Pay Attention or Drift Away

Jesus, in chapter one, we find Him to be the perfect representative of God since He is God. And He has taught us about God in no uncertain terms. His divine character gives final authority to the message that He has delivered to us. His divine character gives final authority, finality to the message that He has delivered to us. That is what Hebrews chapter one explains.

Now, we come to chapter two, and we find in these verses, verses one to four, a bit of a turning point and an application. We see in these verses the implication of what it means for us to be hearers of the message that Jesus has delivered to us. The book of Hebrews, you may know, is famous for having a style similar to a sermon more so than a letter. It's almost as if it's a written down sermon from someone. And like a great sermon, it has application points in it.

My lecturer, my professor on preaching, on homiletics, Murray Kaple, would have loved this manuscript because it has application woven all throughout it. He hated bolt-on applications at the end. Explain why, at why we need to understand this and what we must do in response to it, he would always say. And so, we have all this sort of stylistic evidence to support that Hebrews was this sort of written down sermon. And here, we find his first application point in his sermon, in chapter two, verses one to four.

And it seeks to apply all those deep theological truths contained in chapter one. And it makes this one application point: Pay extreme attention to the clearly expressed news of God's salvation, otherwise you will drift irreversibly towards destruction. That is the point. Pay attention to what Jesus has told us.

Let's have a look at how these four verses unpack this application a bit more. The first point that the writer of Hebrews makes is this: drifting away happens when we don't fix our attention to the gospel. Verse one begins, therefore, we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it. The connective word there, we find at the beginning of our sentence, therefore, indicates that there is a logical imperative that has flown out from what has been discussed previously in chapter one. In other words, he says, because Jesus is the Son of God and because He has supremely revealed God to us, make sure you pay attention to what He said.

We are told to pay much closer attention to what we have heard. Now, Hebrew scholar William Lane suggests that the Greek wording here is actually a superlative usage, not a comparative one. Even though in Greek it is a comparison, you can translate it literally as closer. He says, we should probably, with its usage, understand it to be pay closest attention because of what Jesus has shown Himself to be supremely. At several important parts in the book of Hebrews, we find similar application points written down in this sermon style.

Take for example, chapter three, verse six and verse fourteen in chapter three, and in chapter ten, verse twenty-three, the verb to hold fast. Famously, Hebrews 10:23, let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful. This superlative pay closest attention to the message fits within that holding fast. Hold fast to the message of Jesus. Fix your thoughts, your mind, your lives on the gospel.

There appears to have been a danger, therefore, to the congregation to which the sermon went to of them not holding fast to the gospel, of them leaving their faith. They were a community who seemingly started to grow lax in their commitment to Christ. And here, the book of Hebrews is trying to remind them not to give up. Drifting is the word that is used here. Don't drift away from the message. So what the Bible is highlighting here is that horrible reality that a person's grasp of the gospel is often choked out rather than killed off quickly.

Have a think about the metaphor of drifting. Drifting is slow, steady, quiet, unassuming. It carries a low profile. A few years ago, me and a few friends of mine, we were in our mid-twenties, we decided to go and hire a houseboat down south somewhere in the canals down there. And we loved the idea of being very independent as these twenty-year-olds.

And we had a great time, you know, on the diesel engine up and down the canals. One night, we decided to drop anchor and to set up for the evening, start making some dinner and hang out. When we woke up the following morning, we were presented with a harsh, harsh reality that we were not expert sailors. Because we discovered that our anchor hadn't gripped, and we had drifted over that night much farther from our original spot and wound up high and dry on a sandbank. We had to wait an embarrassingly long time for the tide to come back up before we were able to sheepishly move off that sandbank.

That is the image of drifting. People don't lose their faith by investing in the gospel. People don't lose their faith by spending too much time in church. People don't lose their faith by hearing the word of God preached too much. People lose their faith by the slow, quiet, unassuming drift that happens when we think we know the message.

We've heard it before, we think. Me and Jesus, we're good. We're buddies. He gets me and I get Him. But the Bible is telling us of all the things that you can pay attention to, and there are many things, even good things.

Of all the things you could be paying attention to in your life, you need to be paying the closest attention to the gospel you have heard from Jesus about Jesus. Because if you don't, you drift. You drift. If you don't pay closest attention by setting up habits for church, public worship on a Sunday, study, fellowship with Christians, worship, you assume that because I consider myself a Christian now, that I'll be a Christian in the future. Watch out.

You may already be drifting. Drifting away happens when we don't fix our attention on the gospel. Now, you might ask what's so bad about drifting really? I mean, if you just wind up on a sandbank, no harm, no foul. Well, the author of Hebrews has a few more serious things to say about the consequences, and that is our second point.

Judgement is the result of this neglect. Verses two and three give us really the main application point summed up. Verse two: for since the message declared by angels proved to be reliable, and every transgression or disobedience received a just retribution, how shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation? Having just mentioned that Jesus was superior to even the angels, that He is the most perfect messenger of God's word, the author returns back to the angels by stating that they were still message bearers that gave good news to God's people. They gave important revelation about God to us.

