Let’s take our Bibles together and turn to the Book of Hebrews. Our passage today is Hebrews 6:13-20. We are continuing our series today, “Christ Supreme in All Things.” And the title of today’s message is “The Anchor of Our Souls.” 

You know when people share the gospel with others, I think there is sometimes a mistake that is made that you might call a “soft prosperity gospel presentation.” It’s not a full-blown prosperity gospel, where you tell people, “Come to Jesus and get a Cadillac” or something crass like that. It’s more subtle. It’s the idea that if you come to Jesus, your life will be more comfortable. Or if you come to Jesus, things will get better for you. Or if you come to Jesus, life will be less challenging. Or if you come to Jesus, all your wildest dreams will come true. 

The problem with that gospel presentation is that oftentimes life gets harder when you come to Christ. Sometimes your Christian faith causes problems in your family. Jesus alluded to that (Matt 10:34-37). Sometimes your new faith causes problems at work. It can cause problems in your peer groups. And it puts a target on your back in the spiritual world. That’s not exactly the fulfillment of “Come to Jesus and all your wildest dreams will come true.” 

I remember hearing the evangelist Ray Comfort talk about this once. And he described coming to Christ like putting a parachute on in a plane. If you try to convince another person to put a parachute on in a plane, because it’ll make their lives more comfortable and enjoyable, then they might do it for a while. They might try it out, so to speak. But let’s face it, having a parachute on in a plane is uncomfortable. And the other passengers are going to mock you for wearing that thing. They’re going to accuse you of being an alarmist. And eventually that person will take the parachute off and call you a liar because it didn’t work, and it didn’t make them more comfortable. But if you told that person instead that this plane is about to crash and your only hope of survival is putting this parachute on and keeping it on, then that person is going to keep that parachute on no matter what people say around them, and no matter how uncomfortable it is to wear it. 

When we think about the New Testament and what God has promised us as believers, let’s be clear about this. He hasn’t promised us a comfortable life. In fact, he pretty much promised us the opposite. “In this world you will have trouble…” says Jesus (John 16:33). “They will hate you because they hated me first…” says Jesus (John 15:33). He hasn’t promised us a life of ease and popularity. But what has he promised us? A new, transformed life. The indwelling Holy Spirit. An eternity with him. 

Can we trust God to deliver those things? Can we, metaphorically speaking, put our parachutes on, even if others mock us for doing that? 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Write this down as #1 in your notes. I want to give you three answers to this question:

Why should we trust the God of the Bible? 

And I want to answer that question in the context of Hebrews 6, this amazing passage that gives both eternal security to legitimate believers and eternal insecurity to illegitimate believers. Why should we trust the God of the Bible? Here’s why. 

1) Because He is a promise-keeping God (6:13-15)

Case in point—Abraham in the OT. The author of Hebrews says this, 

13 For when God made a promise to Abraham, 

Now follow the flow of thought here. Last week, the author of Hebrews said in verse 11, 

11 And we desire each one of you to show the same earnestness to have the full assurance of hope until the end, 12 so that you may not be sluggish, but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises. 

The author of Hebrews wants his audience to have hope. And he wants them to have faith. And he wants them to have patience. In fact, he wants them to imitate those who have had faith and patience in inheriting promises. 

By the way, the Greek word for “inherit” in verse 12 is plural. And that’s indicated by the plural word “those.” And the author is envisioning here multiple people throughout the OT world that showed faith and patience inheriting the promise. 

So there are lots of people in the OT for us to imitate. Hebrews 11 gives us a list of fourteen men and two women who are great exemplars of faith for us to imitate. But in verse 13, he doesn’t give us many exemplars, he gives us one. He gives us that one great archetype of God-trusting faith in the Bible. And it’s Abraham. 

13 For when God made a promise to Abraham, 

Notice, God does the promising. Abraham does the believing. That’s the pattern.

13 For when God made a promise to Abraham, since [God] had no one greater by whom to swear, he swore by himself, 14 saying, “Surely I will bless you and multiply you.” 

