Some time ago, I began blogging on our Sunday sermons to help myself review; today, I’m continuing that by covering our June 7 sermon, the third in a series on Hebrews 7:1-10.

As before, I won’t summarize the sermon, since you can stream it if you want to hear yourself, but will focus on what I take away from it.

We were reminded in this sermon how Jesus is the true king of righteousness and peace, Heb. 7:2. First came righteousness, then peace, and they had to come in that order – justice comes first. Only after that comes peace, reconciliation with God. We went over four ways this is hard:

  1. We see justice from our own point of view, which is flawed. We are all racists and/or biased in our own ways. In Judges 21:25, the people did what they thought was right – and that was the problem. Jesus is the king of righteousness, the one who is truly righteous and who sets the standards.
  2. Our standards keep changing, but our king sets true, immutable, perfect standards.
  3. We lack knowledge. We are all biased, flawed, prejudiced in certain ways, and never have perfect knowledge. Only God knows all things in order to make a perfect judgment.
  4. We are sinful. People who have been hurt tend to hurt others – but we’ve all been hurt, and that makes us want vengeance.

The only way for Christ to save us was for him to take the greatest vengeance on himself, the greatest injustice – and that’s exactly what he’s done. Right now the world is crying out for peace, but so many don’t know it can only be found in Jesus. The only true revolution will be when Christ is established as king. He’s the greatest power against injustice, poverty, racism, etc. People in our time want to do something against injustice – so let’s point them to the true solution.

My biggest take-aways were two things: 1) I need to recognize my own sin increasingly, both because that will help me appreciate the work of Christ more, and because it will help me understand my own problems, and those around me, better. 2) This is a critical time to point people to Christ, as people are perhaps more aware than normal of the sin in the world around us.