The Way Into the Holiest is F. B. Meyer’s devotional walk through the Epistle to the Hebrews, and its whole message can be held in a single phrase: there is a road open into the presence of God, and it runs through Jesus Christ, our great High Priest. Where a scholar might dissect Hebrews for its arguments, Meyer takes the reader by the arm and walks the epistle slowly, chapter by chapter, asking at every turn what it means for a tired, doubting, real believer to draw near to God today. If you have ever felt that God was distant, that your faith had drifted, or that rest of soul was for other people and not for you, this is a book written with you in mind.
What the book is, and what Meyer set out to do
Hebrews is one of the richest and, for many readers, most intimidating letters in the New Testament — dense with priesthood, sacrifice, tabernacle furniture, and warnings that make the heart tremble. Meyer’s aim is not to add another technical commentary to the shelf but to make the epistle pastoral: to show that its towering theology exists to bring anxious people close to a merciful God. He preached these expositions to ordinary congregations before he wrote them down, and it shows. Every doctrine lands as comfort or as summons.
The title itself carries his intention. The way into the holiest — into the innermost place where God dwells, once shut off by a veil — has been thrown open. Meyer wants his reader to walk through that opened way with confidence, not to stand outside admiring the architecture. The book is at once an exposition, a devotional, and an invitation. It reads best not as information to be absorbed but as a guide to a place you are meant to enter.
How the book follows the epistle
Meyer keeps in step with Hebrews from first verse to last, and one of the simplest gifts of the book is that it doubles as a running companion to the letter. He opens where the epistle opens, with God who spoke of old in fragments through the prophets and has now spoken finally in a Son (Hebrews 1:1). From there he traces the great movements of the argument: the dignity of Christ above angels, the strange necessity of his sufferings, the perils of drifting and unbelief, the gospel of rest, the priesthood after the order of Melchizedek, the better covenant, the once-for-all sacrifice, and the long roll call of faith that ends with eyes fixed on Jesus.
Because Meyer moves passage by passage, the book’s thirty-odd short chapters map neatly onto the epistle’s own flow. Chapters like “Drifting,” “The Gospel of Rest,” “The Anchorage of the Soul,” and “The Blood of Christ” take up the letter’s hinge texts one at a time. A reader working through Hebrews with an open Bible can read the corresponding chapter of Meyer alongside it and find the hard places opened and the warm places warmed.
The central themes
Four great notes sound through the whole book, the same four that give Hebrews its power.
Christ our great High Priest
This is the beating heart of the epistle and of Meyer’s exposition. Humanity has always reached for a priest — someone to stand between the soul and God, to carry its needs upward and bring mercy down. Meyer shows how every such longing, so often exploited and disappointed, finds its true and final answer in Jesus, who is both sacrifice and priest, and who has passed into the heavens on our behalf.
It is sufficient to say here, that all that men have sought to realize in human priesthoods, but in vain, is realized with transcendent beauty in him.
F. B. Meyer
Because our High Priest has been tempted as we are and has learned obedience through what he suffered, he is not a distant official but a sympathising helper. This is why Meyer dwells so tenderly on the invitation to come boldly to the throne of grace to find mercy and grace to help in time of need (Hebrews 4:16).
The superiority of Christ
Hebrews is a book of comparisons, and in every one Christ is greater — greater than the prophets, than angels, than Moses, than Aaron and the whole Levitical order, than the old covenant with its repeated sacrifices. Meyer follows each contrast to show that Jesus is the express image of God’s substance, upholding all things by the word of his power (Hebrews 1:3). The point is never mere ranking. If Christ is supreme, then to drift from him is to drift from the only refuge there is, and to rest in him is to rest on the highest ground in the universe.
Drawing near
The veil is torn; the road is open. Meyer returns again and again to the summons that gives the book its name: having boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus (Hebrews 10:19), let us draw near. He is honest about why we hang back — our sense of unworthiness, our fear of God’s purity — and he answers that fear not by minimising it but by pointing to the blood that has already dealt with it.
It is not the great white throne of judgment, but the rainbow-girt throne of grace.
