Dennis Tuuri

Scripture is Hebrews 12:22-24. Hebrews 12 verses 22-24. But ye are come unto Mount Zion, and under the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and into an innumerable company of angels, to the general assembly and church of the firstborn, which are written in heaven, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, and to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling that speaketh better things than that of Abel.

I hope you don’t mind if I make use of the time as the parents are doing that to go ahead and begin this morning. We won’t get to the actual topic for a couple of minutes here, but I don’t want to waste any of our time this morning. I want to just remind you what we talked about last week in terms of helping the poor. And I hope that in your homes last week and in the next few weeks, your children will be learning about the four corners of the house of biblical compassion, the four sisters of mercy, which we gave the little title of GLAT to.

Gleaning, loans, alms, and tithe. And remember, we talked about that. We gave you detailed descriptions of what each of those were. We talked about evaluating people’s needs and to teach your children about people’s needs that they come across. We gave you the little word SIDHE as you come alongside of somebody who has needs. Use the SIDHE to evaluate those needs. They have spiritual needs, intellectual needs, dominical needs in terms of self-government and then economic needs as well.

He said that when you have somebody with needs, you should do a perspective check of your own mind to make sure your attitude is right, that you’re not prideful, that you exercise compassion in God’s electing way. You should evaluate the needs of the people, spiritual, intellectual, dominical, and economical. You should prioritize those needs. If a person is on the point of death, you don’t preach them a sermon, you give them food.

And then you pick the means of those four corners of the house of compassion as it were in terms of the economic means, gleaning, loans, alms, and tithe. Then you evaluate your support team and then you put the plan into action. Furthermore, this is very important. I think that probably if we look at Isaiah 58 as we’ve talked about it for the last couple of weeks about rebuilding and reconstruction. Isaiah 58 ties that quite closely to what we’ve talked about the last couple of weeks in this series almsgiving and the help and compassion for those less fortunate around us that in God’s providence he has given needs that we might fill.

I think it’s very important what we talked about last week both in terms of our own self-government of ourselves in terms of our own evaluation of our needs and also helping other people. I honestly believe that there is probably more important kingdom work that’s done if we take what we’ve talked about in this series of worship for instance and apply it to our children and teach them and teach this next generation than if I get on Lou Dobbs’ show fifty times.

Your children are quite important. I was speaking with Greg Harris this last week and he gave me a very interesting idea and I thought I think it’s excellent. He said that he gets a little tired of people saying that we have to wait till the homeschooled children grow up for the next generation to do things right. He said that in fact our children are in a sense raising us as we raise them. And as you take what I’ve preached up here and what the word of God tells you and what other sources that God has used in your life tells you in terms of instructing your household and of being a self-governing household, you begin to apply those things.

You teach your children at home. You have got to be an organized person. You’ve got to rule your household well in order to do those things. And we’re all learning to do that in this church. So in five or ten years down the line from now, we’re going to be much better and more mature Christians. We’re going to be capable of eldership and office both in the church and in the civil arena because homeschooling, turning the hearts of the fathers back to the children, giving our children an economic base, helping understand biblical compassion, what needs are, how to meet those needs biblically.

These things are all part of our being self-governing and it equips us for office as well. So this is very important stuff. Just to reinforce one thing we talked about last week, debt. And I guess in a way it’s kind of like public schools at this church sometimes. We talk about it a lot. It’s because it is a large problem. And one of the important things some of us are in a position I talked to a man a couple weeks ago in no position to get out of debt for years probably unless God works very miraculously.

And yet I said, you know, if nothing else, you should be teaching your children not to do what you’ve done. To teach them what you’ve done and then teach them how to avoid that and raise up a generation that understands the hideousness of debt. I had a couple of quotes here from a book I didn’t get to last week, a book about one hundred years old or more and it’s just on various subjects. This particular article is on debt.

I’m just going to read a couple of quotes here. He says, “A freedom from debts and what nourishing sweetness may be found in cold water. What toothsomeness in a dry crust, what ample nourishment in a hard egg? Be sure of it. He who dines out of debt, though his meal be a biscuit and an onion, dines in the Apollo.” And then further on, “What warmth in a threadbare coat, if the tailor’s receipt be in your pocket, what tyre and purple in the faded waistcoat, the vest not owed for.

