Bible Commentaries

Hebrews 2:1

There is nothing I so hardly beleeve to be in man as constancie, and nothing so easie to be found in him, as inconstancy.... Our ordinary manner is to follow the inclination of our appetite this way and that way, on the left or on the right hand; upward and downe-ward, according as the winde of occasions doth transport us; we never thinke on what we would have, but at the instant we would have it: and change as that beast that takes the colour of the place wherein it is laid. What we even now purposed we alter by and by, and presently returne to our former biase. We goe not, but we are carried: as things that flote, now sliding gently, now pulling violently, according as the water Hebrews 2:1

The counsel is one to Christian men to beware of drifting from Christ Such is our theme—Drifting from Christ. But perhaps it is natural we should speak of another thing first.

I. It must be a long while now since men began to speak of their life as a running stream. It was inevitable the figure should suggest itself to them as soon as they began to think; we all feel its aptness as often as we reflect upon the ceaseless vicissitude that laps our lives round. Of course, it would be a mistake, and worse than a mistake, to think of this ceaseless movement in which we are all involved as if it were a mere brute fate to which simply we must perforce submit. "Life," says the Apostle to Christian believers, "life," with all its elements and conditions, "is yours". This continual change to which we are all committed is for one thing the condition of progress. And besides, how flat and stale life would otherwise be! And yet I believe every one will feel that were there nothing but ceaseless change in our earthly lot, no anchor sure and steadfast for us anywhere, life would be terrible indeed! Ah, it is everything for us to have attached ourselves to Jesus Christ! everything that by strong cords of trust and loyalty we should be fast moored to Him!

II. But it is time to speak now, in the second place, of what is meant by drifting from Christ. Of those who once were alongside Jesus Christ, how many that we could name have drifted very far! It is not easy even for Christian people always to have the Lord Jesus Christ for the fixed centre of their lives. Too often their relations to Him grow relaxed somehow, and His sublime Figure recedes into the distance, threatening to pass out of view—an unhappy process which comes about in very various ways. Thus for example (1) A storm may have broken out in their life and driven them away from Christ. It may have been a storm of doubt, or a storm of trouble. (2) Or again, it may be an influence less obvious that does it. (3) When neither of these influences succeeds in detaching us from our Lord, there is another influence that may—an influence more slow and subtle and secret still. A thousand varying cares and moods and occupations agitate the surface of our lives. And with this there comes a chafing and a fretting which may by slow degrees wear out the strands of loyalty that bind us to our Lord.

III. How can a Christian who has drifted away from Christ regain his moorings once more? It is by no violent efforts, no strong beating up against the adverse forces of his life, still less by any weak complaining of them, that any man will regain his old attachment to Jesus Christ; but just by giving "earnest heed—the more earnest heed to the things which he has heard about Him".

—A. Martin, Winning the Soul, p31.

Drifting

Hebrews 2:1 (R.V.)

There is as much need for this exhortation today as when it was first written. There are many signs of religious decadence which we shall be wise to heed, lest we ourselves, caught in the prevailing current, drift away from the truth of God, from the day of God, and from the Christ of God. John Ruskin was not far wrong when he said that a Red Indian, or an Otaheitian savage, had a surer sense of Divine existence round him, the God over him, than the plurality of refined Londoners and Parisians. Allowing that there is some exaggeration in this, I fear that there is too much truth in it.

I. With a view to our spiritual help, let us see what those things are which we have heard, and then glance at the danger of losing them and the means of holding them fast. (1) Among the new truths these Hebrews had heard was the readiness of God to receive all who came to Him. (2) Take another example of what this writer alluded to—the truth that suffering is often as much a sign of God's love as success. (3) Think also of Christ's revelation of the spiritual nature of acceptable worship. (4) But all this resolves itself into the possibility of losing our hold on the living God, for it is the fact of His Fatherhood which constitutes the brotherhood; it is because He is a God of Love that we are sure our troubles are overruled for good; and it is because He is a Spirit that we must worship Him in spirit and in truth.

II. The danger of loosening our grip on spiritual realities is serious. The nature of spiritual truths and things is such as to make them elusive. They are not evident to our senses.

III. How, then, shall we safeguard ourselves against this peril? The answer is here—by taking more earnest heed to the things we have heard. (1) Could you not give more time to the study of God's Word? (2) Again, you will be taking more earnest heed to things you have heard when you live as if you believed them. (3) Above all, strive to keep up in prayer, here and alone, such personal communion with God in Christ that your affection as well as your intellect may grasp Him.

—A. Rowland, Open Windows and other Sermons, p88.

References.—II:1.—J. H. Jowett, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xliii. p150. C. Perren, Sermon Outlines, p336. S. A. Selwyn, Church Family Newspaper, vol. xiv. p52. E. Griffith-Jones, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lvi. p408 , and vol. lviii. p292. J. Bowstead, Practical Sermons, vol. ii. p15. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture— Hebrews 2:3

The object of the writer of this Epistle was to show to the Jews how much belter the Gospel dispensation was as compared with the old covenant The keynote of the Epistle is the word better—a better priest, a better tabernacle, a better sacrifice, are to be found in the new covenant. There are two points to which I wish to direct your attention.

