A REFUGE AND A HOPE
Roland H Brown
Hebrews 6: 17-20
You will have noticed that, in the last two verses I have read, there are references to runners, persons who are fleeing for refuge; they are running for their lives. And there is reference to One who “is entered”, the writer says, “as forerunner for us”. The Forerunner is the One who runs on ahead, for others.
I want to speak about Him because He is the great theme of God’s glad tidings; but I want to ask if you have fled for refuge, whether you feel the need to flee for refuge, whether you are very comfortable as you are, or whether you have ever felt the need to run to safety in your soul? Because, if you have not, dear hearers, you are in the gravest peril. You could not be in any greater danger if you have not run to the refuge that God has provided. God has provided a refuge for people in danger, for people at risk, a very blessed refuge.
This epistle was written to Jewish believers, and I have no doubt that as they read this epistle their minds would go to the cities of refuge, Num 35. You will remember in the Old Testament that God in His grace provided what I suppose today would be described as safe havens, for persons who deserved to die, persons for whom the avenger of blood was looking. You see, even in the Old Testament, you could not keep out the grace of God. Even though He was dealing with men in a different dispensation, far less favourable than the present moment, the grace of God was testified to abundantly in the law. There was a means for the sinner to bring his sin-offering and to be restored. There was means provided in the grace of God for relationships that had been broken to be mended; but the grace of God entered into the fact that there was a place of refuge. And the cities of refuge were spread throughout the land: you would never be very far from a city of refuge; and if through inadvertence you had shed blood, you needed to run for your life because if the avenger of blood found you outside it would be death.
Do you feel, dear hearer, that you need to run to God’s refuge? If you have not run to it you are in the greatest possible danger. God in His glad tidings would point you to the refuge that is available for the guilty sinner, for any person who does not deserve it; God has provided it for them, the city of refuge. The danger you are in, if you are still in your sins, is that you could die in them. You could die in your sins. The Lord Jesus said that to some persons in John’s gospel; He said that they would die in their sins, chap 8: 21, 24. What a solemn thing! You see, to die in your sins is to be raised in your sins. To die in your sins is to stand before God in your sins, before that great white throne, and the books opened, and the record of them there, Rev 20: 11-15. What an appalling prospect is presented to us! It is presented to us in the Scriptures undramatically, but the solemnity of it comes home to the soul, of a sinner standing before God. And there are no ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’; there are no mistakes: every sin is recorded, every sin is there. And then search is made in the book of life, but you know that there can be only one outcome if someone stands before God to be judged in relation to their responsible history; there can only be one outcome from that. If you are a sinner, and you have not fled for refuge, the judgment of God is the danger that we must flee from.
Another danger is the standard that God will apply: the standard of righteousness. “He is going to judge the habitable earth in righteousness” (Acts 17: 31): one standard; God has one standard and one standard only before Him. How do you measure up, dear hearer, to the standard that God has? The Scripture tells you! The Scripture not only tells you that we have sinned - “all have sinned”, Rom 3: 23. I do not know much about everybody in this room, but there is one thing I know about every person present here this afternoon, and that is that each one is a sinner as I am. It says “all have sinned” - that is historical, but it goes on to say, “and come short of the glory of God”. What a solemn thing, to think that I come short of God’s standard! It is a standard I could never meet in my own endeavours, the standard that God has; He is going to measure everything by that standard, the divine standard of righteousness. And I come short. You know, one wicked king was faithfully told that; he was told, “Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting”, Dan 5: 27. You do not often see such balances today; you go into shops and everything is electronic; but some that are older will remember the balances. You went into a shop and the standard weight was put on one side and the goods were put in the other, and they were weighed in the balance. You think of God having a balance, and this king was weighed in God’s balance, he was measured against the divine standard, and the result was that he came short. And we all come short, and I want to tell you in a minute - if I was only here to tell you that you come short, there would be no glad tidings about it! - how you can flee for refuge.