15 And thus Abraham, having patiently waited, obtained the promise. 

Check out the way the author parallels that statement there in verse 15 with verse 12. In verse 12, the author of Hebrews says, imitate, “those who through faith and patience inherit the promises (ἐπαγγελία).” In verse 15, the author of Hebrews says, Abraham obtained “the promise” (ἐπαγγελία). 

The author is saying three things here about three people. He’s saying about God, that God is a promise-keeping God. God is worthy of your trust. He is saying something about Abraham too. He’s saying about Abraham that Abraham trusted God’s promises even though he had to wait patiently. And he was patient! And that makes Abraham the great archetype of our faith. And that’s the last thing the author is saying, and he’s saying it about his listeners. He’s telling his listeners, “You be like Abraham. You trust God like Abraham did. You put that parachute on, even if it’s uncomfortable. Even if others mock you for it! You believe God, and you wait for him to fulfill his promises.” 

Now we need to be clear about this. The promise that God has given us is not the same as the promise God gave Abraham. God told Abraham at seventy-five years old that he and his septuagenarian wife would have a baby. God has not promised that to any septuagenarian in this room. Okay? 

It’s not just that Abraham believed the unbelievable. That’s great. That’s a sign of his great faith. But it’s not enough to just believe the unbelievable. Abraham believed what God told him. That’s what’s significant. Abraham isn’t just our great example of faith because he believed the unbelievable – that he and Sarah would have a child in their old age – Abraham is our great example of faith because he believed the unbelievable that God promised him. That’s the key. 

Listen, this is why this is important. You might say Christianity is about faith. That’s true. But it’s not just about believing the unbelievable. It’s about believing the unbelievable thing that God has promised you. 

People say, “I believe that God is going to make me into an NBA basketball player,” even though they are only five foot tall, and they don’t have eye-hand coordination. People say, “I believe that God is going to do this” or “I believe that God is going to make me rich” or “I believe that God is going to heal this person or do this thing or answer my prayer.” That’s not the faith that Abraham had. He didn’t just believe some unbelievable thing, and then try to talk God into it. God does the promising. God does the talking. God says, “I’m going to do this unbelievable thing,” and Abraham believed it. He believed God. 

Abraham certainly didn’t believe in himself. I hear people say that all the time in our day. “You just got to believe in yourself!” I don’t even know what that means. And don’t we have something better in this world to put our faith in? Answer, yes, we do, we put our faith in God’s promises.

Here’s why this is so relevant to our lives and relevant for eternity. Here’s the corollary for us as NT believers. What unbelievable thing has God revealed to you, by his Word, and told you to believe? God didn’t tell you that you and your wife are going to have a baby at age 75 or 100. That promise was exclusive to Abraham. But what did God promise you? He promised you eternal life. He promised you a payment for your sin. He promised you salvation and redemption. He promised you that, “if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Rom 10:9-10). He promised us this unbelievable truth in his Word, and our faith, which is a faith like Abraham’s, in his Word will save us. 

So quickly, let me summarize what happened in the OT with Abraham, and why the author of Hebrews wants us to imitate him. In the book of Genesis, God appeared to Abraham and promised him land, seed, and blessing (Gen 12:2-3). God told him to “go from his country… to the land that I will show you.” So Abraham did it. He left everything behind and became a sojourner in a strange land. 

Later in that land, the Lord appeared to Abraham again in a vision (Gen 15:1-5). And Abraham was like, “What gives, Lord? You said, I’ll be a great nation, but I don’t have a son.” He said to the Lord, “This guy, Eliezer of Damascus, is the heir of my house!” But God promised Abraham in that moment that he would indeed have a son and an heir (Gen 15:1-5). In fact it says it stronger than that. It says, “And behold, the word of the LORD came to him: “This man shall not be your heir; your very own son shall be your heir” (15:4). And when God said this to him, Abraham “believed the LORD, and he counted it to him as righteousness” (15:5).

The Apostle Paul said memorably about this occasion, “In hope [Abraham] believed against hope, that he should become the father of many nations… He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was as good as dead (since he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. No unbelief made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. That is why his faith was ‘counted to him as righteousness’” (Rom 4:18-22).

