In the New Testament letter to the Hebrews, the writer compares Jesus to the high priests of the Old Testament. The priests used to offer animal sacrifices to atone for the sins of the people. Jesus, on the other hand, offered up His own life so that we could be forgiven and have the right to come into God's presence. After developing this idea in Hebrews chapter 4 and 5, the writer turns in chapter 6 to speaking about the certainty and trustworthiness of God's promise.
It is impossible for God to lie, he says in Hebrews 6:18 - 19. If we believe what He has promised and hold on tight, we will live our lives with hope, and that hope will be like an anchor for our soul. We can be firm and secure, he says, because it's that hope, that anchor, that takes us through the veil and right into God's presence, where Jesus went before us to prepare the way.
The Greek word here is elpis, which means hope, faith or expectation. The writer is saying that our faith is an anchor that stops us from being cast adrift in the storms of life.
Just a few pages later in our Bible, another writer, James, shows us what it looks like if we don't have faith and we drift through life without that anchor, he says that we will be tossed around like the waves of the sea. James uses the Greek word diakrinÅ, translated in most Bibles as to doubt or to waver... but if we look up diakrinÅ in a Greek dictionary, we discover that it also means to oppose or disagree with what God has said. If we don't take God at His word, we'll be at the mercy of stormy seas, with no anchor to keep us safe and "grounded."
There's a difference between doubt and unbelief. It's not wrong to have doubts, but it's how we respond to them that matters. When John the Baptist was thrown in prison, he began to have doubts about his faith in Jesus. (See Matt 11: 2 - 3 or Luke 7: 19 - 20) But he didn't wallow in those doubts, he didn't tell himself, "Here I am in prison and Jesus doesn't care; he's not doing anything to help me. Probably he's not even the Messiah." Instead, he took his doubts directly to Jesus and asked for help. From his prison cell, he sent messengers to Jesus, asking, "Are you really the Messiah or should we be expecting someone else?"
If you know the story, Jesus didn't criticise him or judge him for his doubts. Instead, He pointed him to the truth. He reminded the messengers of what the scriptures said about the Messiah and pointed out how those promises were being fulfilled - in the preaching of the gospel, the healing of the sick and the raising of the dead.
Doubt is not sin if we take our doubt to Jesus and choose to believe what He says. But when we believe our doubts rather than believing Jesus, that's unbelief, and unbelief is a sin. It's saying that we are right and God is wrong. And, as the writer to the Hebrews says, we only have that anchor for our soul if we hold on to the fact that God never lies and His word is completely trustworthy.
So although Anchor is not a biblical name of God, I couldn't help thinking today that Jesus is in fact an anchor for us. He's the strong, firm, unshakeable One that gives us security and stops us from being shipwrecked in life's storms. We may still feel tossed around, but we know that our anchor will always hold firm.