Another thing that we fear as unforgiven sinners is death; the wages of sin, the judgment of God. The guilty sinner goes on his course, the temporary pleasures of sin, and the wages are collected: “the wages of sin is death”. How solemn it is! One man in the scriptures speaks of it as the king of terrors, Job 18: 14. People are afraid of it, afraid as they say of the great leap into the unknown, the end of all that they have found their life in - and what is beyond? Well, the Scripture tells us what is beyond. It says it is “the portion of men once to die” - but there is what is after this - “and after this judgment”, Heb 9: 27. I desire, dear hearer, in speaking of these things, to arouse with you the need to flee for refuge. God has provided a refuge for persons that are facing death and facing judgment, and the possibility of meeting God and being judged by His standard of righteousness.
But there is a refuge, and the refuge that God has provided is in a Man, a Man: the Scripture says, “And a man shall be as a hiding-place from the wind, and a covert from the storm”, Isa 32: 2. What a Man He is! God commends Him to you; He commends His own love to you in the glad tidings in that Man, the Man Christ Jesus. God commends His love to you; He does not want you to perish. He does not want you to come under His judgment; He has provided a means whereby you need never come into judgment. What a God He is! He has taken account of me in my rebellion, in the lawlessness of my heart; He has taken account of me, but He has taken account of me in grace, and I thank Him from my heart. He brought home to me the solemnity for my own soul of my position. The apostle Paul says, “Knowing therefore the terror of the Lord we persuade men”, 2 Cor 5: 11. I remember Mr Bellamy, who was local here, saying once that he wondered what experience had entered into the life of the apostle that he spoke about knowing the terror of the Lord. We begin in our soul history on the road to blessing through conviction, conviction of what we are - not only of what we have done but what we are, and of our own inability to do anything about it. But God is able to do much about it: He is known as a “Saviour God” (1 Tim 2: 3), which is a title in which the blessed God exults, that He is a Saviour God, and “not willing that any should perish”, 2 Pet 3: 9. There is not one person in this room that God is willing should perish, and He has made provision that you might not perish. The Scripture says that “God so loved the world”, John 3: 16. What a heart God has, a heart that reached out in its fulness to the whole of humanity. He “desires that all men should be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth”, 1 Tim 2: 4. That is why the gospel is preached, that you might be saved.
I wonder if everyone in this room is a saved sinner? God desires that you might be saved, and not only saved but that you might come to the knowledge of the truth. It is very important that you should be saved - you must be saved: “neither is there another name under heaven which is given among men by which we must be saved”, Acts 4: 12. You must have to do with God about your sins - you must! Your eternal destiny depends upon it; but that is not the end of the gospel: God has in mind that you should come to the knowledge of the truth. And if you come to the knowledge of the truth, you discover how blessed it is, and how blessed God is, and how wonderful His thoughts of love are. For sinners like you and me, God has had the most wonderful thoughts of blessing and He would share them with you. And He has given His Spirit in order that we might be led on into the truth: “he shall guide you into all the truth”, John 16: 13. He will enable you to explore the great things of God; what a God God is: not only saving us from our responsible history, but you might say opening the fulness of His house, His heart, to share with men. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whosoever believes on him may not perish” - that is the beginning - “but” - the Lord says.- “but have life eternal”, the enjoyment of a life to which death does not attach, the enjoyment of relationships which death can never interrupt. You may be part of a family, you may enjoy family relationships as a member of that family, but all lies under the shadow of death. When people got married, they used to say, ‘until death do us part’. You think of that: persons falling in love and getting married - you say how attractive that is! - and the shadow of death rests upon it; ‘until death do us part’. God is speaking about relationships that death will not interfere with. The apostle speaks in Romans about a list of things, including death: he says, “For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities” - and he lists many other things - “shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord”, chap 8: 38, 39. Have you got a relationship like that? If somebody you love dies, you cannot enjoy their love as you had enjoyed it, or they enjoy yours; but death cannot “separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord”. That verse has been a great comfort to persons who have been bereaved, in the knowledge as to the one who has been taken, that they may have been separated from us and the enjoyment of our love, but they are not separated from the enjoyment of “the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord”. They enjoy it without any interruption whatever, without any disturbance whatever; well might the apostle say that their portion “is very much better”, Phil 1: 23! How wonderful these things are, that sinners under the judgment of death, and the fear of judgment to come, and the standard of righteousness that God will apply, and He is speaking about not only saving them from those things, but bringing them into the greatest and most blessed relationship with Himself which will be the joy of their souls eternally.