How glossy the well-worn hat if it covers not the aching head of a debtor.” See, the point is contentment and a great rejoicing before God if we have things that maybe not as nice on the exterior appearance as the person next to us, but is our own. I used to think about that sometimes when we drove our old car to the graduate center and parked alongside these twenty and thirty and forty-thousand dollar cars. And one person once remarked that mine was probably the only one that was paid for because it cost three hundred dollars when we bought it.

Well, in any event, I have more quotes here about debt. I don’t know if I should read a lot. I’ll read a couple more, I guess. But debt, however courteously it may be offered, is the cup of siren, and the wine, spiced and delicious though it be, is poison. The man out of debt, though with a flaw in his jerk, a crack in his shoe leather and a hole in his hat, is still the son of liberty, free is the singing lark above him.

But the debtor, although clothed in the utmost bravery, what is he but a serf out upon a holiday, a slave to be reclaimed at any instant by his owner, the creditor? If people would only make a push at the beginning instead of at the end, they would save themselves all this misery. And again, Greg and I were talking about the fact that if you think you can see a house you can afford to buy, look at the payments.

If you bought that house in a thirty-year mortgage, put those payments into a savings account and that house will be paid for in seven years instead of thirty years. Make the push at the beginning instead of at the end. The great secret of being solvent and well-to-do and comfortable is to get ahead of your expenses. Eat and drink this month what you earned last month, not what you’re going to earn next month. One final comment about debt.

Please turn to Nehemiah. I mentioned Nehemiah chapter 5 last week. Turn to Nehemiah 5:8. Now, what I just read is sort of bad news for some of you. Again, you feel bad because you’re in debt. And I want to give you a little bit of again a picture here of what we can do and some goals we can set for ourselves. Remember Nehemiah 5, what happens is Nehemiah is very upset because the people have become indebted to one another and they’re exacting interest from one another within the covenant community.

And in fact, they’re in a position of bondage one to the other. And Nehemiah says, “This is terrible.” And in verse 8, he says, “And I said unto them, We after our ability have redeemed our brethren, the Jews, which were sold unto the heathen. And will you even sell your brethren, or shall they be sold unto us?” They held their peace and found nothing to answer. Point of that verse is that it tells us that Nehemiah says, “What are you doing?

Don’t you remember that we had to buy back people, redeem them out of debt to heathen people to get them into the place of being in the land again and in covenant community.” And so I think it’s appropriate for us to set a goal for this church to try to buy each other out of debt perhaps, train each other out of debt, etc. So at the end of three years or something like that, we could be out of most commercial debt, maybe home mortgages or a different matter, but at least the consumer sort of debt arrangements we’re in.

I think we need to set those goals. Nehemiah gives us here the fact that they had a plan, they worked that plan, and they redeemed each other out of debt. They got out of it. And I think we have to do that in our households as well and in this church. Remember I said here that the work of reconstruction had to stop while they attended to this debt and slavery and interest problem that they had. We don’t want that to happen to us.

Now the context for the last couple of weeks’ talks on almsgiving and how to help the poor is communion. I want to just remind you that we’re still in a series of sermons on worship. We had eleven sermons on the first half of our worship, the synaxis. And we summarized that in the eleventh sermon. And now we’ve had a series of sermons on the second half of our worship. We began with the agape. We looked at the agape or the love feast of the New Testament.

So it had Old Testament roots and has abiding validity for us today. We then spent a week looking at the love in the love feast. What does love mean in 1 Corinthians 13 and applied that in terms of our love feast downstairs before our formal communion service. Then we started talking about communion. We talked about the relationship of communion to community and the vital link there. And then we talked about communion in children, discerning the body correctly.

The body includes children of covenanted members. And so children are invited to the table here because that’s a proper discerning of the body. And to fail to do that would be not discerning the body correctly because the body refers, I think, in the first sense in First Corinthians to the assembled body, the church. We then talked about communion as covenant renewal. And the idea that communion is a covenant meal.

