Coromandel Baptist Church

Sunday 12 October 2008 Hebrews 13:1-14

Outside the Camp

In the closing section of Hebrews 12, the writer has brought to a head many of the themes of the entire letter. In particular, he has reiterated the fact that there are two different communities (of belief and unbelief with respect to the person and work of Christ), which operate within two different modes of worship and that these are aligned with two different covenants. Christians have come (spiritually) to Mt. Zion. This represents the living, worshipping, new covenant community, gathered to God the Father through the Son. This community has no geographical centre (in contrast to the worship of the Mosaic covenant, centred on Jerusalem), and its life and worship is related to the unseen realities of faith. By contrast, the life of the other community is focused on things that are seen and touched: on the earthly city rather than the heavenly. The earthly city offers security, continuity and abundant provision.

The issue for New Testament believers (as is the case for first generation converts everywhere) is one of identity. What relationship do I (as a Christian) now have to my family’s religious and cultural inheritance? What does my new status (as a child of God the Father, creator of heaven and earth) mean for my relationship to other powers and authorities (such as the king or other rulers)? Whose law am I now under? Do I live under the law of my religious-cultural heritage (e.g. Judaism)? How do I relate to the laws of the governing authorities who may be utterly pagan in their outlook? To whom am I responsible? And who cares for and watches over our community of faith? We do not share in the life of the great worship centers and their power structures so where is our refuge and hiding place in time of trouble? How are we to relate to one another within our own, believing community? These questions and others like them lie beneath much of New Testament teaching.

Questions such as these are all evident in Hebrews, not least in the closing chapters. Throughout the letter the implicit assumption has been that there are two communities in existence, and that now, the believing community of faith is suffering at the hands of the unbelieving community. The community of faith is to be marked by love (13:1)—which in reality governs all the exhortations that follow; hospitality (13:2), which in the New Testament context particularly refers to hospitality to other believers and travelling servants of the Lord; true fellowship, extending even to those imprisoned for the faith and which risks the calumny of the wider world by standing with them (13:3); fidelity and purity in marriage (13:4); contentment instead of greed (13:5-6); and imitative, teachable faith (13:7). The Lord’s people are not be carried away by strange teachings (13:9) and they need to recognize that they stand in a different relationship to the surrounding community: they live outside the camp/city, rather than in it (13:10-14).

Being ‘outside’ the camp (13:11-13) is parallel to seeking an eternal city rather than a temporal one (13:14). The first concept (being ‘outside the camp’) takes its meaning from the nature of the sin offerings in the Old Testament. While portions of the sacrificial victims were consumed by the worshippers and/or priests at various times (e.g. Ex. 12:28f.; Lev. 19:5f.; Lev. 22:29f.), the skin, offal and other parts were consumed by fire outside the camp of Israel, where also the ashes of the sacrifices offered on the bronze altar were taken (e.g. Lev. 6:10-11). On other occasions (e.g. on the Day of Atonement, or in some other sin offerings) the whole animal was burned outside the camp (see Leviticus 4:21), with only the blood being used inside the Tabernacle. The place ‘outside the camp’ was unclean and unholy. The remnants of the sin offerings (and any trace of the sin which had been placed upon them in the laying on of hands) were not to pollute the camp.

Here, in a reversal of that pattern, the writer boldly indicates that we now live outside the camp, where Jesus went as our sin bearer. We share his reproach (cf. Matt. 5:11; Luke 6:22; 21:16-19; John 15:18-21; 1 Cor. 4:10-13; 1 Pet. 4:14-16; I John 3:13; etc.). He came into his own city, weeping over it, only to be rejected by it (Luke 13:33-35; 19:41-42). His sacrifice was the fulfillment of all the Tabernacle/Temple sacrifices, so that by offering himself once and for all they were rendered null and void. To reject his sacrifice in favor of the (now outmoded) Mosaic sacrifices was to render the camp unclean. The holy and clean place is now ‘outside the camp’. The fact that Jesus was forsaken there is the guarantee that his people, made holy by his sacrifice, will never be forsaken.

Parallel to this way of speaking is the language of the city. Hebrews 13:14 echoes other places (such as Heb. 11:9-16; 12:22) in which the eternal yet unseen city of God is contrasted with visible and therefore temporal city of man. The theme of the two cities is a deeply important one in the Scriptures. On the one hand we find the glorious city of God (beginning with Eden, the Garden-City) which is represented by Jerusalem (at its best) and Mt Zion (in the spiritual sense of the term), which is the resting place/dwelling place/city of God known by faith and entered by grace. The earthly (unbelieving) city begins with Cain and its history can be traced via the tower of Babel all the way through Jerusalem (at its worst e.g. Jer. 23:14; Ezk. 16:46-52; Rev. 11:8) to the spiritual Bablyon in the book of the Revelation. Biblically speaking, there is an unbreakable connection between the concepts of the city and worship in the scriptures (true city and true worship cf. false city and false worship) and so also here in Hebrews. The people of God look for the true city and have their worship centred on an altar outside the camp/city of the world. This altar is none other than Christ himself (cf. John 6:35, 53), and in feeding on him we find our hearts strengthened by grace. The false city, like Esau, is concerned with physical food or drink, representing either the comforts of this life and/or the ritual dietary laws that marked the old separation between Jew and Gentile under the Mosaic covenant. Significantly, both the cities live by consuming. The city of man lives by greedy consumption (in the sense of self-centred, self-advancing, self-serving life cf. 2 Tim. 3:1-5), but the city of God lives by the consumption of grace (i.e. by ‘eating’ the utterly unselfish loving grace of God who has poured himself out for us). We feed on God, and in so doing, have sustaining grace for one another.