I. Why this salvation is called great. (1) It is called great on account of its great author. It was the conception of the great heart of the great God of heaven and earth. Think of the greatness of our God. Take the telescope and sweep the heavens with it on some clear, starry night. What a revelation of God's greatness we have there! Let us turn to the microscope and there we see the perfection of God's workmanship, how the tiniest of His created things (unlike man's workmanship) will bear the minutest inspection. I turn from God the Creator to God the Ruler of the earth, and there too in the pages of history I see His might and His power. (2) It is a great salvation because of its subject—a lost world. The loving arms of God seem to enclasp this sinful, this rebellious world, and we hear His voice of love saying, "Not one of these sons and daughters of Mine shall perish" so God loved the world. (3) It is a great salvation because of the great object it has in view. It is not only to redeem a world lost, ruined, and cursed, but to redeem man in that world. (4) It is a great salvation because of the great price paid for it. There is no arithmetic, no Hebrews 2:5

In a letter to Lady Elgin, written in1833 , Erskine of Linlathen points out the distinction "between the dispensation of Christ and the dispensation of ἄγγελοι (Heb. I. and II.). The dispensation of Christ embraces in it a oneness with the mind of God—not merely a readiness to do His will, when we know it, but a participation in His mind, so that, by a participation in the Divine nature, we enter into the reasons of His will, and do not merely obey the authority of His will".

Reference.—II:5-9.—Expositor (5th Series), vol. ii. p184. II:6.—J. N. Friend, Preacher's Magazine, vol. xvii. p458. II:7.—Expositor (4th Series), vol. ii. p435; ibid. (6th Series), vol. iv. p385.

Hebrews 2:8

You can remember that text, you have not ability enough to forget it. But we remember many things intellectually which we forget morally and sympathetically. "Not yet"—why it sounds like a song of hope; there is no despair in this strain. The meaning Hebrews 2:8-9

I. "We see not yet all things in subjection to man." "Not yet," but we are to see it This supremacy is the final goal of humanity. The threads of the ages have been woven in the great loom of Time with the weft of the Divine purpose and the warp of human experience, and on the web is traceable in clear characters the God-given sovereignty of man.

II. "Not unto angels has God subjected the coming world." Not to them, but to men like ourselves, who have to do with sheep and oxen and the beasts of the field, with cotton and calicoes, with science and art; whose life is as "fragile as the dewdrop on its perilous way from a tree's summit," and yet so strong that it destroys itself by sin; Hebrews 2:8-9

We have in these words a contrast between the greatness of man and the supremacy of Christ The writer of the Epistle admits the greatness of Hebrews 2:8-9

It is this which gives such terrible, even blighting power to the words and writings of unbelievers, which barbs and sends home many a dull scoff that would otherwise fall harmless; that they touch a conscious, ever-rankling wound. What they urge against Christianity is true. The believer knows, already knows, all that the infidel can tell him; the eye of love can see as clearly as that of hate, and it has already warmed over all the other exults in; has seen springs sink down suddenly among the sands of the desert; has looked upon bare and stony channels, now ghastly with the wreck and drift of ages, yet showing where once a full, fair river bore down life and gladness to the ocean. The Christian would fain explain, account for these long delays, this partial efficacy, this intermittent working. He feels that he is in possession of the key which is to open all these intricacies, but at present he finds that, like that of the pilgrims, "it grinds hard in the lock". He sees Jesus, but he sees not yet all things put under Him.

—Dora Greenwell, in The Patience of Hope.

The Taste of Death and the Life of Grace

Hebrews 2:9

I. Jesus Christ not only died, but He tasted death as incredible bitterness and penury of soul.

II. He did so because He died for every man. He experienced in a Divine life the universal death.

III. Yet this desertion and agony of death was a gift and grace of God not only to us but to Him. And He knew it was so. And that faith was His victory and our redemption.

—P. T. Forsyth, Christian World Pulpit, vol. LVIII. p296.

Ascension Day

Hebrews 2:9

Thoughts of joy and gladness mingle with all our meditations of Ascension-tide. Christ is now seen to have all things put under Him. In this Jubilee of the Saviour's coronation, we may forget for a moment all our preceding commemorations. Bethlehem, Gethsemane, Calvary, the manger, the wilderness, the cross, the grave, they are only so many beautiful memories—stages in that triumphant progress by which the Holy One ascends to the Throne. Our eyes "see the King in His beauty," and they can fix their gaze on nothing else: "We see Jesus, Who was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honour".

