Have you ever wondered how many guarantees we are offered in a week or even a day? Lifetime guarantees, free guarantees, absolute guarantees, low-price guarantees, guaranteed money-making ventures, guaranteed money back, guaranteed satisfaction, guaranteed fun. We are drowning in guarantees. Everybody is willing to give us a guarantee, and most of them are worthless.
We have all experienced enough dubious guarantees or enough fine print to doubt most of what is promised to us. There are, after all, lots of ways to wiggle out of a guarantee, especially when it comes with lots of conditions. Is it any surprise that we end up being cynical about guarantees?
Chapter 7 of Hebrews talks about the guarantee God has given to us. What is it that we are guaranteed? In broad terms, it is the promise that Jesus makes it possible for us to enter into the presence of God with confidence. This is the promise that Jesus is and always will be the mediator who stands before God for us, on our behalf.
A few weeks ago, we spoke of the idea that Jesus is our mediator before the Father. We mentioned two vital qualities of mediators: first that they should fully understand and empathize with those they are representing and second that they should be acceptable to the one they are addressing. The beginning of the letter to the Hebrews makes it very clear that Jesus fully meets both requirements.
And that brings us directly to an absolutely central point. The promise that God has given to us in Jesus Christ as our mediator is not primarily about something that will happen in the future. It is not a guarantee that we might need to use if things don’t work out the way we want. Rather, it is a promise of what is available to us right now. It is a guarantee that should we choose to turn to God, to seek him out, he is ready and willing to listen to us and to engage with us and to help us make sense out of life. It doesn’t mean that life will always feel great. Nor does it mean that everything will work out exactly the way we expect. But it does mean that we don’t need to wander around wondering where we should go, or what will give us ultimate meaning in life. This is no small guarantee.
Hebrews 7:22 tells us that God is giving us a New Covenant. The language of the covenant would be familiar to the people of Israel. From the time they were infants they had been told and reminded repeatedly that God had made a covenant with them. The idea of the covenant carried with it the whole history of God and his engagement with his people. They knew that God had kept his covenant, had kept his promises. Indeed, their hope for their future was rooted in God and his faithfulness to his covenant, his promises to them. Through thick and thin, good times and bad, at the center of it all is the faithfulness of God in keeping his word.
Yet the other side of the covenant is the fact that because the people rebelled against God and ignored him, they had not yet entered the fullness of life God had for them. There were still barriers between them and God, particularly the barrier of sin—their rejection and denial of God. There was also some frustration with the covenant; not because God wasn’t faithful but because a lot of what God had promised remained a future reality. In particular, the promise of God’s presence with the people and their confidence in always turning to him was not yet fulfilled.
The reference to a New Covenant becomes a major theme in Hebrews 8, when the author quotes a promise from the Book of Jeremiah about his New Covenant. At the heart of this New Covenant is the same promise as the Old Covenant—you will be my people and I will be your God. But there are two significant differences: first there is the sense that in Jesus Christ the future has already arrived, and second in Jesus Christ the barriers that separated the people from God have been surmounted.
As a result, the New Covenant carries with it the confidence of a new and personal relationship with God. If we flip ahead to Hebrews 8:10, we read a passage from Jeremiah: “I will put my laws in their minds and write them on their hearts, and I will be their God and they shall be my people.” Hebrews 8:11-12 adds: “They shall all know me from the least of them to the greatest for I will be merciful toward their iniquities and I will remember their sins no more.”
At the heart of this New Covenant is that God has a new way of engaging with his people, in part because he has dealt with the problem of sin. In the past the law served as a marker to God’s plans and purposes, but the law did not deal with the fallout of human rebellion against God. It is not that the law failed but that the law could not account for sin. All it did was expose a problem. Now we have a new hope and a new confidence that these barriers have been dealt with and that nothing stands in the way of our entering God’s presence right now.
So the million-dollar question is this: What’s this guarantee worth?
How can we trust this guarantee when so many guarantees are not worth the paper they are printed on? The author of Hebrews knows that this question is on the minds of his readers. It is not so much because we expect God to disappoint us but because when times are tough we naturally begin to doubt and we find it hard to trust. He knows that, like most people in a difficult place, his readers aren’t thinking particularly clearly—instead they are feeling overwhelmed, and that feeling is causing them to lose sight of reality. They are feeling scared, alone, and are beginning to doubt their decision to follow Jesus. It would be similar to what many people feel in the current economic situation or what others felt during the COVID pandemic. In the face of bad news or difficult situations, we start to fear and we start to doubt. We need our confidence shored up if we are to remain grounded. With these concerns in mind, Hebrews lays out the points of reference or confidence in God’s guarantee to us.
The Lord has made an oath to us (Heb. 7:20). This echoes what was said in Hebrews 6:17: “In the same way, when God desired to show even more clearly to the heirs of the promise the unchangeable character of his purpose, he guaranteed it by an oath.” We all know what it means to make or swear an oath. Here we are being told that God himself has made an oath to us.
God will not change his mind (Heb. 7:21). That is in case we begin to say, “Sure, God said he will do that, but you never know, God might change his mind. This also has an echo in Hebrews 6:18, when it speaks of the oath as unchangeable: “so that through two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible that God would prove false.” The two unchangeable things are God and his oath. It is impossible to imagine that God should fail to keep his promises.
Finally, we come to the climax in Hebrews 7:22 when we are told that Jesus is the guarantee or guarantor of this covenant.
What gives us ultimate confidence in any guarantee is the person who stands behind it. If we don’t trust the person offering us a guarantee then the guarantee is worthless. If, however, we have a fair degree of confidence in the person offering us the guarantee, then we will have the same degree of confidence that the guarantee will be kept. There remains the possibility that something might happen to the person who has given us the guarantee—except in this case. In this case, our guarantee is unshakeable, immoveable, absolutely certain, because it is grounded in the indestructible life of Jesus, who is our mediator.
Jesus holds his priesthood forever because he continues forever (Heb. 7:24). Jesus our mediator is both the content of the promise and the guarantee of the promise. We don’t need to talk to associates or representatives or middlemen. We go directly to the top. And this brings us back to the central theme of Hebrews: To say that Jesus is our mediator means that Jesus is the one who will make sure that we get to where we need to be.
And here we come back to the idea that this guarantee is not something we might turn to in case we need it: it is not a guarantee just in case. Rather, this is the revelation of what is available to us right now. “He is able for all time to save those who approach God through him” (Heb. 7:25). The promise of salvation is not primarily a promise that we go to heaven when we die. No, it is focused on life right now. After all, when you are writing to people who are in desperate situations, it is not all that helpful to say, “One day it will be OK.”
The assumption of Hebrews is that to make sense of life, to figure out which way is up, to make it through the dark and difficult times, we need to go right to the source, right to the top. The hope and promise given to us in Jesus Christ means that we no longer need to struggle along in the dark on our own. We no longer need to live with confusion and uncertainty. Rather, we may enter right into the presence of the One who holds life itself in his hand—the One who made all things, sustains all things, and in whom all things hold together.
The Rev. Dr. Peter Robinson is Professor of Proclamation, Worship and Ministry at Wycliffe College at the University of Toronto.