In the Old Testament, there are hints in various places like Deuteronomy 33:2 and Psalm 68:17 that God delivered the law of Moses and Israel. God delivered to Moses and Israel the law alongside these heavenly messengers, these angels. We don't get that bit of detail in the narrative that we just read in Exodus 20 of God saying to Israel, here are the ten commandments. We're not told there that these angels were there, but we do see that glory, that thick cloud of darkness that surrounded God. We can feel that there was a holiness, a presence there.

And so you can probably understand that God was there surrounded by His heavenly host as part of the glory represented there. And that's what is being referred to here as the message. Not so much messages about God, but specifically, the law of God given to us by these mediators, these intermediaries, the angels. Angels were involved somehow in the delivery of the law to Moses. That is why the language here is so judicial.

The word reliable in that verse means that it was legally valid. It was a valid message. We are told that every transgression or disobedience against that message received what? Just retribution. Those are all legal and punitive words.

They concern God's law and His punishment for lawbreakers. But here's the point that is being made. If the people in the Old Testament received fair punishment for rejecting the message they received, what happens to us who have received a more comprehensive and clear message through Jesus Christ? What happens to us if we forget that? If we neglect that?

The word neglect here, for me, sounds, you know, if you can forget it. But it carries with it more a determined ignoring of it. You ignore the gospel. You don't forget it. Again, William Lane sums up that question, what happens to us, really poignantly.

He says, if disregard for the Mosaic law was appropriately punished, unconcerned for the gospel must inevitably be catastrophic. If you drift from the message by not paying closest attention to it, what happens? Something disastrous. You receive hell. That's the judgement being talked about here.

And so the rhetorical question, how shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation? has only one answer: you don't. You don't escape. Whilst drifting seems innocuous, innocent, and unoffensive, the final consequence is anything but. So I wanna tell you, friend, if you are here and you've heard the gospel so many times, I would rather you pay closer attention to the gospel, digging into it, and being frustrated by it, and then come and yell at me about those frustrations than for you to sit here with a polite smile on your face and think, wow, KJ really believes all of these nice things.

We are being told to go and do the work, to pay attention to God's word, to dig it up, to write down all of our questions, to vent all of our frustrations, and then give God the chance to convince you of His truth. Politeness will not get you into heaven. Judgement is the result of our neglect of the gospel. And so we were told at the beginning this morning that in the great sermon in the book of Hebrews, the first application point that he makes is to pay supreme attention to the clearly expressed news of God's salvation. Otherwise, you drift irreversibly towards destruction.

Now, what hope do we have in putting our trust in that message? How can we trust that the message is true? If my eternal life is truly at stake, how can I be sure that I am staking my flag in the right soil, on the right hill? Well, we are told the many great reasons to pay supreme attention. Point three: the reasons to pay attention is that Jesus declared it, the apostles recorded it and God confirmed it.

Verse four, really, is just another summary of what chapter one has started to say. We can trust the news of God's salvation through Jesus, because Jesus Christ Himself was the God and the author of that salvation. He not only spoke about that salvation, He brought it. He delivered it in His body on the cross. He verified it through His eternal resurrection from the dead.

He showed us that He had broken the curse of sin and death. And the author is enormously interested, subsequent to that revelation, in the preaching of that message. He writes a sermon about the tradition of preaching the gospel. He's aware at this point that there has been some time that has passed since Jesus came and did that and ascended. There's been maybe perhaps thirty years since that time.

I'm only thirty-seven. That's almost my entire life. That's a long time. And at this point, people have started moving away from that message. The second and perhaps third generation are starting to think, well, can we trust their memories of thirty years ago?

But this is one of the reasons, perhaps, why we can say that Paul was probably not the author of this book. Because whilst Paul had a personal experience of the resurrected Jesus on the road to Damascus, our author speaks of having himself received the message from the apostles. Have a look. He says, it was attested to us by those who heard.

He includes himself in the same category as his listeners. They have simply received the news from the apostles, and they've been asked to believe it. But then he argues that there's every reason to have complete trust in the gospel message because of the inherent integrity of that apostolic tradition. Listen to the logic of how the gospel has come to us from verse three, part B, the second half of verse three. It was declared at first by the Lord, and it was attested to us by those who heard it.

Whilst God also bore witness by signs and wonders and various miracles, and by gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to His will. Four witnesses. Four attestations of the truth of the gospel. And so you trace it all the way back and you say the foundation of the Christian faith is surely the ministry of Jesus Christ Himself. Christianity is not based on what Paul said.

It is based on what Jesus said and what He did. The message of God's salvation doesn't start with what the apostles said. The message of salvation starts with Jesus. It is the word that He proclaimed. That is not simply the information that He shared concerning salvation, not just the top ten tips for eternal life.

Jesus embodied the word. He accomplished the gospel. The Son is the eschatological event inaugurating the message. He spoke the gospel that everyone subsequently only pointed back to. From Jesus, the author says, came those who attested to us what they have heard from Him.