We went through a bunch of covenant meals of renewal in the old covenant in the new covenant and talked about communion and its application of that. And then we talked about the relationship of communion to victory. Remember Jesus says that you do a couple of things. You do this in remembrance of me and you do this proclaiming my death till I come. And we looked at Revelation. We said that when we’re going to remember Jesus, we’re going to have to remember who the Bible says Jesus is.

And he’s the lion of Judah and he’s the slain lamb and he’s the root of David. He’s the meaning of history. And we have to remember that we proclaim his death. We must proclaim what that death affected. And the death affected the reign of the saints on earth and our redemption. And in the context of that then we went to a discussion of alms. The reformers saw alms and compassion for the poor as a vital aspect of our Christian faith and particularly related to the communion service because again it speaks of a fellowship of sharing with one another in terms of the church and then outside in terms of the community as well.

And so helping the poor is part of worship and the giving of alms apart from your tithe is an important part of biblical worship and we’re going to be implementing an alms reception time during communion in the next few weeks. Today we’re going to start to talk about communion in heaven and then next week we’ll talk about communion with saints on earth and then we’ll sort of wrap all this up summarize it again the last half of the series here on communion in the agape. When we talk about communion as a eucharist, a giving of thanks, we have much to give thanks for at communion and it’s taught to us within the very thing that we do on Sunday and we’ll review all these things and remember why we give thanks on this day.

Before we get too far into today’s topic, I wanted to just in the context and I’m going to be talking today about something that may be a little different for you or it may be with some of us a question that’s been on our mind for a number of months now or several years about what is this ascension into heaven stuff? What do we mean to lift up our hearts to heaven and what does that mean in terms of our public worship?

And one thing I’m going to be saying—I’m going to give you the end of it before I get to the beginning. But essentially, we’re going to be talking about worship as being worship in the context of the assembled host, including angels, including departed saints, including saints across the whole face of the earth that now live. And of course, through Jesus Christ, the covenant mediator. And that’s what we do when we come together on Sunday.

And there’s application of that into the week that I think is easy to be ignored in some of this stuff, which we’re going to stress very hard at the end of the talk. But in any event, point of saying that is this: we are an assembled convocation, formal worship now in God’s throne room and in his presence and we have a communion with the saints departed and the saints on earth and in the context of that I wanted to publicly acknowledge the fact that this is our last worship service here at Reformation Covenant Church at least till they come back and visit us if the Lord says so.

And it is a good thing—the scriptures say to praise those men who are honorable and godly men and families as well. It’s part of Psalm 15 says our entrance into holy worship of God those who give men credit for what they’ve done and acknowledge their faithfulness. And so it’s by way of honoring the Lord and what Howard L. has done. You know, Howard really was the person that kind of started this church. He said, “Let’s get to—I’m going to, I don’t know what you said, but I’m not going to that other church today. I’m staying home and worshiping.” And that was the beginning of Reformation Covenant Church.

As I mentioned the other night, we had a little get together with them that it’s going to be a loss to this church. It’s going to be a loss to me personally. And I’d ask your prayers that God would fill that loss both for me individually and for this church as well and send the Lordses on their way to kingdom work in Chicago. It’s a good thing though to praise men and families that have been dominion people and these people have been and I hope your prayers go with them as they leave us today.

Okay, let’s turn to our subject. We want to talk about communion with saints in heaven. Three very simple statements. First, this communion with the saints in heaven, its future reality gives comfort to the believer. Its present reality in Sabbath festivities brings joy to the worshipper and its present reality in life girds the overcomer for victory. First, its future reality gives comfort to the believer. Turn to First Thessalonians 4:13-18, please.

We can’t spend a lot of time on this. I hope to at some point in the future return to this topic. Many of you probably know by now that several months ago when I was at Powell’s bookstore, I bought a book that’s a very interesting book on the recognition of saints in heaven. That’s the whole topic of the book, the fact that we’ll recognize people in heaven and we’ll have communion and fellowship with those that we’ve had communion and fellowship with here on earth.

And it’s an excellent book and has much to be commended in it, and I hope to return to some of the themes in that book for some sermons in the future. But for now, as we’re talking about communion with the saints in heaven. Let’s turn to First Thessalonians 4:13-18. He says, “I would not have you be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that you sorrow not even as others which have no hope.” They were sorrowing over departed friends, relatives, loved ones who had died.

