Hebrews 2:9-18

Hebrews 2:9-18

This passage is a nearly complete description of God's redemptive plan. It includes the pre-incarnation and divinity of Christ and the fullness of His humanity. It tells us of the sympathy He has because He was fully human. We see His sinless life and nature. It identifies Him as both the sacrifice that saves and the One who offers that sacrifice. We see His complete victory over the devil by use of the devil's primary weapon: death. We see Jesus’ identification with man and the fellowship He shares with us. If the only passage one had to study were these verses in a careful and detailed study, they would end up with a fairly complete and full understanding of God‘s cosmic and overall plan for our salvation. Unfortunately, we do not have space for such a detailed theology.

However, there is a unique description in this text to which we will give special attention. In verse 14 we read, “…through death he might render powerless him who had the power of death, the devil.” Since the Garden of Eden, the devil has had one trump card, if you will: the power of death. Like all powers, the evil one operates under the limits of God. But when man allied himself with the devil, he became subject to separation from God and from life. Death was the original terror weapon. The heathens and pagans could find no real hope or remedy for death. They looked to death as perhaps nothingness, loss of identity, a life of gloom and subterranean prison, gibbering madness, or an extension of this life, which is why they tried to take familiar trinkets with them. The powers of darkness kept their victims bound to the hopeless truth of their coming death. The devil’s hate for God and God‘s beautiful creation; man, motivated the evil spirits to torment and numb man into the hopelessness of death. “Life is hard and miserable, and then you die and it gets worse.” Death was a trump card Satan loved to play. All his other tricks, tools, and traps were related and rooted in death. Even pleasure was used by Satan to point to death: “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we will die.” Christ comes and, bear with the crude illustration, takes the weapon the club of death, from the devil’s hand, and with that very weapon beats the devil powerless. On Good Friday the devil may have believed that he had finally won a great victory in his long war against God. Only to find Easter morning that the weapon that he had so used and wielded with such power was taken from him and was used to crush him. Death, rather than a terror weapon, became a bridge to life. What beauty and hope!

“Thank you Lord, that death is the one who has died. AMEN”

Hebrews 2:1-8

Hebrews 2:1-8

The author continues his teachings of the superiority of Christ over angels, but in this moment he digresses. Digressions will happen five times in this book, and these are always a warning about leaving faith in Christ for something else. Remember the original readers were under intense pressure to leave the Christian faith and return to Judaism. In this warning about the dangers of leaving the faith, the author uses a powerful metaphor from the experience of maritime travel. We read this nautical warning and may not recognize its naval roots. The phrase “because of this…,” that is, Christ’s superiority over angels, “…we must pay closer attention” is much more expressive and passionate in the original language than it is in English. The picture or warning is that we must be completely and passionately focused on Christ. This phrase could be translated, “It is our passionate duty to superabundantly” pay attention. The word translated “pay close attention” is a deeply personal word; sometimes it was used to describe paying attention to clothing or even pregnancy. It was primarily a word used to describe the way a ship’s pilot had to pay close attention as the ship approached the harbor. Without constant attention to his task, the pilot might find the ship drifting away. The word “drift away” describes a ship that is pushed off course by the currents. Rather than going into the harbor, the ship is carried down the coast, out to sea, or into a sandbar. By momentary inattention, the ship is lost.

It is important to note that those who leave the faith, who go off into the life of sin, or who become apostate, don’t do so in a moment or in an instant. The preacher who leaves his wife and runs away with another woman had a long and likely secret history of emotion or physical infidelity. Long before their flight out of state, there was a flight of fancy. The Christian who is discovered to be scamming the innocent for money, drifted into corruption with a few nibbles here or there. Heretics don’t begin with radical false doctrines; they make a small twist to a small interpretation first.

If we don’t pay close attention to the message of Christ, we are in danger of drifting inch by inch away either morally, doctrinally, personally, and/or spiritually. It is in the attention to the little things that we help secure the right course for the larger things. If we want a great faith, it must begin by being faithful in small things.

“Lord, help me keep my heart loyal to you in every detail. AMEN”