Jesus is the Better Promise | Hebrews 8:6-13
What does Christmas mean to you? Stevie Wonder in 1967 sang, “Candles burning low, lots of mistletoe, lots of snow and ice, everywhere we go (except Naples), choirs singing carols…that’s what Christmas means to me my love.” For many of us, Christmas is a time of year we celebrate the birth of Jesus, get together with family and friends, eat too much food, spend a lot of money and time to escape the stress of everyday life. For others, it is a time that is lonely and sad; you miss loved ones, or you don’t have anyone you love or that loves you. A lot of our Christmas traditions have been passed down through the centuries: Christmas trees and wreaths came from the Germans in the 16th century; Merry Christmas came from the British Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol; Santa Claus came from the Dutch Sinterklaas or the English Father Christmas. Every family celebrates Christmas differently and so Christmas means different things to different people. The question is what should it really mean? It is easy for us to get caught up in the weeds of the story of Christmas that we forget the bigger picture of Christmas and what it means. We have walked through the book of Hebrews to get a bigger picture of Christmas by taking a deeper look at Jesus. Ultimately, Christmas means that God keeps His promises. Christianity hinges on whether God keeps His promises to us. Everything we believe is based on His promises.
The Hebrews writer encourages us not to give up on Christianity. It is easy for us to look at our circumstances, the reality of suffering, and our own brokenness and start believing that maybe this Jesus thing isn’t working like we thought it would. There is a temptation to want to give up on it and go back to our old life or go find something else that works better. But Hebrews is telling us that there is NOTHING and NO ONE BETTER than Jesus. The whole book is written to tell us how and why Jesus is better. Jesus is the better Word, the better King, the better Priest and He gives us better Promises than anyone else can give us. In Hebrews 8, we see that there were old promises we could not keep and there are new promises that we cannot beat found in Jesus.