They were sorrowing over them. Now, these were people who understood the resurrection. I don’t think that’s what Paul is getting at. The essence of what Paul is reminding them of is the resurrection of the dead. They knew that. They knew they were going to be resurrected, but they’re still sorrowing. We sorrow over those we know we’re going to see in heaven and who we know will be resurrected. But we sorrow because of our personal loss of them.

Well, that’s what they were going through. He says verse 14, “For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him.” You see, now he doesn’t say here will be resurrected. He says those who are asleep in Jesus Christ, God will bring with him when he returns. So he’s emphasizing here not simply the resurrection of these people—they were starting over, but the fact that they’re going to come back with Jesus when he returns.

Verse 15, “For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain of the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are asleep. For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, with the trump of God, and the dead in Christ shall rise first. Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so shall we ever be with the Lord.”

In verse 17, he says, “Don’t unduly sorrow over this thing.” Because when the loved ones that you’re sorrowing over, that’s the context of Paul’s remark. When your friend, if you’ve got a friend who’s died in this congregation, or if you have a friend now that you know of who’s a Christian who’s died, think of it this way—you’re sorrowing over it, Paul tells you, don’t be sorry over that person. Don’t unduly sorrow there because that person’s going to be raised up too and you will be raised up with him when Christ returns. And you will be together with the Savior. That’s what he says in verse 17.

Those that are alive and remain will be caught up together with them in the clouds. And he’s saying, you will be caught up together with this person you’re sorrowing with. So Paul in a couple of ways here goes out of his way to talk to them not in terms of the general resurrection, but in terms of the specific resurrection of the ones they’re sorrowing about, and telling them that those people will be resurrected, and you will be brought into communion or fellowship with them. You’ll be together with them. And then not only will you meet them at that point in time, but you shall remain so. We shall so shall we ever be with the Lord. We’re with the Lord and with the Lord we’re also with our friends who have died and who are resurrected.

And then in verse 18, he says, “Wherefore comfort one another with these words.” You see, this is a source of comfort. Paul says that a couple of times in this passage, be comforted because of this thought. And you need to know this morning. You need to believe this from the word of God that when you have loved ones who have died, it is not as if you will never see those people again or you will just see them as part of some sort of great host who you’ll never say anything to and not have a relationship with in heaven.

We have this picture of heaven sometimes. We’re just standing up there all by ourselves, you know, you can be alone in the midst of a crowd. That’s how a lot of people think about heaven. But the scriptures—Paul here says no. You’re going to be caught up together with them. You’re going to have communion and fellowship with them. There’s a hundred verses I could go to point that thing out. As I said, we’re going to return to this subject. But for now, we’re talking about communion with saints in heaven. It should be a comfort to us. The fact that in the future we will have an increased communion, a return to those familial relationships and church relationships we have on earth.

Now, that means something to us, I hope. I mean, in terms of comfort, it also should be a little bit of an exhortation to us to work with the people that God has brought us in his providence into fellowship with here. I mean, I guess what I’m saying here, folks, is I think this verse and other verses in the scriptures tell us that our communion with the saints in heaven in the future means that we’re going to have communion. You and I in heaven, we’re going to know each other. We’ll be in the context of one another and we’ll be rejoicing together in the presence of our Savior and we’ll have relationship.

See, and that means that you don’t—you can’t just sit back and hope, well, maybe death will clear up this stuff and I won’t see that person again in the church. No. See, we’re going to be together in eternity. You might will get used to it today.

Okay. So, in any event, this is a source of great comfort for the believer. I want to return to this in the future, but for now, I want you to be comforted by this by this scripture and by the scriptures that tell us we will have recognizability of one another in heaven. We will have communion and fellowship with our families, with our friends, and particularly and certainly with our church. Okay. The fellowship communion with saints in heaven.

