The Glory of the Son

For the Lord’s Day:  the 23^rd of February 2003

 

Hebrews: 2: 5-9

“Now it was not to angels that God subjected the world to come, of which we are speaking.  It has been testified somewhere,

 

‘What is man that you are mindful of him, or the son of man, that you care for him?  You made him for a little while lower than the angels; you have crowned him with glory and honor, putting everything in subjection under his feet.’

 

 Now in putting everything in subjection to him, he left nothing outside his control.  At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him.  But we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.”

 

Introduction:  Ancient kings as well as many contemporary leaders, protected their food supply and thereby their own lives by employing “professional” food tasters.  Directly to the point, every item of food meant for the ruler’s palette had to be tasted, just in case - powerful poisons had purposely been included in the recipe!  You see, in the ancient world and even into the late Middle Ages – there were all kinds of spells, herbal concoctions and specific chemicals to create a worse life for those subjected to attack.  This was one major reason why the early Greek medical doctors subjected the members of their craft to the Hippocratic Oath – promising to do no harm to their patients on purpose.

 

Almost never in recorded history do you see the great and powerful going out of their way to taste the food meant for peasants – so that thereby the general health of the population might be improved.  When I was in the Army, the officers and Chaplains especially were encouraged to sample the food served to the ordinary GI’s to make certain there was no general cause for complaint.  After all, one of the Chaplain’s duties was to serve as morale officer so that he could advise the unit commanders about the underlying ability and willingness of the soldiers to do their duty.

 

On one occasion I complained about the oily-liver like taste rampant in the cook-house beef supply at lunch.  The Chaplain immediately walked over to the mess and sampled what the ordinary guys in line were eating.  He then took the Horse meat back to officer’s country and showed it to the unit commander.  Within a week and a half – the head cook was on his way to Fort Leavenworth: having been charged with selling our fresh eggs, beef and countless other items on the local black market and substituting substandard ersatz European commodities!

 

It was absolutely amazing how quickly the vitality, taste and aroma of our daily food improved.  So much so – that the city boys began complaining that they missed the blandness of their ordinary existence.  The point of my story is simple, when the powers-that-be take an interest in the lives of the ordinary: the living of life improves for all concerned.

 

Development:  And yet, these examples fall so far short of adequacy in explaining the kind and loving mercy exhibited by our Father in heaven for those lost and weary souls claimed for a better destiny in His eternal presence.  “He put His glory by” runs an old poem that describes the coming of the Godhead down to earth in the form of a servant Son of Man!

 

Commentator John Brown raises for our consideration two popular views of the verses before us in their context of the whole paragraph which we will continue and finish next week.  The question in many minds concerns the purpose of this paragraph which is either: “the prosecution of the argument for the superiority of Jesus Christ to the angels – interrupted by that beautiful and impressive practical” admonition we considered last week.  “Or, it may be considered as an answer to an objection, which might not unnaturally rise in the mind of the reader, to this doctrine of the superiority of Jesus Christ to the angels, from the consideration of His being a man – a mortal man – ‘a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief’ – a man who actually died, and died in circumstances of peculiar agony and ignominy.”

 

The peculiar point in question is simply this.  Do we find in this passage from the Eighth Psalm a specific and prophetic reference to the Messiah or is the context of the Psalm the more general mandate sounded fourth in the creation narratives of Genesis for the subjection of the earth to the rule of Adam’s progeny as we might readily read:  “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.  And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” (Genesis 1: 26)

 

Raymond Brown makes this observation:  “With the aid of Psalm 8, the writer wants to emphasize not only that Jesus has entered fully into our humanity, but more especially that he is the ideal man, man as God really intended him to be.”

 

F.F. Bruce would continue this line of thought:  “The conception of Christ as the last Adam is certainly no innovation on our author’s part … God’s man as the fulfiller of God’s purpose meets us in the Old Testament … [and] when one man fails in the accomplishment of the divine purpose … God raises up another to take his place.  But who could take the place of Adam?  Only one who was capable of undoing the effects of Adam’s fall and thus ushering in a new world order.”

 

There are many New Testament themes that we could use to describe this New Administration of Christ.  There is the passage where Jesus tells the disciples that He “saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.”  In this sense, commentators presume that any angelic ordering of national destinies is thereby brought into complete subjection to the will and purpose of Christ the Lord - a fact declared in the context of our passage today. 

 

Second, is the ongoing Christological appearance and reality of the Kingdom of Heaven being brought in even now in these last days, both then in Jesus time and continuing now and into the future.  Recently, some of Sir Isaac Newton’s personal papers have turned up in the Mid-East.  What we usually do not hear is that in addition to his interest in science, alchemy and theology: is that he researched and wrote extensively about the end of the age and the coming in glory of Jesus Christ.  The newly rediscovered papers even contained a final date from his presumptive “scientific” studies of the Covenant texts.

 

But, that is not important – what is important in the context of our passage today is that even with the declaration of the New Administration, we are still limited in that knowing and realizing, as verse eight faithfully declares: “At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him.”  However, we are still willing to admit on the basis of scripture that “for those who love God all things work together for good for those who are called according to his purpose.”

 

And this is the impact of the text before us: here is an announcement of not only the future glory and reign of the second Adam, but also in the context of chapter one: the declaration of the ongoing reign of Jesus Christ from the beginning of time and even more into the future forever.

 

Application:  And even though as our passage describes – Jesus did descend below the stature of angels to be born in the flesh that was only a temporary event which was and is still meant to lift members of the fallen race of Adam once again to an eternal place in the presence of God the Father.  Remember, the angelic servants are and always have been poised to serve not only the Father in heaven but also the purpose and place of mankind within the structure of God’s heavenly ordering.  And while, because of the fall – all mankind was demeaned, this was and is not the permanent state of those who are being redeemed!  “In Adam’s sin we all did fall” runs a colonial acrostic designed to use even the memory of the alphabet to remind us of the reality of our original situation without Christ.