Abraham believed the promise of God. And the Lord followed up that promise by making a covenant with Abraham. Literally in Hebrew, you don’t “make” a covenant, you “cut” a covenant. The Hebrew word for covenant is בְּרִית. And God cut a covenant with Abraham. Abraham took these animals, and he cut them up. And while Abraham was sleeping, the Lord passed through the bodies of these dead animals, signifying ostensibly that God is invoking a self-curse—God will become like the dead animals if he does not keep his word. God’s covenant promises are that rock-solid and irreversible. 

And God did fulfill his promise. The old man Abraham and his aged wife did have a baby. Charles Spurgeon wrote, “Isaac was born not through his father’s or his mother’s strength, for they were well stricken in years.” Well-stricken in years! That’s Victorian language for “they were really old.” But the promise wasn’t just for a baby, it was for a great nation. And later, on Mount Moriah, God tested the faith of his servant Abraham again (Gen 22:1-19). He told him to go up that mountain and sacrifice his only son, Isaac. This was the son of the promise. This was Abraham’s heir that he had waited decades for. And Abraham, without hesitation, obeyed the Lord, even to the point of binding his only son on that altar and lifting the knife to slay him. But God stayed his hand. 

And it was in that moment, that God not only promised Abraham, he not only covenanted with Abraham, he swore to him. Genesis 22:16-18: “By myself I have sworn, declares the LORD, because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you, and I will surely multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore. And your offspring shall possess the gate of his enemies, and win your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because you have obeyed my voice.” 

This is the passage that the author of Hebrews keys on. This is the passage that he’s referring to when he says, 

13 For when God made a promise to Abraham, since [God] had no one greater by whom to swear, he swore by himself, 14 saying, “Surely I will bless you and multiply you.” 

And then the author says in verse 15, 

15 And thus Abraham, having patiently waited, obtained the promise. 

God promised Abraham land, seed, and blessing. God swore to Abraham land, seed, and blessing. And even though at the end of his life, Abraham had a small family and a small plot of land that he bought to bury his wife Sarah (“the field with the cave of Machpelah” in Genesis 23:1-20), he still believed in God’s promise. God’s promises were fulfilled mostly posthumously. They are still waiting to be fulfilled today as we await the Promised Land of the future and the full offspring of Abraham who are being blessed through is seed. Abraham waited patiently for his son. He was seventy-five years old when he left the Ur of the Chaldees. He was a hundred years old when Isaac was born. You do the math. That’s a lot of patience. But God has proven himself faithful again and again.  

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Go ahead and write this down as #2. Here’s another reason why we should trust the God of the Bible. We should trust him because he is a promise-keeping God. And we should trust him…

2) Because He has an unchanging character (6:16-18)

The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, “Change alone is unchanging.” But that’s not true. Our God is an unchanging God, and he has an unchanging character. Also in Mormon theology and in what’s called “process theology,” God’s nature and God’s character changes. But that’s not the God of the Bible. Our God is immutable. He’s an unchanging God. 

The author of Hebrews says in verse 16,

16 For people swear by something greater than themselves, and in all their disputes an oath is final for confirmation. 

When people really mean something, when they really want to emphasize the truthfulness of their statement, they swear by something greater then themselves. They swear to heaven. Or they put their hand on the Bible and say, “I do solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” And throughout history this has given a since of finality and irrevocability with oaths or promises or commitments. In the ancient world, people didn’t make contractual arrangements with a signed document. They would make agreements by an oath. 

I heard this last week that the old English expression, “By Jove” derives from this kind of oath-taking statement. “By Jove” either means, “by Jehovah,” the Old English rendering of Yahweh or it means “by Jupiter” the Roman god of the sky. Either way, men are swearing by something greater than themselves. 

But what do you do when your God, and you don’t have anything greater than you to swear by? Well in verse 13, God swears by himself. But also in verse 17, you double down with an oath. 

17 So when God desired to show more convincingly to the heirs of the promise 

“Heirs” meaning Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, etc. 

the unchangeable character of his purpose, he guaranteed it with an oath, 

So we have with Abraham, both a promise and an oath. 

18 so that by two unchangeable things [the promise and the oath], in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us. 