Its present reality in Sabbath festivities brings joy to the worshipper. Okay. And first of all, the first pointer to that point is its Sabbath reality is seen in Hebrews 12:22-24. So we turn to the text that we read, our primary text today. Hebrews 12:22-24. Now first of all and your outline there, the first point is we come and we don’t want to fly by words in scripture. In Hebrews 12:22-24 he is telling them something specific. He says you are come unto and he lists several places they are come unto and then he lists some people that they’ve come there with or some beings I should say since they involve angels as well.

Now the word for come there in verse 22, “Ye are come unto Mount Zion,” is used in only a few other scriptures in the book of Hebrews. Now when you’re studying the Bible and you find a particular word, Greek word in an epistle, one of the ways to decide what that word means in context of course is the context itself. If that can help you. But another evidence of what the word might mean is to see how that author used it in that epistle. Okay? If the word can be used in different ways and then of course you’d want to look at how the author has used it in other things he’s written as well. How did he as an individual use that word? God preserves the individuality of these writers in the holy scriptures.

I guess what I’m saying is it’s very important here that we look for a couple of minutes at these other uses of the term, the Greek word here that’s used and translated “your come unto” in Hebrews 4:16. We have—and you don’t need to turn there, I’ll read these verses. Stay in Hebrews 12. In Hebrews 4:16 we read, “Let us therefore come boldly under the throne of grace and find grace to help in time of need”—to draw near, to come close. There’s it’s a heightened sense here.

And in verse 16 of chapter 4 is the first occurrence of this word, and the point of the word is to come into worship, to come boldly under the throne of grace in prayer and in worship. And so it has a specific reference to worship.

Now before we get too far into the other uses of this term, I want us to remember back to the very first sermon in this series, which was the call to worship. And do you remember what psalm we used? Psalm 95. And remember where we looked in the New Testament to see where that psalm is quoted? Hebrews 3 and 4. And remember we talked about how Psalm 95 is the preeminent picture of an Old Testament call to worship.

And God says, “If you don’t hear the call to worship, if you don’t come forward to worship me, you’ll be judged.” We talked about how the implications for all of your life. Of course, it doesn’t mean if you just come out on the Sabbath, you’re going to be okay and then live your life the way you want. No, but the point is that there’s a formal call to worship in the old covenant. If you didn’t come to worship, you were judged by God.

Psalm 95 is a picture of that. And Hebrews gives us a quotation of that in Hebrews 3 and 4. Now remember the context. We said at that time of the book of Hebrews that you’ve got Christians who are pulling back from the worship services of the church and going back to the sabbatical—the old covenant Sabbath instead of the Lord’s day Sabbath, the Christian Sabbath. They’re being urged, they’re being pulled back to those old ways.

Now obviously we’re talking about a whole life here, but the specific one of the specific admonitions found in Hebrews of course is to not forsake the assembling of yourselves together. We’ve talked about that verse a lot. The epic synagoguing, the super synagogue. Don’t go back to that restricted synagogue. Come together to the Lord’s day service where you got synagogue, temple, rejoicing, communion, meal with God, meal with friends, worshiping the Savior’s presence, etc.

Point is this: that Hebrews 3 and 4 shows us that this has reference at least in a sense to convocated worship. Hebrews 3:6 says, “Whose house you are if you hold fast confidence, rejoicing.” He says, “There is a temple. You are the new temple in Jesus Christ. You’re the house if you hold fast. If you keep going to church and do what that means in terms of the rest of your life, if you go to the old building, the temple, which wasn’t destroyed yet, what’s going to happen to that house?

It’s going to be torn down. So, you want to stay in the new house, and you are that house. In Hebrews 3:6, if you hold fast, if you keep doing these things. And then he quotes in Hebrews 3, Psalm 95: “If you hear his voice, don’t harden your heart as in the day of provocation. Come forward, worship. Do what that worship requires for the rest of your lives.” We could go on, but it would be very important to just mention here that in terms of this, in Hebrews 3:13, we read, “Exhort one another daily even while it’s called today.”

And the exhortation there is to not depart from the living God, to again continue to do what God requires. And that word exhort is next used in Hebrews 10:25. The term to not forsake the assembling of yourselves together but exhort or admonish one another, and so much the more as the day comes closer. What I’m trying to get you to see is there’s lots of internal evidences in the book of Hebrews that one of the primary considerations is what you do at worship and then the effects of that worship in the rest of your life.

