(Hebrews 13:12-14) “Therefore Jesus also, that He might sanctify the people through His own blood, suffered outside the gate. So, let us go out to Him outside the camp, bearing His reproach. For here we do not have a lasting city, but we are seeking the city which is to come.”
Yesterday I finished watching the online sessions of the Conference held at the Messianic Synagogue Celebrate Messiah this past Saturday titled “The Yom Shabbat Conference” Celebrating the Messianic Heroes both is the Bible and in the history of the Jewish nation who ran the race for God with endurance. In these sessions I learnt more about how all the heroes of faith in the Book of Hebrews Chapter 11 all ran the race of faith accompanied by endurance that God had set for their lives, who kept the faith and who stayed the course to the finishing line.
The theme that came through for me was that all of these heroes of faith experienced suffering for their faith and in this realising more fully that as followers of Messiah Jesus we too will suffer for our faithfulness to Him and to the Word of God. Also it was shown how in the Holocaust there were multitudes of faithful Messianic Jews who knew and believed that Jesus was the Messiah of Israel and that these faithful New Covenant believers suffered and died in the death camps alongside their unsaved Jewish brothers and sisters testifying to them with their dying breath that in Him alone was the salvation of God. These faithful witnesses of Messiah Jesus in the Nazi death camps bore testimony to Him as the Passover Lamb who had been sacrificed to redeem His people from their sins (1 Corinthians 5:7) (Matthew 1:21).
God has always had a faithful believing remnant since the time when Noah and only eight members of his family were saved from the deluge that destroyed all living people on earth through the flood at that time. It took Noah 120 years to build that ark and undoubtedly he was laughed at, ridiculed, scorned, mocked and marginalized by the society of his day.
It was a world rife with murder, sexual perversion, violence and the people’s imaginations only focused on evil all of the time. Added to this was the satanic infiltration of the human race. Noah we are told in Torah was a righteous man living by faith and was leading a blameless life being faithful to God by the way he lived and that he walked with God continuously (Genesis 6:1-11). He was undoubtedly persecuted for his faith. When you look at the long history of all of God’s faithful servants in the Bible they, as a remnant, were all persecuted to a greater or lesser degree because they were in the world but not of this world. They were not living by what they saw in the natural but by what they saw in the unseen spiritual realm which was a greater reality and eternal hope to them than anything they saw in this world or what this world could offer them (Hebrews 11:1).
The unseen realm of God’s eternal kingdom was a greater reality for them than what they saw in the natural and physical realm, and they had a faith that pleased God and caused Him to act favourably towards them even in the trials and tests they faced every day (Hebrews 11:6).
Most of the Body of Messiah today are already experiencing great tribulation. Before Messiah Jesus comes back it will intensify, spread and become a global reality especially in the last of the last days as Messiah Jesus said it would be, and that what He experienced we also would experience as New Covenant believers spiritually grafted into the Commonwealth of Israel, represented in scripture by the Olive Tree and completely personified and embodied fully in Messiah Jesus, the true vine (John 15: 1-8, 18-21).
In Revelation Chapter 12 we see how the woman representing the nation of Israel down through history even to the present time and the nation through whom the man child Messiah Jesus came being the target of the Dragon Satan. In his fury Satan cannot destroy or defeat the man child (The Messiah) or eradicate Israel as a nation, and so in a great rage the Dragon goes off to make war on the rest of the woman’s offspring, being the faithful remnant, who obey God’s commandments and hold to the testimony of Jesus (Revelation 12: 17). This is the Body of Messiah because New Covenant believers are not separate from Israel but one with Israel, being one new man in Messiah as the Israel of God. When the beast empire of the Antichrist goes after Israel he will at the same time go after the faithful Body of Messiah which we see already happening in the Islamic world, in China, in North Korea and which will spread into western democracies which are now post Christian and neo-pagan.
Added to this, western Christendom has become so spiritually corrupt that the time is coming, and is even now upon us, when faithful Bible believing New Covenant believers will be marginalized, persecuted and even ejected from their churches because of their testimony to the real Jesus of scripture and to the absolute authority of His word and because they refuse to compromise. ‘Babylon’ is not only in the world but also within Christendom! This is another subject in itself.
Now in our text in Hebrews 13:12-14 we are told several things…
(Vs12) “Therefore Jesus also, that He might sanctify the people through His own blood, suffered outside the gate.”
We are told in God’s Word that Messiah Jesus was one “who was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces He was despised, and we esteemed Him not” (Isaiah 53: 3). The Lord Jesus never lost sight of what He came into the world for to seek and to save the lost (Luke 19:10).
