hadowed for Him, refused not to
submit to that supreme rejection.

From this the apostolic Writer draws two messages for his readers. First
(ver. 13) they are to follow the Lord outside, willing to be rejected
like Him and because of Him. They are to be patient, for His sake, when
they are "put out of the synagogues" and reproached as traitors to
Moses. They are by faith to conquer the cry of their human hearts as
they crave perpetuity for the beloved past; they are to remember (ver.
14), as they issue from the old covenant's gate into what seems the
wild, that "Jerusalem that now is" was built for time only, and that
they belong to the city of eternity, where their High Priest sits on His
throne to bless them now and welcome them hereafter. Then, secondly and
therefore (ver. 15), they are to use Him now and for ever as their one
sacerdotal Mediator. By Him, not by the Aaronic ministry, they are to
bring their sacrifices to God. They are to accept exclusion and to turn
it into inclusion, into a shutting-up of all their hopes and all their
worship into their glorious Christ. And what now is their altar-ritual
to be? It is to be twofold; the offering of praise, "the fruit of lips
that confess" the glory of "His Name," and then the sacrifice of self
and its possessions for others for His sake (ver. 16); "doing good, and
communicating" blessings; for these are "altar-sacrifices ([Greek:
thysiai]) with which God is well pleased."

Such, if we are right, is the connexion. The Lord, rejected, that He
might die for us after a manner faithful to the prophetic type, is to be
the Hebrew disciple's example of patience when he too is rejected. Such
rejection is only to unite him the more closely to the Christ as his way
to God, his Mediator for all the praise and all the unselfish service
which is to fill his dedicated life.

The lesson was special for the believing Hebrew then. But it has its
meaning for all time. In one way or another the true follower of the
crucified and rejected Redeemer must _stand ready_ for cross and for
exclusion, so far as he is called upon by his faith to break with all
ultimate and absolute allegiance save to "Jesus Christ and Him
crucified." He has to recollect, on one account or another, that he too
belongs to the invisible order, to the "citizenship that is in heaven,"
and not to any visible polity as if it were final, as if it were his
spirit's goal. But then he too is to make this detachment and s