Our Small Town Summits theme for 2024 is “Our Extraordinary Christ.” All six Summits in the New England states will include expositions from Hebrews as we see together that the supremacy of Christ is rocket fuel for a joyfully tenacious life and ministry. In light of this theme and goal, our Small Town Summits Articles for 2024 will highlight one chapter of Hebrews each month.
When you and I want to illustrate truth, we reach for stories or some object or process from God’s created order in order to paint a fuller picture. Propositional truths draw the lines. Illustrations bring the color. Our Lord Jesus did this, illustrating our dependence on him and the necessity of our union with him through a vine and branches.
God’s illustration of truth is different than ours in that we can only draw on realities he’s created, but he creates to illustrate. Jesus was the Bread of Life before God ever made bread to point to him. Our union with Christ was in the mind of God before he ever created vines and branches.
In the same way, there were heavenly realities in the mind of God before he ever established the Mosaic Law and the Levitical priesthood, prescribed its rituals, or gave instructions for the tabernacle that was the portable sanctuary where God would dwell with His people.
Because the tabernacle was to illustrate the gospel of Christ and heavenly realities in dramatic fashion, God repeatedly commanded Israel to build it exactly according to the blueprints he gave to Moses (Exodus 26:30). He could not be worshiped or approached any way they wanted. The sections of the tabernacle communicated God’s holiness, their sinfulness, and his plan and intention to redeem them and bring them again into his presence by the blood of a spotless Lamb.
Like the writer of Hebrews, we won’t speak in detail of these things here (though we recently did in April of this year in our church’s study of Exodus if you want a deeper dive).
What the writer of Hebrews could speak of concerning the tabernacle was that it was pictorial, and that the courts of the tabernacle themselves represented ages. Under the Mosaic covenant, which correlated to “the age then present” (v. 9), God prescribed rituals and sacrifices that could not perfect the consciences of the worshiper. No matter how many offerings they brought to God, no matter how many purification rituals they underwent for cleansing, the people remained outside the holy places in their sin. The ongoing need for blood sacrifices reminded the people of their sin and their need for a better sacrifice (Hebrews 10:3–4).
Even the earthly tabernacle was purified and anointed, set apart as holy to the Lord, with the blood of the covenant. God was giving Israel pictures and shadows that were important for them to honor because Christ was the substance they pointed to. It was Jesus who would usher in the time of reformation (v. 10) and is himself the High Priest of the new and better covenant.
Reformation and Eternal Redemption
Hebrews 9:11–12 says that Christ took his own blood into the heavenly realities that the tabernacle pointed to, and there in the presence of God he secured eternal redemption for his people. The Father accepted the sacrifice of the perfect righteousness of Christ in the place of sinners, and his blood purifies his people in ways that the blood of bulls and goats never could.
His blood purifies our consciences from dead works to serve the living God (v. 14). The ongoing mediatorial work of Christ rests on the sufficiency and efficacy of his sacrifice. He applies the benefits of his accomplished work for us before God in his intercessory ministry, not offering himself repeatedly, but interceding for us on the basis of his once-and-for-all sacrifice (Hebrews 7:25; Romans 8:34).
The testimony of God’s Spirit, brothers and sisters, is that Christ has “put away your sin” by his blood and he has cleansed your conscience, forever (v. 14, 26). You will never be more righteous in the sight of God than you are right now, because Christ is your righteousness (Romans 3:21-22).
He is mediating for you so that you receive as a gift the eternal inheritance promised to Abraham—the city that has foundations, whose maker and builder is God (Hebrews 11:10). The promise of life with God in the New Creation was to Abraham and to his offspring, which you have now become in union with Christ by grace through a faith like Abraham’s.
The tabernacle was full of imagery that echoed Eden and pointed ahead to the New Creation. Christ’s final sacrifice that the sacrifices of the tabernacle pictured in miniature secured forever for God’s people life in his presence. His blood has brought us near to God now and has bought for us his nearness forever (Ephesians 2:13; Revelation 21:3).
How Then Should we Live and Worship in our Small Places?
What’s the end of Christ’s redemption of his people, now and forever? There are endless ways of applying Christ’s redemption. Let’s focus on one way that Hebrews 9 points us to.
Taking v. 14 and v. 28 together, the writer of Hebrews says that Jesus offered himself without blemish to purify our consciences in order that we would serving the living God while we eagerly await Christ’s return and the completion of our salvation in Him.
In his insightful and practically helpful book Eternity Changes Everything, Stephen Witmer illustrates on every page that when we have our eyes fixed on Jesus and the New Creation that he’s secured for us, it changes everything about how we live and labor for him in this life.
We ought to long for that day and being home with Christ with eagerness while laboring faithfully here with patience.
Eager Hope
Have you noticed that when people ministering in small towns get together, there’s a good bit of commiseration on how hard our ministry is? There is real encouragement found in knowing we’re not alone in our difficult circumstances (1 Peter 5:9), but there’s also real encouragement to be found in leaning the weight of the coming glory of Christ against our difficult circumstances. We should aim to encourage each other, not just by the knowledge of our shared trials, but also by our mutual hope in the midst of the shared trials.
Merely waiting on the Lord might be marked only by longing to escape the difficulty of small-town ministry. The groaning and longing for our redemption is real, after all (Romans 8:23). But eagerly waiting for him implies a hopefulness that should flavor all of our obedient service until he comes.
If you’re a small-town pastor, have you considered how the smallness of your ministry and the size of your church might have actually saved you from hoping in your ministry in ways you might be tempted to if your church was larger? Instead of hoping in our ministry or looking to our ministry for affirmation, our ministry’s lack of impressiveness points away from itself to Christ as the source of our sufficiency and hope.
Instead of languishing in our ministry because we feel it’s insignificant, we ought to be grateful for the ways it points us to Christ’s worth and let eager hope in him mark our faithful endurance and obedience.
We must remember that we’re invited and enabled to serve the living God by the redemption of Christ, but before he purchased us for himself we were unable to serve him. Ministering in Christ’s name as his royal priests is a blood-bought privilege.
When Christ returns, will he find our talent buried in a hole of excuses covered over with the soil of self-pity, or will he find us laboring in faith, resting in his eternal redemption and doing all that he commanded us, no matter how small the task, as an expression of our eagerness for his return?
Patient Labor
Knowing that Jesus has gone to prepare a place us, that our redemption is secure, and that he’s coming again to receive us to himself so we might live with him in his glory forever frees us from having to have that glory now. Instead of having to seek paradise and glory in our ministries, we can wait for the fullness of his salvation and the glory to come with patience (Romans 8:25).
In his description of those that will be saved by Christ on the last day, the Apostle Paul says that those who are truly of faith seek glory and honor and immortality “by patience in well-doing” (Romans 2:7). Believers seek glory and honor, but by the grace of God’s revelation, we now know where it comes from, when it’s coming, and how to seek it. We are freed from vain glory and self-seeking so that we might serve the living God who enables us to walk in the good works he’s prepared for us with patience.
Your small-place ministry can serve you here, believer. Pastoring a small church in a small town cultivates “patience in well-doing” in unique ways, and in this way, our small ministries can serve our sanctification and our joy in Christ on that day. God is using your ministry to complete the work he’s started in the lives of the people you’re ministering to, but he’s also using it to complete the work he’s started in you, and he will until the day of Christ Jesus (Phil. 1:6).
Until that day, may he find us resting in the sufficiency of our great High Priest, serving him with patient labor in our small places as we look to him with an eager hope.