F. B. Meyer
Drawing near, for Meyer, is not a mystical technique reserved for advanced souls but the ordinary privilege of every believer, offered freely and to be taken up daily.
Faith and rest
Meyer gives some of his most searching pages to the “rest that remains for the people of God” (Hebrews 4:9). He is clear that this rest is not idleness but a settled heart — the peace of a will no longer at war with God’s will. It is entered, like everything in Hebrews, by faith, and it is refused, as Israel refused it in the wilderness, by unbelief.
This rest is holding out both its hands to the weary souls of men throughout the ages, offering its shelter as a harbor from the storms of life.
F. B. Meyer
Running under all four themes is the great appeal of the epistle’s eleventh and twelfth chapters: to run the race with patience, laying aside every weight, looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith (Hebrews 12:2). Faith, for Meyer, is the hand that takes hold of what Christ has done and steps into the rest he has secured.
Who should read it
This book is for the believer who finds Hebrews forbidding and wants a trustworthy companion to walk them through it. It is for anyone who feels their faith slowly slipping — Meyer’s chapter on “Drifting” alone is worth the reading — and for the weary Christian who has never quite believed that rest of soul was on offer to them. It is for those wrestling with assurance, who need to hear that the throne they approach is a throne of grace and not of judgment.
It also rewards the preacher, teacher, or small-group leader looking for a model of how to make deep doctrine warm and applicable. Meyer never leaves a truth in the air; he presses it home to the conscience and the affections. Because the chapters are short and self-contained, the book suits both patient study and unhurried daily devotion. It asks nothing of the reader but an open Bible and a willing heart.
How to read it today
The most fruitful way to read The Way Into the Holiest is with the Epistle to the Hebrews open beside it. Read a passage of the letter first, then the matching chapter of Meyer, and let him unfold what you have just read. Because Ochorus hosts the full text free, you can keep both open at once and move between them without friction.
Take it slowly. These were sermons before they were chapters, meant to be received a little at a time. One chapter a day, read prayerfully rather than quickly, will do more good than a rushed sweep through the whole. Meyer’s nineteenth-century prose is vivid but occasionally ornate; where an image or an allusion feels dense, read for the movement of the thought rather than every phrase, and the central point will come clear.
Read it, above all, as an invitation rather than a lecture. Meyer laments how few believers have entered the rest that is theirs.
How few Christians seem to have learned the secret of the inner rest!
F. B. Meyer
Let each chapter press its question: am I actually drawing near, or only reading about it? The book is designed to move you from the outer court into the holiest place, and it does its work when you let its texts become your own prayers. Keep a note of the verses that arrest you — the anchor of the soul (Hebrews 6:19), the answer to “what is man?” (Hebrews 2:6), the unchanging Savior (Hebrews 13:8) — and return to them.
Readers who are drawn to Meyer’s pastoral voice here will find the same heart, turned toward the life of guidance and surrender, in his companion classic The Secret of Guidance. And the fuller story of the man behind these expositions — his own hard-won surrender and his ministry of consecration — is worth knowing; you can read about F. B. Meyer before or after you take up the book. When you are ready, the whole of The Way Into the Holiest is yours to read here in full.
For reflection
Whether you read alone or with a group, a few questions will help the book do its deeper work:
- Meyer warns that most of us do not renounce Christ so much as quietly drift from him. Where in your own life do you feel the pull of that current, and what would it look like to drop anchor again?
- Hebrews invites us to come boldly to the throne of grace (Hebrews 4:16). What fears or feelings of unworthiness keep you standing outside the veil, and how does the blood of Jesus (Hebrews 10:19) answer them?
- Meyer distinguishes rest from idleness — the peace of a will no longer at war with God’s. In what area is your will still pulling against God’s, and what would it mean to enter his rest there?
- If Christ is truly our sympathising High Priest who was tempted as we are, how might that change the way you bring your ordinary struggles to God this week?
- Hebrews 12:2 calls us to run the race looking unto Jesus. What one “weight” is Meyer’s exposition prompting you to lay aside?
Come to the book not to master a difficult epistle but to walk a road that has already been opened for you. Meyer will keep you company the whole way in, and the destination is nothing less than the presence of God.
