Hebrews 12:18-29 2025 Commentary

Whenever I read this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson, I’m reminded of how both our relationship with and worship of God is a kind of balancing act. Our natural preference for cut-and-dried answers may at least help explain why any form of relating to God easily devolves into one extreme or the other. Jesus’ friends easily either try to snuggle up close to God or maintain an extreme distance from God. However, Hebrews 12 offers a kind of “both/and” stance.

Our text begins with what most scholars assume is an allusion to Israel’s encounter with God at Sinai as Exodus 19, as well as Deuteronomy 4 and 5 recount it. “You have not come [proselelythate],” Hebrews narrator writes in verses 18ff., “to a mountain that can be touched [pselaphomeno*] and that is burning [kekaumeno] with fire [pyri], to darkness [gnopho], gloom [zopho] and storm [thyelle], to a trumpet blast [salpingos echo] or such a voice speaking words that those who heard it begged [paretesanto] that no further word be spoken [protesthenai] to them, because they could not bear [ouk epheron] what was commanded [diastellomenon]: ‘If even an animal touches [thige] the mountain, it must be stoned to death [lithobolethesetai].’ The sight was so terrifying [phoberon] that Moses said, ‘I am trembling [enromos] with fear [ekphobos]’.”

The imagery is vivid. Though modern pictures and accounts of violence may largely desensitize citizens of the 21^st century to explicit images, God’s Israelite people’s encounter with God at Sinai clearly terrified all of them, including their leader, Moses. In fact, verse 21 repeats some form of the word phobos (“fear”) as if to underline the horror the sight of Sinai engendered.

Hebrews’ narrator, in fact, describes how God’s appearance to Israel at Sinai’s impacted many different senses. It discouraged people and animals from touching it. Sinai almost certainly smelled horribly. It was visually dark, stormy and intimidating. It touched people’s hearts and minds with terror.

But what is perhaps most sobering about Hebrews 12’s account of God’s confrontation with God’s Israelite freed slaves at Sinai is its report that it so terrified them that they begged that “no further word be spoken to them” (19b). When God announced that anyone or thing that touched Sinai would die, it’s as if they plugged their ears because they were too horrified to hear any more.  The terrified Israelites wanted to stop listening to God.

The biblical scholar Tom Long (Hebrews, Westminster John Knox Press, 1997) suggests that in recounting this encounter for Hebrews’ readers, its narrator “uses a classic travel agent’s strategy: get [its readers] to imagine they are already there.” Of course, those readers aren’t at Sinai’s base; they’re in the first century Roman Empire. But Hebrews’ narrator invites his readers to imagine ourselves standing in the shadow of one of the most horrifying scenes imaginable.

Yet then it’s as if Hebrews’ travel agent points her clients away from Mt. Sinai and toward Mt. Zion. In verses 22ff., after all, we read, “You have come to Mount Zion, to the city [polei] of the living God, the heavenly [epouranio] Jerusalem.” God has brought God’s people, in other words, not to a mountain that can but may not be touched, but to a heavenly city that can be at least partially touched.

Biblically literate hearers can hardly hear this reference to the epouranio Ierousalem (“heavenly Jerusalem”) without thinking of “the new Jerusalem” to which Revelation 21 refers. But, of course, it’s not just that the new Jerusalem comes to God’s people rather than God’s people going to it. It’s also that the new Jerusalem’s coming to us awaits Christ’s return. We have not yet come to that heavenly city.

So while we can see the heavenly Jerusalem with the eyes of faith, we’re still on our way to it. We can’t yet touch it the way God’s Israelite people could touch either Mount Sinai or the Mount Zion on which the “old” Jerusalem stood. This at least suggests that the “heavenly Jerusalem” symbolizes the God who has graciously come to God’s adopted children.

In that “city” we find, Hebrews’ author adds in verse 22bff., not just the living God, but also “thousands upon thousands [myriasin] of angels in joyful assembly [panygerei], to the church of the firstborn [protokon], whose names are written [apogegrammenon] in heaven. [We] have come to God, the judge [Kritei] of all, to the spirits [pneumasi] of the righteous [dikaion] made perfect [teteleiomenon], to Jesus the mediator [mesite] of a new covenant [diathekes], and to the sprinkled [rhantismou] blood that speaks a better [kreitton] word than the blood of Abel.”

Here Hebrews’ readers see both continuity and a new reality. The living God of Sinai is also the living God of Zion. What’s more, this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson draws our mind’s eye back to God’s call to circumcise all of Israel’s protokon (“firstborn”) males, to the diathekes (“covenant”) God established with Noah, Abraham and other people, as well as to the haimati rhantismou (“sprinkled blood”) of sacrificed animals. Hebrews’ Jewish readers were also familiar with angels, as well as Abel, whose blood cried out from the ground to God.