Okay. And Hebrews 4:16 is in the context of those things and tells us to come in the sense of coming to worship. The next occurrence is Hebrews 7:25 of this word come. And in Hebrews 7:25, we read, “Wherefore he is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for him for them.” And again, we have a sense that we come to God by Christ. And in what way?

Christ makes intercession for us. And so we come to God with Christ making intercession for us. And again then the reference is to prayer and to worship. Hebrews 10:1 is the next use of this term. “For the law having a shadow of good things to come and not the very image of the things can never with those sacrifices which they offered year by year continually make the comers thereunto perfect.” And so there are the kind, the same word is used in terms of coming unto, and obviously the reference there is to come into worship under the old covenant and coming into the sacrificial system and performing the sacrificial rituals.

The other occurrences are in verse 22 of this passage is another occurrence in Hebrews 10. “Let us draw near with a true heart and full assurance of faith.” And there, it’s translated draw near instead of come. And again there the context says we have boldness to enter into the holy of holies by Jesus Christ, special worship is what it’s talking about. Of course, also then having implications for our lives.

Well, without going through all these passages, what I want you to see is that when this word come is used in the book of Hebrews, it has a significant reference to coming forward into the throne of God into his special presence as it were in prayer or in worship. And so, what our first thing we want to realize is when Paul says, “You are come not unto Sinai but unto Zion,” in that passage—and that’s the two things talked about in Hebrews 12.

He’s talking at least in terms of an inference or by a rather by a specific application to worship. That’s what happened on Sinai. Remember Moses worshiped before God and that’s what happened on Zion. Okay. Now just so you won’t think that I’m just making all this up or anything, A.W. Pink also noted this. He didn’t go through all the verses we’ve gone through but he said that the Greek verb has a specific significance in this epistle as may be seen by a careful reference to—and he lists two or three of the verses we listed—to come under here, to come unto here means to approach as worshippers. To approach as worshippers. And so in the very use of the term to come unto and the specific word the epistle of Hebrews uses here and the way he uses that epistle shows us that the coming unto here is a drawing forth in formal worship.

And so we’re talking about Sabbath festivities. Now, there’s a lot more indicators of that than just that verse, but it is important to notice that the end of this section there’s an admonition not to refuse him that speaks. At the end of Hebrews 12, and he says, “If you didn’t—if they didn’t escape who refused him that spoke from Sinai on earth. How much more will you not escape if you refuse him who speaks from heaven?” Again, the idea of speaking and God calling his people to an action has primary reference to worship, God’s call to worship, and then the implications for our lives. And he says, “If you don’t do that, then you’re going to suffer judgment from God who shakes all things.”

Speaking of this shaking that is threatened if we don’t obey this commandment to come, Owen said, John Owen wrote the following. He said, “It was therefore the heavens of Mosaical worship and the Judaic church state that were shaken by Jesus at his coming. So shaken for the introduction of the more heavenly worship of the gospel and the immovable evangelical church state.” And so Owen saw these relationships, saw the context with the speaking of the voice and the Mosaical worship context etc. and said what it’s talking about here is worship and the establishment of the evangelical church state.

Okay. Now secondly, so we are to come and that means into worship. And we come—where do we come to? We come to a sphere of worship. We come to Mount Zion. We come to the city of the everlasting God. And Zion of course was the place where worship was conducted. Thomas Hewitt in the Tyndale commentary says that in the old covenant, Israel was God’s chosen religious community. And Mount Zion was the place of worship and Jerusalem was looked upon as the place of God’s presence.

And we won’t bother to look through all the references to Zion in the old covenant. But the context there of Zion and Jerusalem and the city of the living God and the heavenly Jerusalem means we’re talking about the place where God resides, where his people go up to be in his special convocated presence to learn from his scriptures and to worship him for who he is. The whole picture where we come up to is the presence of God ultimately.