Here’s the logic that the author of Hebrews lays down. And I want you to lean in and pay attention here, because the logic of this argument has huge applicational payoff in our lives. The author says at the end, “we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us.” We are part of that “we” in verse 18. We have the same refuge as Abraham and as the original recipients of this letter to Hebrews. The author of this letter wants us to have “strong encouragement to hold fast to our hope.” And that encouragement comes when we realize that we serve an unchanging God who never deviates from his promises or violates his Word. Therefore we can trust him. 

Back to verse 17. 

17 So when God desired to show more convincingly to the heirs of the promise the unchangeable character of his purpose, he guaranteed it with an oath, 

What “oath” is he talking about there? Well, back to Abraham. God promised Abraham in Genesis 12. He followed that by cutting a covenant in Genesis 15. But in Genesis 22, on top of Mount Moriah, God “oathed” with Abraham. He swore by his own name. God’s commitment to Abraham’s land, seed, and blessing never changed. He promised it. He covenanted with Abraham concerning it. And then, he swore an oath concerning it. 

By the way, Abraham had his ups and downs as a covenant keeper. Abraham wasn’t always above board with his actions. Remember when he tried to pass off Sarah as his sister to save his own skin? That happened twice, by the way! Once with Pharaoh in Egypt and once with Abimelech in the Negev (Gen 12:10-20; 20:1-18). And his son, Isaac, did the exact same thing (26:6-16). Like Father, like son. That’s another sermon for another day.  

Abraham also had a little covenant snafu when he took his concubine Hagar and tried to enact God’s promises in his own power (16:1-16). That wasn’t Abraham’s greatest moment. And it created a lifetime of animosity between Sarah and Hagar and Isaac and Ishmael. That wasn’t great.  

But where Abraham failed, God proved faithful. God doesn’t renege on his promises. And part of that involves the fact that God cannot lie. Everyone see that in verse 17? That’s a shocking admission right there. God can’t do something. Because of his unchanging nature, and the unbreakable character of his promises, it’s impossible for God to lie or to not follow through with his promises. 

And by the way, this is not an isolated statement. In Numbers 23:19, it says, “God is not man, that he should lie.” In 1 Samuel 15:29, it says, “the Glory of Israel will not lie or have regret, for he is not a man.” Titus 1:2 tells us that we can put our hope in the God who promises us eternal life and “never lies.” You thought it was George Washington who cannot tell a lie. It’s actually the Lord. 

You know sometimes people like to ask crazy questions like, “Can God make a rock so big he can’t move it?” Or “Can God microwave a burrito so hot he can’t eat it?” And they think it’s a clever trap, because if you say “no,” then they say, “So you admit there’s something that God can’t do.” Well yeah, here’s an example of something God can’t do right here in the Scriptures. It’s impossible for God to lie. 

And lying is part of a bigger category of sin. It’s impossible for God to sin. Yes, he is omnipotent. But his omnipotence is qualified in the sense that God cannot violate his own nature. He is holy and righteous, and he cannot engage in anything that is unholy or unrighteous. And that’s part of another characteristic of God. The Lord is omnipotent, but he’s also immutable. He doesn’t change. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Heb 13:8). He is a holy, trustworthy, and unchanging God.   

And here’s the applicational payoff of this for us. Here’s why this is so important to the author of Hebrews. God is a promise-keeping God, and God is unchanging in his character. So when God promises something to us, we can be sure that it’ll come to pass… even if we have to wait 2,000 years for it to transpire! Even if we have to die waiting, he will still follow through with his promises! 

And what is his great promise to us as his children? What’s our great hope? I’ll tell you what it’s not. It’s not a life of ease and comfort and prosperity in the here and now. 

What is our great hope? What are we counting on? It’s eternal salvation. Right? It’s Hebrews 5:9: “And being made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him.” It’s Hebrews 4:1 and the promise of entering God’s eternal rest. 

Charles Spurgeon wrote this: “Unless God can undeify Himself, every soul that Christ died for He will have. Every soul for which He stood Substitute and Surety He demands to have, and each of those souls He must have, for the covenant stands fast.” 

Listen, hear me on this. God has not promised you a life of ease and comfort in this world. God has not promised you “Your best life now.” And God hasn’t promised you that you will have a baby in your old age. That was his promise for Abraham and Sarah, and God’s promise came true. 

