02 - Teaching of the Epistle to the Hebrews

II. TEACHING OF THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS The conception of the person of Christ which underlies and finds expression in the Epistle to the Hebrews is indistinguishable from that which governs all the allusions to Our Lord in the Epistles of Paul. To the author of this epistle Our Lord is above all else the Son of God in the most eminent sense of that word; and it is the Divine dignity and majesty belonging to Him from His very nature which forms the fundamental feature of the image of Christ which stands before his mind. And yet it is this author who, perhaps above all others of the New Testament writers, emphasizes the truth of the humanity of Christ, and dwells with most particularity upon the elements of His human nature and experience. The great Christological passage which fills chap. ii of the Epistle to the Hebrews rivals in its richness and fulness of detail, and its breadth of implication, that of Php 2:1-30. It is thrown up against the background of the remarkable exposition of the Divine dignity of the Son which occupies chap. 1 (notice the "therefore" of Php 2:1). There the Son had been declared to be "the effulgence of his (God’s) glory, and the very image of his substance, through whom the universe has been created and by the word of whose power all things are held in being"; and His exaltation above the angels, by means of whom the Old Covenant had been inaugurated, is measured by the difference between the designations "ministering spirits" proper to the one, and the Son of God, nay, God itself (Php 1:8-9), proper to the other. The purpose of the succeeding statement is to enhance in the thought of the Jewish readers of the epistle the value of the salvation wrought by this Divine Saviour, by removing from their minds the offence they were in danger of taking at His lowly life and shameful death on earth. This earthly humiliation finds its abundant justification, we are told, in the greatness of the end which it sought and attained. By it Our Lord has, with His strong feet, broken out a pathway along which, in Him, sinful man may at length climb up to the high destiny which was promised him when it was declared he should have dominion over all creation. Jesus Christ stooped only to conquer, and He stooped to conquer not for Himself (for He was in His own person no less than God), but for us. The language in which the humiliation of the Son of God is in the first instance described is derived from the context. The establishment of His Divine majesty in chap. i had taken the form of an exposition of His infinite exaltation above the angels, the highest of all creatures. His humiliation is described here therefore as being "made a little lower than the angels" (Hebrews 2:9). What is meant is simply that He became man; the phraseology is derived from Psalms 8:1-9, Authorized Version, from which had just been cited the declaration that God has made man (despite his insignificance) "but a little lower than the angels," thus crowning him with glory and honor. The adoption of the language of the psalm to describe Our Lord’s humiliation has the secondary effect, accordingly, of greatly enlarging the reader’s sense of the immensity of the humiliation of the Son of God in becoming man: He descended an infinite distance to reach man’s highest conceivable exaltation. As, however, the primary purpose of the adoption of the language is merely to declare that the Son of God became man, so it is shortly afterward explained (Hebrews 2:14) as an entering into participation in the blood and flesh which are common to men: "Since then the children are sharers in flesh and blood, he also himself in like manner partook of the same." The voluntariness, the reality, the completeness of the assumption of humanity by the Son of God, are all here emphasized. The proximate end of Our Lord’s assumption of humanity is declared to be that He might die; He was "made a little lower than the angels . . . because of the suffering of death" (Hebrews 2:9); He took part in blood and flesh in order "that through death . . ." (Hebrews 2:14). The Son of God as such could not die; to Him belongs by nature an "indissoluble life" (Hebrews 7:16 in.). If he was to die, therefore, He must take to Himself another nature to which the experience of death were not impossible (Hebrews 2:17). Of course it is not meant that death was desired by Him for its own sake. The purpose of our passage is to save its Jewish readers from the offence of the death of Christ. What they are bidden to observe is, therefore, Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels because of the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honor, that by the grace of God the bitterness of death which he tasted might redound to the benefit of every man’ (Hebrews 2:9), and the argument is immediately pressed home that it was eminently suitable for God Almighty, in bringing many sons into glory, to make the Captain of their salvation perfect (as a Saviour) by means of suffering. The meaning is that it was only through suffering that these men, being sinners, could be brought into glory. And therefore in the plainer statement of verse 14 we read that Our Lord took part in flesh and blood in order "that through death he might bring to nought him that has the power of death, that is, the devil; and might deliver all them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage"; and in the still plainer statement of Hebrews 2:17 that the ultimate object of His assimilation to men was that He might "make propitiation for the sins of the people." It is for the salvation of sinners that Our Lord has come into the world; but, as that salvation can be wrought only by suffering and death, the proximate end of His assumption of humanity remains that He might die; whatever is more than this gathers around this. The completeness of Our Lord’s assumption of humanity and of His identification of Himself]f with it receives strong emphasis in this passage. He took part in the flesh and blood which is the common heritage of men, after the same fashion that other men participate in it (Hebrews 2:14); and, having thus be-come a man among men, He shared with other men the ordinary circumstances and fortunes of life, "in all things" (Hebrews 2:17). The stress is laid on trials, sufferings, death; but this is due to the actual course in which His life ran—and that it might run in which He became man—and is not exclusive of Other human experiences. What is intended is that He became truly a man, and lived a truly human life, subject to all the experiences natural to a man in the particular circumstances in which He lived.

It is not implied, however, that during this human life— "the days of his flesh" (v. 7)—He had ceased to be God, or to have at His disposal the attributes which belonged to Him as God. That is already excluded by the representations of chap. 1. The glory of this dispensation consists precisely in the bringing of its revelations directly by the Divine Son rather than by mere prophets (Hebrews 1:1), and it was as the effulgence of God’s glory and the express image of His substance, upholding the universe by the word of His power, that this Son made purification of sins (Hebrews 1:3). Indeed, we are expressly told that even in the days of the flesh, He continued still a Son (v. 8), and that it was precisely in this that the wonder lay: that though He was and remained (imperfect participle) a Son, He yet learned the obedience He had set Himself to (cf. Php 2:8) by the things which He suffered. Similarly, we are told not only that, though an Israelite of the tribe of Judah, He possessed "the power of an indissoluble life" (Hebrews 7:16 in.), but, describing that higher nature which gave Him this power as an "eternal Spirit" (cf. "spirit of holiness," Romans 1:4), that it was through this eternal Spirit that He could offer Himself without blemish unto God, a real and sufficing sacrifice, in contrast with the shadows of the Old Covenant (Hebrews 9:14). Though a man, therefore, and truly man, sprung out of Judah (Hebrews 7:14), touched with the feeling of human infirmities (Hebrews 4:15), and tempted like as we are, He was not altogether like other men. For one thing, He was "without sin" (Hebrews 4:15; Hebrews 7:26), and, by this characteristic, He was, in every sense of the words, separated from sinners. Despite the completeness of His identification with men, He remained, therefore, even in the days of His flesh different from them and above them.