And by now having gone through this worship series, if you don’t know anything else, you know, and we’ve tried to reinforce it with our calls to worship every Lord’s day morning, including this morning, when we’re called into the presence of God, into the place where he is, into the city that in some sense is a heightened sense of his approach to us. When we come into the presence of God, what do we do? We fall down. And what does worship mean? Worship means in its actual literal sense in the old covenant, the word means to fall down on your knees, to kneel. And so, when we come into the presence sphere of worship, a sphere of God’s presence, we come into a sphere of worship of prostrating ourselves and declaring the worthiness of the God into whose presence we have been brought. And that is worship.

So we come—technical term in this particular epistle in terms of drawing near and worship—we come to a sphere of worship and we come to festivities. Okay, verse 23 it says we’ve come to the general assembly. Now if you’re looking in your text you’ll notice I skipped over “an innumerable company of angels.” Without getting too technical here, there are several things listed that we come unto. Each of these separate things that are listed are separated by the word and in the Greek, a specific Hebrew word that is translated and. That word does not exist between the as the company of angels and the general assembly. And so most commentators believe the general assembly modifies the angels.

Okay? So it’s unto the general assembly, the innumerable company of angels. So, I’m not going out of order here. Now, this particular word has given people a lot of problems. This general assembly—one of the reasons for that is that this is the only place in the Bible where this particular Greek word is used. The Greek word is not used any place else. And the question is, what does it mean? Well, if we don’t have any internal evidence to tell us what it means, and we don’t—we don’t have any other use of the term to tell us what it means—then we’ve got to look for how the word was used in the Greek of that particular time.

And the classical meaning of this particular Greek word was a festal gathering of the whole people to celebrate public games or other solemnities. That’s according to Wisest. John Owen said that it meant any great general assembly with respect unto praise and joy. This was not used when business of state was to be conducted. It was a time of rejoicing and of public games, praise, joy, that sort of a thing.

We, looking at this classical meaning, says that here the writer refers to a festal gathering of the holy angels and to the saints of God living and dead. Lenski, in his interpretation of this phrase—to the myriads of angels, to the general assembly—translates it this way. He says, “We have come to myriads of angels in festal assembly.” And so the angels are described in a particular setting. That setting is a festive assembly.

Lenski says that since Christ has entered heaven after his work of redemption, the whole angel world rings with festal panagy. Now, you know about festal panagy, I suppose, don’t you? Well, it turns out that panagy is a perfectly good word today in your dictionary and it’s used in the 1828 Webster dictionary in many places. And a panagy was a place of high praise and public praise and joy being displayed.

And it just so happens that the reason it’s called a panagy is because it comes from a transliteration of this Greek word that’s not used any place else in the Bible. So when we say, when Lenski says, “We’ve come we’re going to have a panagy,” he’s actually using the same Greek word transliterated into the English here. Point is that we’re called, in a sense, in a specific sense of the term, come or draw near into worship.

We come to a sphere of worship. And now we’re said that when we come into this sphere with the angels, they are worshiping. It is a panagy. It is a glorious singing forth of praise and joy for what God has accomplished in Jesus Christ. And so that’s what’s going on here. And the use of that term means that when we draw near to God, we draw near with these other created beings, that we draw near in the context of worship.

And that’s what we’re trying to talk about here is Sabbath festivities, Sabbath panagy. And so next week you can tell your friends you’re going to be having a panagy at church. That’s what’s talking about here. That panagy, that festal assembly that we come forward to praise and worship, not to conduct business, right? Includes created beings. And first of all, it says it’s a festal assembly with myriads and innumerable company of angels.

We read the quote from Lenski. In Hebrews 1:6, God says that when he brings his firstborn into the world, he says, “Let all the angels of God worship him.” The angels worship Christ. When God brings him into the world, when God had him ascend to the right hand of himself, the Father, then the angels burst forward into this festival gathering in song, singing. We’ve looked at Revelation enough times in this series on worship to understand that kind of festivities the angels involve themselves in terms of singing before God.

And so we have communion in Sabbath festivities with angels. And that’s not the central point of this morning’s talk. But before we pass by this too lightly in terms of our communion with the angels, let me apologize for not giving them a separate week. But let’s look real quickly at Second Kings 6:16-17. Second Kings 6:16-17. Situation here is the Syrians have a plot to get Elisha and Elisha has a servant who is very afraid because he sees all these chariots and horses around him of the army of the Assyrians who want to get and capture Elisha and kill him.