But, of course, some things this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson mentions would also have been unfamiliar to God’s Old Testament people. While they longed for a Messiah to rescue them, they were not yet familiar with Jesus, the mediator of a “new covenant” between God and God’s people. Nor were God’s dearly beloved Old Testament people yet familiar with the “church of the firstborn.”

But perhaps no contrast between the approaches to Sinai and Zion is starker than their tone. Those who dared to approach Sinai were terrified by both it and the living God whose presence it symbolized. God’s Israelite people trembled with fear at the prospect of trying to deal with the God who spoke to them from it. The Message’s paraphrase of verse 21 even suggests the Israelites’ fear of Sinai’s God paralyzed them.

By contrast, the approach to Zion, the city of the living God that is the heavenly Jerusalem is characterized by great joy. Its angels are in what verse 22 calls “in joyful assembly.” At Zion God’s people gladly encounter “the church of the firstborn whose names are written in heaven” (23). Jesus’ friends can approach with joy because Jesus is “the mediator of a new covenant” (24).

That’s why Hebrews’ second shift in tone in verses 25ff. may surprise its readers. It moves from the joy that comes from Christ’s finished work on our behalf to a warning. “See to it [Blepete],” Hebrews’ narrator goes on to write there, “that you do not refuse [paraitesesthe] him who speaks [lalounta].” Israel’s terror at Sinai in effect closed their ears to God’s speaking. Hebrews’ author begs his readers not to make the same mistake.

Hebrews’ narrator then goes on to describe the “balancing act” that God’s beloved hearers continue to try to maintain. “Since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken [asaleuton],” he writes in verse 28, “let us be thankful [echomen charis], and so worship [latreuomen] God acceptably [euarestos] with reverence [eulabeias] and awe [deous].”

Jesus’ friends, in other words, worship the living God with both gratitude and awe. We long to worship God in ways that are both pleasing to God and show our reverence for God. The God whom we worship in Jesus Christ is, after all, as this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson ends, “a consuming [katanaliskon] fire.”

Part of Christians’ struggle to understand this somewhat mysterious summons arises from our assumption that it pairs what we sometimes think of as conflicting emotions. We sometimes assume that thanksgiving and reverence contradict each other. It’s sometimes tempting to assume that our awe leaves no room in acceptable worship for anything approaching gladness and joy.

Yet preachers might note a couple of things about verses 28 and 29. The Greek word latreuomen we often translate as “worship” more often refers to service. That may be why the NRSV translates verse 28 as an invitation to “offer service well-pleasing to God with reverence and awe.” It’s not just our worship that Hebrews invites us to offer to God with reverence. It’s Jesus’ followers’ whole lives that we give to God with reverence and awe. Our entire relationship and walk with God is characterized by a deep respect for God.

This, in turn, leaves plenty of room for Christians to humbly debate and sometimes lovingly disagree about how we can serve and worship God with reverence and awe. There is, after all, a kind of paradox embedded in Hebrews 12. While our God is a consuming fire, the Son of God became incarnate in order to live, die and rise again from the dead to rescue us.

God’s adopted children seek to let the Holy Spirit maintain in us a deeply respectful posture towards God that doesn’t allow us to approach God overly casually. However, we also gratefully worship a God who in Christ invited all who are weary and burdened to come to him.

Jesus’ friends don’t let our deep reverence for and awe of God keep us away from God, God’s word or God’s people. After all, while God is a consuming fire, someday that fire will burn up all that opposes God, as well as God’s good and loving purposes for God’s world and people.

Might, in fact, the Scriptures be suggesting that acceptable worship somehow combines thanksgiving and reverence? Might the Spirit be summoning Jesus’ followers to serve God with both joy and awe? If so, Hebrews 12 summons Jesus’ followers and Church to seek the Spirit’s guidance on how to worship God with appropriate amounts of both gratitude and respect, with both great joy and a deep sense of God’s holiness.

*I have here and elsewhere added in brackets the Greek words for the English words the NIV translation uses.

Illustration

In his compelling book, One Lost Soul: Richard Nixon’s Search for Salvation, Daniel Silliman describes what the American President Nixon thought of as “acceptable worship.” In it the author notes that no president before or since Nixon hosted more worship services in the White House.

Yet Silliman also goes on to observe: “The service wasn’t for ‘scrubby’ families. It wasn’t for sinners or repentant people seeking grace. It wasn’t for top White House officials to bow their heads in humility, gratitude or supplication. It was for Nixon and what he wanted. He insisted on control.”