But what has God promised you? What has God even guaranteed with an oath? God has guaranteed you that your great high priest, Jesus Christ, sits at the right hand of God the Father mediating on your behalf. God has promised you a new and better covenant than what he offered in the old covenant. And God has even gone so far as to seal it with blood, with the blood of a true and better sacrifice. And it wasn’t the blood of bulls and goats. It was the blood of his only Son. 

And because God is a truthful God, “we who have fled for refuge” can have “strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us.”

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Does that mean that life will be easy? No. It wasn’t easy for the church that the author of Hebrews was writing to. They were suffering. Some of them may have even been physically accosted or put to death because of their faith in Christ. The truth is that life, on this side of eternity is tumultuous. And that’s why the author gives this amazing analogy in verse 19. Go ahead and write this down as #3 in your notes. Why should we trust the God of the Bible? Here’s a third reason. 

3) Because He is the steadfast anchor of our souls (6:19-20)

The author says in verse 19. 

19 We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain, 20 where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf, having become a high priest forever after the order of Melchizedek. 

Wow, there are a lot of images there mixed together. So let’s walk through this slowly. The author says, 

19 We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul,

The word for “anchor” here is the Greek ἄγκυρα. You can hear the linguistic correspondence between the Greek and the English. And yet, this word doesn’t show up a lot in the NT. It’s used three times in Acts 27, when Luke was describing a literal anchor that was necessary for the ship that Paul was on. But Hebrews 6 is the only place where this word is used metaphorically in reference to our souls. 

Coincidently, this passage made such an impact on Christians in the early church, that many of them were buried with the picture of an anchor on their tombstone. Several pictures of anchors can be found in the Roman catacombs. In the so-called “Catacomb of Priscilla” near Rome, more than sixty representations of anchors have been found. 

And what does this image of an anchor symbolize? Why did the author of Hebrews speak of an anchor of the soul? Well in the ancient world, an anchor was essential for a boat that was being tossed about on the sea. If you’ve ever been on a boat in the open ocean, you know how tumultuous and volatile the wind and the waves can be. 

I remember on my honeymoon, Sanja and I went on a cruise. And we were out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean when our boat hit a squall, and the entire boat felt like it tilted ninety degrees. That was terrifying! And for the next two days, we were hulled up inside our room riding out the bad weather and the waves of that storm. 

That was in the modern-day world, with a modern-day boat departing from a country with a Navy and a Coastguard. Think how much more terrifying it was for sailors on boats in the ancient world! What the author of Hebrews here is symbolizing with this “anchor of the soul” statement is that our lives are going to be tossed and thrown about by suffering and persecution and struggle. We will age. We will go through hard times. We will have our faith tested. But no matter what happens, our souls are anchored to the hope of eternity. And no matter what happens in this life, we won’t lose that. 

Here’s how Daniel Towner said it about a hundred years ago:

I can feel the anchor fast

As I meet each sudden blast,

And the cable, though unseen,

Bears the heavenly strain between;

Through the storm I safely ride,

Till the turning of the tide. 

And it holds,

my anchor holds;

Blow your wildest, then, O gale,

On my bark so small and frail;

By his grace I shall not fail,

For my anchor holds,

my anchor holds.” 

And what is that anchor for our souls? Well look again at verse 19.

We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain, 

The anchor is the hope. The anchor is the promise. The anchor, more specifically, is Jesus who entered into the inner place behind the curtain. The curtain is a reference to the holy of holies. Jesus has entered into the holy of holies as our great high priest. He has interposed his own blood on our behalf. But this isn’t talking about the holy of holies in the Tabernacle. This is talking about the holy of holies of God’s presence. And Jesus is sitting there, at the right hand of God the Father, interceding for us. And we are anchored to him. 

Look at verse 20. 

We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain, 20 where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf, 

In other words, we can enter into the inner place as well. We can enter into the presence of God as well. Jesus has made a way. Jesus, as our forerunner, has made a way for us to be reconciled to the God of the Universe and to live forever in his presence. Warren Wiersbe said, “The Old Testament high priest was not a ‘forerunner’ because nobody could follow him into the holy of holies. But Jesus Christ has gone to heaven so that one day we may follow.” 