And Elisha tells the servant, he says, “Fear not, for they that be with us are more than they that be with them.” And Elisha prayed and said, “Lord, I pray thee, open his eyes that he may see.” And the Lord opened the eyes of the young man, and he saw, and behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha, heavenly beings.

Kuyper and Delisch in their commentary on this passage says, “The fiery horses and chariots were symbols of the protective powers of heaven which surrounded the prophet. The very form indicated the super terrestrial origin of this host. For as the most ethereal of all earthly elements, fire was the most appropriate medium for making the spirit world visible. The site was based upon Jacob’s vision in Genesis 32:2 in which he saw a double army of angels encamped around him at the time when he was threatened with danger from Esau.”

Point here is that we’ve got several places in scripture. We just mentioned Jacob with Esau here, Elisha, where the angels of God, his immediate messengers, are camped around him, God’s people to protect them from those doing spiritual warfare and physical warfare against them. Our communion with the angels is important for us again in terms of comfort and equipping for the battles that we have to face.

I don’t know, I’ve not read Peter’s books—you know, Piercing the Darkness and This Present Darkness. But I have heard that what he does is he talks about this heavenly warfare that’s going on between the angels and the demonic forces and then the earthly results of that and the correlation between the two. And if he simply helps the Christian church to realize that there are spiritual battles and that angels are our allies in those battles, that’s a good thing because the scriptures clearly teach that’s the case.

We have this kind of communion with angels not just in terms of convocative worship when we praise God with them. And that’s what are doing this day is praising God with the angels, but they are also around us in a normal sense also to protect us, be used by God to protect us. A.W. Pink here quotes a Sapper who wrote, “When the thought of Satan and his legions brings fear we ought to comfort ourselves at the assurance that more in number and greater in power are the loving and watchful angels who for Christ’s sake regard us with the deepest interest and affection.”

It’s important that you know that. It’s important that you know that you have communion in that sense with angels. Angels are described as our fellow servants in the book of Revelation. And service is ultimately service to God. Formal worship service is a picture of what we do all week. But it sets the pattern. And our angels are fellow servants with us as we come before God’s presence and offer him our holy worship service.

John Owen, commenting on Revelation 5:11-12, says that there is a oneness in design and a communion in service between them, the angels, and us. We rejoice in their happiness and glory. So they seek ours continually. Their ascription of praise and glory to God is mingled with the praise of the church so as to compose an entire worship. See, we’re brought together with angels in the festivities of holy worship on the Lord’s day.

And we’re brought together with the church militant on earth. Now, just so you won’t, you may not be familiar with the term church militant. It’s not a reconstruction. This term has been used historically: the church militant as opposed to the church triumphant. The church militant refers to the body of believers on the earth. The church triumphant refers to the body of believers in heaven and at rest with Jesus. And so it’s not a, some kind of you know, let’s go get a militia going. The church militant refers to the church here on earth.

And next Sunday we’re going to be dealing more particularly with this part of Hebrews 12:22-24 talking about our fellowship with the church militant here on earth. Mark asked me, in terms of the Reformation Day coming up that stresses all saints day and the fact that we do have communion with the heavenly host departed and the host of saints here on earth as well, asked me to address that. It fits in beautifully with our series of sermons on worship and in communion because we have communion with the church across the face of the earth and that is told to us here because we have communion with the church of the firstborn which are written in heaven.

Now that particular term used in this passage here in Hebrews 12, there is some disagreement about, but I think that Owen is right when he says that the main emphasis here after talking about the angels that we have communion with talks about the church, the ekklesia, a term used not to describe essentially the gathering in heaven, but the ekklesia, the coming together on earth. And that what’s being pictured here is again it’s contrasted with the old covenant Mount Sinai and one of the beauties of what Christ has accomplished—of course bringing us into worship with the angels and all—is also the bringing together of Jew and Gentile, one people, and having the ekklesia now being affected throughout the world.

And so that’s one of the things that’s being stressed in this portion of scripture. And we’ll talk about that more next week. But there is a vision of Jews and Gentiles together here worshiping with God. That is important. And we’ll be coming back to this next week.