19 We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain, 20 where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf, having become a high priest forever after the order of Melchizedek (Heb. 6:19-20).
During World War II, the HMS Neptune hit an Italian minefield off Tripoli on December 19, 1941. Lost were 764 British and New Zealand sailors and crew. Only one man survived. He was twenty-year-old Norman Walton, and he escaped by clambering down the chain of the ship’s anchor and grabbing onto a floating raft. He was captured by an Italian ship and spent the next fifteen months as a prisoner of war. He had no idea he was the one-and-only survivor. When told, he didn’t believe it. It took a long time to accept.[i]
In biblical times, when a large ship came into port, they looked for a rock embedded in the granite of the harbor. The rock was called the anchorea, the word from which we get our word “anchor.” When a larger ship would sail into port, two or three of her chief hands would disembark into smaller boats, row into the harbor, and fasten the rope to the anchorea-rock. The ship would then follow the strength of the rope as the hands brought the boat into the harbor and anchored it securely.
The story of Norman Walton and Hebrews 6 reminds us to be anchored in Christ. As the writer suggests, Jesus is our forerunner, and He has carried our anchor behind the veil into the presence of God the Father. He has affixed that anchor to the very throne of God. As we move through life into the turbulent waters and troubled times, we have anchor that is secure. Hope is not an abstract principle – it’s a Person and His name is Jesus.
We need to stay near the anchor that stabilizes our lives, ready to grip it tightly when the winds and fires come. We can’t sink when we’re holding to the anchor, and we can’t be lost when gripping it. Our anchor isn’t cast downward into the water but upward into the sky, and one day it will carry us upward, toward the Rock of our Salvation.
As the hymnwriter Edward
Mote so eloquently expressed, “When darkness veils His lovely face / I rest on
His unchanging grace / In every high and stormy gale / My anchor holds within
the veil.”
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