 

And yet now, because of what Christ has done, all of the spiritual children of Abraham are raised from sin and death so that we can aspire to a heavenly future because of what Christ has done for us.  John Owen outline’s this blessed hope in four points with which we will conclude our meditations today.

 

The last words of our passage today describe the exaltation of Jesus Christ in these glorious words:  He was “crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.”

 

First, Owen writes: the Apostle “mentions the reason behind Christ’s humiliation ‘so that by the grace of God’” certain things may be accomplished in and through the Son of Man.  Here we must understand “that grace, God’s grace, was the impulse behind Christ’s death.  It was the gracious, free, sovereign purpose of God’s will, suited to and arising from his natural grace, love, goodness, pity, mercy, and compassion, working together.  It was not of any anger or displeasure on God’s part against Christ that caused Christ’s death.  It was out of love and kindness toward others, who would not otherwise have been brought to glory, that Christ was thus appointed to die.”

 

It is a national treasure to have so many battlefield memorials and cemeteries scattered around the world.  From Valley Forge, to Gettysburg, to Normandy and Pearl Harbor and even the broken and scattered bones and dust in far off jungles or even ocean depths – there lie countless sacrifices for freedom’s light so tenuously still burning in our day and time.  That collection is about to be added to once again and will be until the end of time.  While many critics abound, and whine and make their selfishness publicly known – the treasures of mortality sacrificed for the common good and a hope for a better life remain for those who will take the time to appreciate the cost of freedom.  There are several holidays set aside to remember the survivors of countless wars and rumors of war.

 

So it is far more fitting that the human race once bound in the chains of sin and deluded by the myths of Satan: to gather one day in seven – as instructed from the beginning of time: to give honor and glory and worship to the One who died that we might live eternally.

 

Second, as Owen observes:  “the kind of death Christ died is described as: ‘he might taste death for everyone.’  To die in this way is to experience the sorrows, bitterness, and penalties of death.”  We should focus in this phrase on the specific word “taste” so that we understand that “Christ’s tasting death also implies his conquest over death.  For the phrase taste death, as applied to Christ, indicates … that he neither was nor could be detained by its power.”

 

Just as we started with the image of taste-testers for sovereign rulers, so have we come full circle in the providential plan for our salvation.  The God of all heaven and earth would not leave us hopeless, but did indeed taste the poison we all so richly deserve in order that death might die and Christ might live and reign.  The death of death is as much to be celebrated in the victory of Christ as is the promise and prospect of eternity realized in His final presence.

 

Third, is the promise and premise that Christ tasted death for others, for everyone who would come to faith in Him.  In the Old Covenant we read how “David wished that he could have died in Absalom’s place.  David longed to die for Absalom, so that Absalom could live.  So the most common way of interpreting these words is to ‘die for another,’ meaning that the death is in his place.  The Jews understood this about their sacrifices, where the life of the animal was accepted in the place of the life of the sinner.”

 

Jesus Christ died for us in this sense:  a sense realized and understood ever since Abraham stood on the mountain and received a lamb in place of his one and only son: Isaac.  In order to impress upon an ungodly man who needed the gospel I once used an image of a Cuban refugee hunkered down in a flimsy inner tube.  Around him swam a swarm of curious sharks.  Providentially, there appeared a Coast Guard helicopter just as one of the patches on the old tube let loose.  The rescue rope and sling were lowered, but the victim was falling into the water and just as a Great White opened its jaws to invite him to dinner, a Coast Guardsman jumped down and fell into the victims place.

 

That is its rawest terms is the cost of our salvation.  He tasted death for us so that we, the redeemed might taste of his blood and body in the table of bread and the fruit of the vine set before the members of Christ’s own Church.

 

Fourth and last, the “everyone” detailed in the last word of this section means all of those for whom Christ died who we will see described in the remainder of this paragraph and chapter and book in the coming weeks and months. 

 

What hope have we in heaven?  I am reminded of a young writer who was addicted to alcohol at least and even rumored to have tried opium as well.  He hardly ever made an adequate living, his young wife was constantly sick and the young man was found lying in a gutter, having died we believe from rabies caught from a rat in his squalid apartment.

 

The world little appreciates the sorrow of his soul, but in one of his most memorable stories he describes the symbolic “Pit and Pendulum”, in the horror of a dungeon’s bottomless pit and the pressing passage of time.  Alternately, in this sickening dream sequence – his devilish tormentors heat the metal walls so as to force him into the pit.  And yet, even in life’s desperation – his fictional story ends with an unexpected and untimely salvation.  He was rescued in the last paragraph, and the last lines of his story!  Given the undying hope of that fictional account, we can only hope that this testimony on the part of Edgar Allen Poe had a higher and better meaning!

 

So may we all, on the basis of what Christ has done on our behalf: have a precious hope in heaven – knowing that it was for us that Christ came, it was for us Christ died, it was for us Christ rose from the dead and it is for us that Christ reigns in heaven.  Amen.

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PREACHING RESOURCES

 

Brown, John.  A Geneva Series Commentary: Hebrews.

Brown, Raymond.  The Bible Speaks Today: The Message of Hebrews.

Bruce, F.F. The Epistle to the Hebrews.

Hewitt, Thomas.  Tyndale New Testament Commentaries: Epistle to the Hebrews.

Owen, John:  Commentary on Book of Hebrews.

The Holy Bible: English Standard Version

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