Text: Hebrews 13:20–25
Preacher: Pastor Brian Sauvé
Bright Glory, Benedictory Grace
So we arrive at the final installment of our time together in the book of Hebrews. I hope that it has been as edifying to you as it has been to me. This book has put a greater resolve in my to refuse any rival to Christ as King or Prophet or High Priest.
And so it is fitting that this morning, we’d finish our time in this book with both a blessing and a final appeal from the author. Look with me, if you would, at Hebrews 13:20, and we will get the final text of this great book before us, and get to work. This is the Word of the Living God:
“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 his will, working in us that which is pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.
I appeal to you, brothers, bear with my word of exhortation, for I have written to you briefly. You should know that our brother Timothy has been released, with whom I shall see you if he comes soon. Greet all your leaders and all the saints. Those who come from Italy send you greetings. Grace be with all of you.”
-Hebrews 13:20–25
As I said a moment ago, the author ends the book of Hebrews with two things: A benediction and a final appeal. In his benediction, he appeals to God to bless the readers of the letter in a certain way and for a certain end. We’ll consider that portion first. Then, he ends the letter with a final appeal, which we would be wise to obey with joy.
Let’s end our time in this book by looking at both of those parts of his conclusion, starting with the benediction.
A Benediction
A benediction is an invocation of blessing—meaning the author is appealing to God to bestow a certain blessing on the readers of this epistle. Look at verses 20–21 again, and you’ll see what I mean:
“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 his will, working in us that which is pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.”
-Hebrews 13:20–21
One of the most potent tools that we have as we work God’s vineyard—as we work to see his Kingdom come and his will be done on earth as it is in heaven—is the invocation of blessing. Christians are to be a people who bless one another in the name of God and in faith in the promises of God. We are to be fathers and mothers who bless our sons and daughters. We are to be churches full of saints invoking the blessing of God on one another as we gather in the name and for the glory of Christ. This is a potent thing, though only the eyes of faith can see how. See, to the world, a benediction like we just read is nothing more than a jumbling of morphemes and phonemes and syllables and words and sentences. It’s just talk to them. But we understand that there is a God who has said he is listening to us. We have a Father who his given his Son to redeem us and adopt us, and we have heard his promises, haven’t we? We know, as the Lord Jesus taught us, that he doesn’t give stones to his sons when they ask for bread. We know that he is a God who delights to bless his people when they come to him and ask.
Why? Why is the Christian invocation of blessing a potent thing? Because it preaches that we are a people who believe God—that is, it preaches our faith, the thing without which no act or word is pleasing to God—and that we are a people who believe that God is good. We believe he gives good gifts, and that we are not self-reliant, but rather God-dependent.
In that spirit, as those who delight in God’s blessing, let’s unpack this particular benediction. What I want you to see about this benediction is how specific and sharp it is. The author of Hebrews knows exactly what he would want the Lord to give to these people. There are three parts to it that I’d like to look at with you for a moment.
Number one, the author is clear on what he is asking for, and that is essential for us to see, because it tells us what our whole life here in this time is for.
Second, the author is clear on the matter of who he is making this appeal to. Who is doing this blessing? This is important, because our blessing isn’t pagan superstition, where we send certain vibes to the Universe in hopes that we will receive back from the Universe. Hard pass.
Third, he tells us why he is asking that God do this: For glory. All of this saving and blessing and working in us to do what is pleasing to him is done that Christ might have his glory forever and ever. Amen.
1. The What: God’s Will
So first, what blessing is the author of Hebrews invoking? What is his request? It’s clear: He wants the Lord God to equip his people for good works through Christ.
“Now may the God of peace… equip you with everything good that you may do his will, working in us that which is pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.”
-Hebrews 13:20–21 (selections)
The thing he would like to see is that we would be a people who please God. Listen, don’t let anyone peddle you a false gospel of cheap grace that saves you from sin, but then gives you no alternative to that life of sin. That’s not the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. The gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ is the good news that while we were God-hating rebels against the Kingdom of God, he has ransomed us by the blood of Christ, nailed our record of debts to the cross, wholly forgiven us our sin, raised us up from death to be seated in the heavenly places with Christ, and listen—rendered every millisecond of our lives massively meaningful here on earth.
This is good news! Your life isn’t a waste. Because of the grace of the Lord Jesus, you can actually do things that are pleasing to God. You are no longer totally depraved and dead in your sin. No, you are a new creation in Christ, created in him for good works. This is not what I’ve been accused of many times—soft legalism. I am emphatically not saying that you are saved by your good works, but rather to them… and that this is good news!
