon with it, our worship service together with it. Remind us of what we've learned as we've gone through this book. Would your spirit please recall things to our mind as we need them and as we've reflected on them. Help us to be talking about these things when we come in and when we go out, when we're at home and when we're at work, when we're with our children, when we're with our friends, when we're by ourselves. Cause us to think on your word and may your word change us from the inside because it is the word of God. And we thank you Lord most of all for how this book has glorified your son, your only begotten whom you sent all those years ago to do all of the things that we've read about here. We thank you for who he is. We thank you for how great he is. We thank you for how he is superior to any other son of God. We thank you for how he is the uncreated creator of all things. We thank you for his work on our behalf. We thank you for his life and his obedience. We thank you for his obedience to go even to death that he didn't deserve. We thank you for his substitutionary atonement. And we thank you for his ransom that freed us from the power of Satan. And we thank you that you raised him from the dead. We thank you that Father, Son, and Spirit raised the Lord Jesus Christ to life, and that he is alive even now, and that his presence is among his people by his Spirit. And we would ask that you would be glorified and praised in your church through your word, that you would hear our prayer today, our prayer of thanks for letting us participate in your word together. Leave, have us leave with your spirit, we would ask. Be with us as we come to the supper and hear our prayer in Jesus' name, amen.