These are the apostles. It's your Paul, it's your Peter, it's your John. They took the message that Jesus shared, they wrote it down in the gospel accounts. They proclaimed it verbally, and then they explained it in the rest of the New Testament, the reasoning and the logic behind who Jesus was and what He did. And then, it moves to the weight of that testimony, and we see that God powerfully and supernaturally attested to that preaching with signs and wonders and various miracles.

Here's a great lesson for us in thinking about miracles today. A miracle is something that doesn't happen simply because God wants to heal someone. It's given to point to the authority of the gospel and to cause that person and everyone around them to do what? Repent and believe that Jesus Christ is Lord. That is the purpose of a miracle.

Those miracles attested to the truth of what they were saying. It grabbed people's attention and it verified the claims of the gospel. And then finally, in the establishment of the church through the ministry of those apostles, God pours out His Holy Spirit to the early Christians to give the fledgling church gifts that will keep them healthy and functioning and cause them to be the repository of the gospel message. It protects them. It causes them to be edified and strong and built up so that they can pass this message to the next generation, to the next generation, to the next generation, to a church who had been warned about falling away, these words carried supreme weight.

Remember the gift of the Holy Spirit that is among you. Remember the words that you have received from Paul and Peter and John that I heard with you. And remember how it points back to what Jesus has done for us. And so we see this tight logical framework given to us about why we can trust the gospel message because Jesus first announced it as the supreme Son of God, the perfect revealer of God. His word and His deed saved us.

Then the apostles heard and saw all that He did, and they went out and proclaimed this amazing news. They wrote it down so that we eventually would hear it ourselves. And now, because the church has been protected by the Holy Spirit through those various gifts, we have the glorious news of our salvation this morning preached to us again. Imagine that. The same message in Australia, two thousand years later, on the other side of the world.

That is the Holy Spirit. My question as we finish this morning is the same question as the author's. Will you pay attention to this news? And if you say, of course, yes, let me ask you, what does it look like for you to pay the closest attention to this message? What does it look like to pay the closest attention to the gospel?

I can suggest a few things. It means you build your life around that message. It means you value God's church because that is where the life-giving message is contained and promoted. It is a logical impossibility to be a Christian without a church. And it's an impossibility to be a Christian who never desires to attend Sunday worship to hear that same old message.

A Christian who never reads or studies their Bibles themselves or with others. Friends, these aren't signs of freedoms in Christ. They are signs that you are distracted and not paying attention. And it is possible that these are the signs of you drifting away. Now, I realise that I'm speaking to the ones that have come this morning to hear the gospel, but we know people in our church connected with our church that we haven't seen in years.

They are drifting and we have the message that they need to hear. And I can preach it here this morning to you, but I need your help. I need your help to bring them to hear it again. I need you to go and bring that message to them, to remind them not to drift away, to remind them to pay the closest attention to it because they have become distracted by all the other messages. So we have sons and daughters, wives and husbands, family members and friends who need to have that conversation around the gospel again, to urge them to pay attention again.

Now, a lot more could be said about whether it's even possible for a true child to actually drift away. But that's not what the passage here is trying to debate. This passage isn't talking about the perseverance of God's saints. It's telling you and me to prove to ourselves that you are a saint by not drifting away. As a bunch of twenty-year-olds with no idea, on a houseboat all that time ago, what we should have done was to have dropped our anchor deep.

We should have made sure that it dug into the thick, rich, heavy mud that wouldn't have allowed us to have moved. Today, you and I are being reminded to dig in, to drop our anchor deep, to not plop it on the soft sandy soil, to make the gospel a habit for our life because if you don't, you won't end up on a sandbank. You'll end up dashed against the rocks of God's judgement. And friend, I don't want that for you. I don't want that for your family member or your friend.

More importantly, this morning, from God's word, He's telling us, He doesn't want that for you and for them. Let us pay closest attention to the message we have heard from the Son of God, Jesus Christ Himself, lest we drift away from it. Let's pray. Lord, you see our need. And God, there is just so many distractions in our lives.

And sometimes, Lord, we wilfully get distracted. We know that we shouldn't and yet we allow ourselves to be. Sometimes, Lord, we get distracted from very significant things in our lives, things that hurt, things that disrupt, things that inevitably grab our attention. Oh God, we ask that you will bring us back very quickly from those things. Lord, if we realise, any one of us, that we have become distracted, if we toss-up our worship of you, our knowledge of the message, our desire for your church and we make it a fifty-fifty strike rate of whether we care or we don't.

What help us to realise that we are in a perilous situation. Discipline us, discipline our hearts and our minds to cause us to be committed to those things so that we may pay attention to them. Thank you, Lord Jesus, that you delivered this message, that you sent your servants to go and spread it and then you, through the power of the Holy Spirit, confirmed those things amongst them and now ultimately to us. We ask, Lord, that we will see your hand in those things, that we will trust that it has been your hand and that we will believe that what we have heard again this morning is your word and your warning and your encouragement to us. In Jesus name, we pray. Amen.