How magnificent the glad tidings are, and God has provided a city of refuge; He has provided it in One who came into this scene in order to be a Sin-bearer; who wended His way to the cross - “he stedfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9: 51) because He had come to die; He had come “to give his life a ransom”, Matt 20: 28. “The wages of sin is death” (Rom 6: 23); there were no sins that He committed that made Him subject to death. Death had no claim upon Him, but He was wending His way to the cross to die for the sins of others. Through God’s grace, I can say that he died for my sins: I can say with Peter that He bore my sins “in his body on the tree” (1 Pet 2: 24); those sins that I could never ever atone to God for, He atoned to God for them. He bore the sins of believers. It is a solemn thing to take account of the cross of Jesus: God would have you take account of the cross of Jesus; take account of the One who was on it, the One who alive on that cross bore and exhausted the judgment of God against sins. So that I can rejoice in that word, “There is then now no condemnation to those in Christ Jesus”, Rom 8: 1. One of those things that struck terror into my soul was the thought of standing before God to be condemned eternally: what peace it brings into my soul to know, not simply that I will not be condemned, but for those who are in Christ Jesus, there is no such thing as condemnation. There could never be: the righteousness of God requires that I should go out free, that I should go out blameless, because all that lay to my account has been paid; it has been paid in precious blood. It was blood that was precious to God. God said to His people of old, “when I see the blood”, Exod 12: 13. God is looking upon the blood: on the mercy-seat the blood was sprinkled, and the cherubim - the great guardians of God’s rights - were looking down upon that blood, sprinkled on the mercy-seat, Lev 16: 14, 15. I can draw near to God without fear. You think of the first sinner, driven out - not only running away from God in his fear and his guilt, but God drove him out: he was unfit for the presence of God, and He set the cherubim there with the flame of the flashing sword. If that sinner looked back at that lost paradise, at that beautiful garden that he had forfeited through his disobedience, there were the guardians of God’s righteousness, guarding the way to the tree of life, holding the flame of the flashing sword - there was no way back, Gen 3: 24. There was no way of meeting that divine standard of righteousness, but through faith in Christ, and through faith in His blood, God clothes me - me the guilty sinner! - with the righteousness of Christ! What a matter it is: I have no righteousness of my own; the Scripture tells me that “our righteousnesses are as filthy rags” (Isa 64: 6), but God has a righteousness for people who have no righteousness of their own, and He is pleased to clothe them with it. The “righteousness of God by faith of Jesus Christ towards all” (Rom 3: 22); that is, that God would clothe with His righteousness all who would avail themselves of it, but it is only “upon all those who believe”; those who have fled for refuge, they are clothed with the righteousness of God. No charge can be brought against them, and when they look at death, they know One who is risen from the grave; One who has been into death, and death could not hold Him. It held every other, but it could not hold Him: “it was not possible that he should be held by its power”, Acts 2: 24. He lay among the dead, but from among the dead God raised Him: He was “raised from among the dead” (chap 3: 15): you think of that selective resurrection! Myriads and myriads lie in death, but there is one glorious Man that God claimed; He claimed Him by His glory from the grave! He has broken the power of death, and through going into it, He has removed - for me at any rate - the fear of death; He has broken it for ever. What a refuge Jesus is! I commend Him to you, that you might run - run with alacrity! The need is great, but the blessing is even greater. As you run to the refuge that God has provided, you are safe.
But then God intends not only that you should be safe, but that you should be blessed. The One who is a Refuge is also a Forerunner. The One who died for my sins, who bore them alive on the cross, He went into the grave and was buried, He went out of sight, and He took those sins from God’s sight for ever. God says of such that “their sins and their lawlessnesses I will never remember any more”, Heb 8: 12. He did remember them: He remembered them at the cross of Jesus; they came in remembrance before God, and His judgment without any mitigation was poured out upon the head of that sinless One. And the result is that God says ‘I am never ever going to remember them again’. And that brings peace, it brings the most profound peace into the soul and into the conscience.