He not only grieved over the lost condition of man whom He came to redeem, but more so over Jerusalem and at the rejection by His own flesh and blood being the Jewish people “who were like sheep without a shepherd.” Most of all, He knew that His fellowship with His Father in heaven, which He had enjoyed from all of eternity, was to be broken at the cross. His blood was to be the purchase price of redemption and forgiveness of sin, for Israel and for the whole world (John 1:29) (Ephesians 1:7) (1 John 2:2).
Jerusalem was the City of God but rejected the Messiah and so He suffered outside of the city wall which metaphorically can also represent the world. We who follow Him also, will to a greater of lesser degree, suffer for our faith in this world as He did. Physical persecution has not as yet come to the Post-Christian western democracies as it has come to our brothers and sisters in most parts of the world, but it will inevitably come to the Church in the west.
Through His redeeming work the Lord Jesus procured our redemption and our sanctification or separation to God as New Covenant believers through His atoning blood which cleanses from all sin, and which brings us justification in God’s sight when we repent and believe in Messiah Jesus to save us, counting on the fact that His blood will also protect us from the wrath to come (1 John 1:7-9) (Romans 5:9).
And then we read…
(Vs.13) “So, let us go out to Him outside the camp, bearing His reproach.”
While we live in this world we will never be at home in this present age. We will always be aliens and strangers in this world because the whole world lies in the grip of the evil one (1 John 5:9). As we go out into the unsaved world we will be like sheep among wolves (Matthew 10:16). While Satan has power over the unsaved in this world he does not have power to usurp God’s sovereign will and His awesome power because it is also written that “The earth is the LORD’S, and all it contains, the world, and those who dwell in it” (Psalm 24:1). Just as Messiah Jesus was rejected and suffered the reproach of the world and even from the religious world, so we as His followers will experience what He experienced in this fallen world.
As the apostle Paul wrote that “through many tribulations we must enter the Kingdom of God” (Acts 14:22). Paul did not have an escapist mindset! Messiah Jesus Himself also said; “In this world you will have tribulation but be of good cheer I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). As John writes; “Greater is He in you than he that is in the world” (1 John 4:4). He also wrote; “For whatever is born of God overcomes the world; and this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith (faithfulness)” (1 John 5:4). This is that shield of faith by which we extinguish all of the fiery darts of the evil one! (Ephesians 6:16).
Paul writing to Timothy made things clear when he wrote; “This is a trustworthy saying: If we died with Him, we will also live with Him; if we endure, we will also reign with Him; if we deny Him, He will also deny us; if we are faithless, He remains faithful, for He cannot deny Himself” (2 Timothy 2:11-13). If we are seeking to remain faithful to the Lord Jesus now and every day seek His strength constantly to persevere in all of the challenging and changing circumstances of our daily life before the final persecution of western Christendom really kicks in, we will be able to stand in Messiah’s strength when the hour of that persecution comes to all of us who are seeking to keep God’s commandments and bear testimony to Messiah Jesus.
And finally we read…
(Vs.14) “For here we do not have a lasting city, but we are seeking the city which is to come.”
This was also written about father Abraham of whom we are told “For he was looking forward to a city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God” (Hebrews 11:10). This city is the New Jerusalem which will come down out of heaven after the 1,000 year millennial reign of the Messiah on earth has finished. In that day when God Himself comes down to unite the new heavens with the new earth He will come to dwell with His resurrected and glorified remnant, and He will live with them for ever and ever. They will be His people, and God Himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things will have passed away (Revelation 21:2-4).
As we keep walking by faith we are in good company indeed with all of those who have gone before us, a great cloud of witnesses cheering us on from the grandstand of heaven, who themselves were longing for a better country-a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has prepared a city for them and for us as well who walk in their footsteps by faith (Hebrews 11:16) (John 14:2).
In the Millennial kingdom we will see the face of Messiah Jesus in all of His celestial glory reigning from Jerusalem, and in the final and eternal state after the Millennium has finished, in the new heavens and earth we will see the face of God in the Holy City, the New Jerusalem descending from heaven to earth of which we will be apart and prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband (Revelation 21:1-2).
Therefore let us press on by faith with perseverance, with the eyes of that faith fixed on Messiah Jesus, the author and the finisher of our faith, with our eyes also fixed on the unchanging Word of God and in anticipation with expectancy seeking and looking forward to that heavenly and eternal city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God!