Your life is not meaningless. The Lord has given you good work to do; in fact, Paul says in Ephesians 2:10 that, “…we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” Our omnipotent, sovereign God intends to use you—yes, tiny, insignificant, sinful, weak you—to actually advance his glorious Kingdom. That is what the author is praying. That is the gift for which he is invoking the blessing of God, that you would be equipped by God for good works.
So when you go to do God’s will, obey Christ, do that which is pleasing in God’s sight—everything listed as the goal of this benediction—who is being called upon to see all of this through? The second part of the benediction tells us. Who is being called on to do all of this in you?
2. The Who: God God himself.
The death-defeating God of peace. The power the author appeals to in order to bring us to fruitful obedience to God is the power of God himself—and that through the Lord Jesus Christ, the great Shepherd of the sheep who laid his life down for his flock.
“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 his will, working in us that which is pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.”
-Hebrews 13:20–21
Don’t miss this or skate past it quickly. Because we have a tendency to overestimate ourselves. We might tend to read this benediction or hear what I just said and think, “Ok, please God. I can do that. Of course I can please God.” Foolishness. Listen: Every single act of any Christian that is pleasing to God is a result of the supernatural work of God. God is the one who prepared the work beforehand. He is the one who raised you from the dead, forgave you, put a new heart in you, put his Spirit in you—and listen—caused you to walk in his ways. That is the New Covenant promise if Jeremiah 31 and Ezekiel 36. It is tremendously good news that the author invokes God’s power to see this blessing through, because that is the only power that can make men do the good will of the Lord our God. That is the only power that can put living sinew and flesh on the desiccated bones of the spiritually dead and make them walk around in newness of life.
Unless you die with Christ and rise with Christ and live with Christ and reign with Christ, you cannot do good, not ultimately. As Paul quotes from the Psalmist and the prophet Isaiah in Romans 3:10–12, “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.”
The moral reformation of a human being is no trifle; it is a serious thing. It is not a matter of rearranging some philosophical concepts, adopting a new political framework, instituting the right educational paradigm. Man’s problem is not merely educational, social, sexual, physical, political, or psychological. Man’s problem is more fundamental than those things; our problems in all of those areas are fruit, not root.
What we need is nothing less than the new birth. What we need is nothing less than to have our hearts of stone—the very center of our desiring and our loves—removed and replaced with a new heart, a heart with renewed and righteous desires. What we need is nothing less than the indwelling of the Holy Spirit of God. See, this is why the gospel is such good news: It doesn’t merely forgive our sin. It doesn’t merely remove the penalty of our sin. It aims to actually reconstitute a new humanity in Christ, through unbreakable union with Christ.
So hear this benediction as just that: A benediction. A blessing. May God indeed work in us that which is pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ our Lord. And may he do it, because no other power will suffice.
3. The Why: God’s Glory
Finally, built into this blessing is the great why behind it all: The author would have God equip you for good works for glory—that Christ would have his glory. He writes,
“Now may the God of peace… equip you with everything good that you may do his will, working in us that which is pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.”
-Hebrews 13:20–21 (selections)
The great why behind all of this blessing—indeed, behind all of God’s activities—is glory. Everything God does is done with the intent of displaying and magnifying his own glory, including his work in your life to raise you from the dead and renovate you in the image of the God-Man, Jesus Christ.
So question: What is glory? We say it a lot in church. We read it often in Scripture. But what actually is glory?
There are many ways we can answer that question, and they aren’t mutually exclusive; they work together to give us a fully orbed picture of what we mean when we say that something is glorious or that we ought to give glory. Glory is renown, we could say. To render glory is to acclaim a thing, to say that it is great and good and worthy and beautiful. Glory is weightiness. The Hebrew word for glory, kabod, comes from the word for “heavy” or “weighty.” A thing is glorious if it has a certain gravity to it, a gravitas.
Glory is brightness and power. The Israelites were led by a cloud of glory in Exodus, and the Temple was covered in a cloud of glory when God came down to it. In Revelation 21, glory is related to brightness and light. John 1:14 teaches us that Jesus himself is the enfleshing, or visible incarnation, of God’s glory—meaning that when you look at Jesus, you are looking at the very glory of God.
We could begin to sum it up by saying something like: Glory is the effulgence, or radiance, of the manifold excellencies of a thing. It is the beauty and goodness and rightness and radiance of something good.
And so in Scripture, different things are said to have a certain glory. The cedars of Lebanon were said to be Lebanon’s glory in Isaiah 60. Paul specifically says that man is the glory of God, and that woman is the glory of man.
