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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadCambridge Greek Testament for Schools and Colleges - Hebrews 12:23 - 12:23
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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
23. πανηγύρει. The word means a general festive assembly, as in Son 7:1 (LXX.). It has been questioned whether both clauses refer to Angels—“To myriads of Angels, a Festal Assembly, and Church of Firstborn enrolled in Heaven”—or whether two classes of the Blessed are intended, viz. “To myriads of Angels, (and) to a Festal Assembly and Church of Firstborn.” The absence of “and” before πανήγυρις makes this latter construction doubtful, and the first construction is untenable because the Angels are never called in the N.T. either “a Church” (but see Psa 89:5) or “Firstborn.” On the whole the best and simplest way of taking the text seems to be “But ye are come … to Myriads—a Festal Assembly of Angels—and to the Church of the Firstborn … and to spirits of the Just who have been perfected.”
ἀπογεγραμμένων ἐν οὐρανοῖς. “Who have been enrolled in heaven.” This refers to the Church of living Christians, to whom the Angels are “ministering spirits,” and whose names, though they are still living on earth, have been enrolled in the heavenly registers (Luk 10:20; Rom 8:16; Rom 8:29; Jam 1:18) as “a kind of firstfruits of His creatures” unto God and to the Lamb (Rev 14:4). These, like Jacob, have inherited the privileges of firstborn which the Jews, like Esau, have rejected.
κριτῇ θεῷ πάντων. Into whose hands, rather than into the hands of man, it is a blessing to fall, because He is “the righteous Judge” (2Ti 4:8).
τετελειωμένων. That is, to saints now glorified and perfected—i.e. brought to the consummation of their course—in heaven (Rev 7:14-17). This has been interpreted only of the glorified saints of the Old Covenant, but there is no reason to confine it to them. The writer tells the Hebrews that they have come not to a flaming hill, and a thunderous darkness, and a terror-stricken multitude, but to Mount Sion and the Heavenly Jerusalem, where they will be united with the Angels of joy and mercy (Luk 15:10), with the happy Church of living Saints, and with the spirits of the Just made perfect. The three clauses give us a beautiful conception of “the Communion of the Saints above and the Church below” with myriads of Angels united in a Festal throng, in a Heaven now ideally existent and soon to be actually realised.