And we don’t enter based on our own righteousness or our own actions. 

Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf, having become a high priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.

There’s that Melchizedek language again. I knew we’d get back to him eventually. The author of Hebrews has taken us on a little detour starting in 5:11 and now ending in 6:20. He gave us some rebukes. He gave us some sober warnings. He gave us some encouragement and showed us how to have assurance of salvation. He reminded us that God is a God of promises in whom we can put our trust and hope. And now he’s ready to circle back and talk about Jesus as the high priest forever after the order of Melchizedek. 

What does that mean, “order of Melchizedek”? And why is this guy Melchizedek so important? And what does it even mean that Jesus is a high priest forever? And why is this even important to a room full of mostly Gentiles in San Antonio, Texas, in 2023? 

Well, we’re going to find out. Because the largest section of this book, Hebrews 7-10, has to do with Jesus not only being a better high priest for us—an eternal high priest in the order of Melchizedek—But also Jesus being a better sacrifice offered than any of the blood sacrifices of the OT. That’s our subject matter moving forward in this great book of the Bible.   

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

But let me close with this. I want to go back to the image of the anchor in verse 18. You know there is something quite unnerving, if you’ve ever been in a boat before, about being out on the open sea. My dad used to own this little catamaran sailboat that we would take out on Lake Travis. And on that lake, you never lost sight of the shore, so there was nothing to be unnerved about. But for the last few summers, we’ve been renting those same catamarans in Florida, and going out on the Gulf of Mexico. And I’ll just tell you, you never want to be too far from the coast. You definitely don’t want to lose sight of the coastline by being too far out or getting caught in a storm. You’ll be half-way to Cuba before the Coastguard finds you. 

And that’s because the sea is unpredictable. And the weather on the sea is especially unpredictable. You never know which way the wind is going to blow, or where the waves are going to toss you. And in the ancient world you nullified the vicissitudes of wind, waves, and weather with an anchor. You would drop your anchor with its teeth, and you would move about until the teeth of that anchor would latch on to a rock or something solid underneath. And if that anchor had a tight grip on the bottom of the ocean, then your boat could absorb the worst that the sea would throw at you. You might get battered around for hours on end, but that anchor would hold you in place. 

Charles Spurgeon spoke about the glory of experiencing how the anchor holds us through the vicissitudes of life. He said, “Some of you people who have never known affliction, you rich people who never knew want, you healthy folks who were never ill a week, you have not half a grip of the glorious hope that the tried ones have. Much of the unbelief in the Christian Church comes out of the easy lives of professors. When you come to rough it, you need solid gospel. A hardworking hungry man cannot live on your whipped creams and your syllabubs [desserts]—he must have something solid to nourish him. And so the tried man feels that he must have a gospel that is true, and he must believe it to be true, or else his soul will famish…Therefore, when greater trouble comes, believe the more firmly, and when your vessel is tossed in deeper water believe the more confidently… Our anchor is within the veil. It is where we cannot see it, but Jesus is there, and our hope is inseparably connected with His person and work.” 

Can I just say something brilliant for you this morning? Life is hard. Can y’all write that down in your notes somewhere? You heard it hear first. Life is hard. There’s financial instability. There’s physical and medical instability. There’s relational instability. Sometimes you feel like a boat that is being beaten and battered around by wind and waves. 

But God never promised you a cushy life where you will be floated on a magic carpet right on into eternity. Paul spent many of his last years in prison and was executed on a whim by a Roman Emperor. Peter was probably crucified upside down. Probably some of the Jewish Christians, who the author of Hebrews was writing to, died martyr’s deaths! The author of Hebrews, whoever he was, may have died a martyr’s death. 

And even if he didn’t… even if he died of old age… I can guarantee you that his life wasn’t easy. Just aging, and living out your days in these expiring bodies, is hard enough. And yet, no matter what this life throws at us, we have an anchor for our souls. We have an eternal hope. Paul says it this way: “Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self his being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal” (2 Cor 4:17-18). 

That is God’s promise to us. That is the anchor of our souls. That is our hope. Can we trust our God with this?