But then this Scripture speaks of Jesus as a Forerunner. He is risen, not only risen from the grave, but He has ascended up where He was before. And in the gospel, God presents to you a glorified Man, a living Man, One who has entered into God’s presence. And He has entered in there at divine invitation: “Sit at my right hand” - God has said - “until I put thine enemies as footstool of thy feet”, Ps 110: 1. Now that tells me that every issue in relation to my sins has been resolved to God’s eternal satisfaction, because the Sin-bearer, who bore them “in his body on the tree”, has been exalted to the place of supremacy and dominance. And from that place of supremacy and dominance, God presents Him in the glad tidings. It is God’s appeal: you may not think much of the preacher - the way he speaks or looks or whatever - but you must remember that behind the preacher of the gospel lies the appeal of God Himself. And He presents a glorified Saviour. And He presents Him as a Man in subsisting righteousness before God. Every question of sin and sins has been resolved. He could never have been exalted to the right hand of God if He was still bearing my sins. And the fact that He is available tells me that every matter related to that has been for ever settled to God’s entire satisfaction.
He has entered in not only in the glory and greatness of His own Person, but He has entered in as a Forerunner: “entering into that within the veil”, Heb 10: 19. Now I think these persons reading this letter would be used to the tabernacle system, the veil, and the holy of holies where nobody went except the high priest, and then not without blood, and there were certain precautions in case anything happened to him. He had bells on his garments so that his sound could be heard, so that they knew as he went into that holy place where the presence of God was that nothing untoward had happened to him. God was dwelling in thick darkness, and these precautions were taken, but no common person could go through the veil. But the veil is where you can go - through the veil - into this place where Jesus is. He has entered in as our Forerunner; He has become the Head of a heavenly company. Persons who have fled for refuge, and have been indwelt by the Spirit of God, have become part of that heavenly company. They do not belong here; they have no place here; they have no place in this world. The Lord Jesus in speaking of them said, “they are not of the world, as I am not of the world”, John 17: 14. And these persons to whom this letter was sent were suffering under the Roman power for their Christianity, some of them even unto death, unto martyrdom: they had no place here, but they had a place there and He has entered in as their Forerunner.
The gospel brings peace to our souls and to our consciences, but it gives us a hope too, a living hope. It is spoken of as a “living hope” (1 Pet 1: 3); it is spoken of as a “blessed hope”, Titus 2: 13. It is centred in a blessed Man, but He is in another world altogether. He has entered there as the Forerunner for myriads; there are going to be myriads like Him, and with Him eternally. He is presented not only as a Refuge but as a Hope; and it says here that we are to “lay hold on the hope set before us”. Lay hold of it tonight if you have not laid hold of it before: it is brought within your reach. Lay hold of it for yourself; do not rely on the fact that you sit in a Christian company, or even that you belong to a Christian family, but make sure that it is your personal hope: lay hold of it. It can be an anchor for your soul. There is not anything else that you can anchor your soul on in this poor world; it is marked by instability and turmoil, people wondering what is going to happen next. Is somebody going to set off a bomb? Are governments going to fall? People do not know what is going to happen next and they are bewildered and frightened.
In the midst of such conditions, you need an anchor for your soul, something you can rely upon without fear and with perfect certainty. When it comes to the salvation of your soul, you cannot rely on ‘perhaps’ and ‘maybe’ and ‘I will hope for the best’: you must be absolutely certain, and God has provided a certainty. In fact, He has taken account of our poor weak hearts, our doubting hearts, and as this Scripture says, He wanted to show to the heirs of the promise “the unchangeableness of his purpose”. He wanted to do that; He wanted to convey to these persons that nothing could alter what God had set His heart upon: He wants you to have that security in your own soul - “both secure and firm”. The anchor is outside of the ship and if it is a good anchorage, the anchor is safe and secure down there on the seabed, and it is firmly secured in the boat. Then the boat is safe. Now the anchor we are speaking of here is not down on the seabed, it is the Forerunner who has entered in for us within the veil. You think of having an anchor in a glorified Man beyond death! Nothing will upset that anchorage, but the question is, is it firm in your own soul? Have you laid hold of it for yourself; are you bound by an indissoluble bond to the Man of God’s choice?
I commend Him to you, dear hearer; He is worthy to be presented in the gospel; He is a mighty Saviour. Myriads have fled for refuge to Him and He is still available. God is appealing in the gospel that you too might run, and run with alacrity. Lay hold of that hope set before you and find the peace and joy in believing.
May God bless the word!
Buckhurst Hill
5th May 2019