You can live for glory, both rightly and wrongly. The heart essence of sin, Paul teaches us in Romans 3, is to fall short of the glory of God, and the Pharisees were rebuked for living for the glory that comes from man and not from God.
The world God made is a glorious thing, full of little glories that all point upwards to the greatest, maximal glory of God himself. God made you and all things for glory—the glory of a creature being a creature, of a created image bearer at peace with God and obeying God through the grace of God. Sin is reaching for glory, but falling short and grabbing onto lesser glories. And what happens is that we corrupt and defile those lesser glorious, making them inglorious. So food, sex, nature, community, family, children, marriage—whatever it is—loses its glory when you make it a god.
All of this comes together here in the benediction of verses 20 and 21, right? The author of Hebrews invokes the power of God to bless the people of God to make them pleasing to God for the glory of the Son of God.
So don’t fall short of the glory and aim for a paltry, lesser glories. The message of this passage, as it invokes the blessing of God to make you pleasing to God, is not that you are reaching too high and need to lower your sights. No, it is that sin rebels against God by preferring things to God that are vile in comparison to him, so lesser are they in glory.
A Final Appeal
That brings us to the final part of the letter, and we’ll end here: He appeals to you to heed his words, so that you don’t fall short of God’s glory in the most fundamental way that you can. Look at verse 22 again,
“I appeal to you, brothers, bear with my word of exhortation, for I have written to you briefly. You should know that our brother Timothy has been released, with whom I shall see you if he comes soon. Greet all your leaders and all the saints. Those who come from Italy send you greetings. Grace be with all of you.”
-Hebrews 13:22–25
The appeal is simply that they would listen to what he has written. The appeal is that they would bear with the exhortation of the epistle. “I appeal to you, brothers, bear with my word of exhortation...”
So it is fitting that we would end our time in this great letter to the Hebrew Christians by remembering that exhortation briefly, that we might bear with it, love it, obey it, and believe it. Let’s remember the three main points as we close:
1. Jesus is better—accept no rival.
Christ is our King; we give no other our ultimate allegiance. Christ is our mediating High Priest; we go to no other intercessor. Christ is the very incarnate speech of God; we reject all self-appointed prophets who would speak for God. Whatever idol would vie for your worship, remember: It is impotent and vain in comparison to Christ, the King. Render your life and worship to God, and God alone.
2. Don’t return to the forerunners.
The Temple and its worship, the priests and their ministry, the prophets and their message, the kings of old and their rule, the sacrifices and their blood, even Moses himself—don’t miss the point of all of these things by failing to see the shadow of Christ in them and worship Christ.
He is the true Temple. He is the High Priest. He is the true Prophet, the very speech of God in flesh. He is the Lamb slain for sin. He is the King immortal. He is the great Lawgiver, the greater Moses. His mountain is Zion, to which Sinai pointed. The Scriptures are about the person, the work, the coming, the sacrifice, the resurrection, the reign, and the bright glory of God in Christ.
3. Get to work.
He is equipping us for the work, and Hebrews has served us as something of a New Testament Deuteronomy. Remember:
Both books taught a generation of Jews immediately following a great salvation of God: Deuteronomy, the generation living after the salvation of the Jews from Egypt in the book of Exodus, Hebrews, to the generation living after the salvation of God’s people from sin in the gospels.
Both Hebrews and Deuteronomy serve as key instruction to that people at this pivotal moment in their history. They’re moving from one controlling paradigm to another. For the Jews, the old paradigm was slavery in Egypt. For the Christians, that old paradigm was the Old Covenant economy and slavery to sin.
For the Jews receiving Deuteronomy, their instruction was how to conquer and dwell in the land that God was bringing them to after 40 years of wandering in the wilderness because of unbelief.
For the Church of Christ receiving Hebrews, that instruction was how to evangelize the nations and live in the new global Canaan, the global Kingdom of God after coming out of the 40 years of wilderness between Jesus’ resurrection and the utter destruction of Old Covenant worship with the fall of the Temple.
The 40-year period was also a time marked by unbelief and death, this time the unbelief and death of the majority of Israel, who rejected their Messiah; as Jesus’ prophesied, the way was narrow and few found it.
And so the great aim of the book of Hebrews is to prepare a church on the brink of invading the world with the gospel to complete that work and live with God in this new global Kingdom.
Here’s the point for us as we heed the instruction of the book in closing: May we faithfully preach the gospel of God’s Kingdom to the people of Utah, bring them through the waters of baptism in the name of our Triune God, and teach them to obey all that Christ commanded.