I. What was the glory here spoken of? First, there was the glory of a great salvation for the lost children of men. The anticipation of this honour entered into that intercessory prayer recorded in the seventeenth chapter of St. John. Now this joint glory of the Father and the Son consisted in bringing many sons into glory. And in order thereto, Christ was to be set as a King upon His holy hill of Zion. "The government was to be upon His shoulder." He was to become the centre of ten thousand times ten thousand redeemed and happy beings who had been washed from their sins in His own Blood, and who should live only to cast their crowns at His feet. And there were means and agencies for carrying out these objects to be employed upon the Throne. No sooner had Christ ceased to drink of the brook by the way, and had sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high, than the sun of His Godhead shone forth with all the effulgence of its original and eternal brightness. Men were to see the glory, both of the Father and of Christ. The triumphs of the cross shall be made manifest. The victories of the Holy Spirit shall begin. The work of the all-prevailing intercession shall go on within the veil. There shall be, as it were, a mighty revival in heaven, all the powers therein wondering at the extending reign of righteousness and the fruits of the outpoured gifts of the Ascension on the hearts of the sons of men. "Thy Throne, O God, is for ever and ever: the sceptre of Thy Kingdom is a right sceptre: Thy people shall be willing in the day of Thy power."

II. "Crowned with glory and honour," in that, all things, both in heaven and earth, shall be subject to the kingdom of mediation (see Ephesians 1:20-23); and again, "All things were made by Him and for Him". "For Him," observe, that Philippians 2:10), plainly affirms the dominion of Christ over all worlds, intelligences, and kingdoms. He is "God over all, blessed for ever".

—D. Moore

Hebrews 2:9

When I think of our Lord as tasting death it seems to me as if He alone ever truly tasted death. And this, indeed, may be received as a part of the larger truth that He alone ever lived in humanity in the conscious truth of humanity. But when I think of death as tasted by our Lord, how little help to conceiving of His experience in dying do any of our own thoughts or anticipated experiences seem fitted to yield! What men shrink from when they shrink from death, is either the disruption of the ties that connect them with a present world, or the terrors with which an accusing conscience fills the world to come. The last had no existence for Him who was without sin: neither had the world, as the present evil world, any place in His heart.

—McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, pp259 f.

Hebrews 2:9

Bishop King of Lincoln wrote: "We cannot understand the mystery of sorrow. We can "see Jesus" the "Man of Sorrows" and see how His earthly ministry apparently was a failure. They did not care for Him—wonderful and purifying example for us all, warning us against the dangers of popularity and apparent success."

—Spiritual Letters, p64.

References.—II:9.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xiii. No771 , and vol. xxv. No1509. J. T. Parr, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lvi. p4. R. W. Church, Village Sermons (3Series), p85. Expositor (4th Series), vol. vi. p132; ibid. (5th Series), vol. vi. p375; ibid. vol. ix. p472; ibid. (6th Series), vol. xii. p45. II:9 , 10.—C. Kingsley, The Good News of God, p340.

Hebrews 2:10

Thought, true labour of any kind, highest virtue itself, is it not the daughter of Pain? Born as out of the black whirlwind;—true effort, in fact, as of a captive struggling to free himself: that is Thought. In all ways we are "to become perfect through suffering".

—Carlyle, Heroes (lecture III.).

References.—II:10.—J. G. Binney, Christian World Pulpit, vol. liii. p22. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. viii No478 , and vol. xlv. No2619. J. Bunting, Sermons, vol. i. p51. C. S. Macfarland, The Spirit Christlike, p127. Archbishop Cosmo Lang, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lv. p235. Expository Sermons on the New Testament, p256. G. Body, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lvii. p200. H. Bushnell, Christ and His Salvation, p219. J. Farquhar, The Schools and Schoolmasters of Christ, p145. Expositor (4th Series), vol. i. p143; ibid. vol. iii. p370; ibid. vol. iv. p34; ibid. (6th Series), vol. viii. p386. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture— Hebrews 2:14-15

Death is a subject which may at present be remote from our thoughts, but it is an experience in which we shall all one day or other be interested. To be frequently in the contemplation of death is perhaps the mark of a feeble rather than of a robust spirit, yet we ought not to refuse the calls which in God's providence invite us to consider death. And, if it be extravagant to demand that a large part of our life should be consumed in contemplating its end, we may, like Nelson, while fighting on deck yet keep our coffin in our cabin.

It is well to be assured that one of the purposes served by the mission of Christ was to dispel the fear of death by destroying that which gave it power to terrify. The fear of death is here represented as a bondage, a condition of slavery out of which every child of God must be emancipated.

I. If we analyse this fear we find that there are various causes producing it First of all there is the bodily pain, which frequently precedes death, and may in our own case do so. Dread of pain increases with age, as we learn more of the capacity for suffering which our body possesses, and as we see more of the terrible forms of disease by which life is slowly worn out It is human nature to shrink from long-continued and hopeless weakness, from months of uselessness and slow decay, from the gradual extinction of all the functions of life, and the constantly renewed misery of the medical or surgical appliances which we know can but prolong for a short time a life that has become torture. But this cause of fear may be left to be dealt with by common sense and nature. For it is unreasonable to distress ourselves with prospects of such a kind. For all we know, death may find us in sleep or may have passed before we were conscious of its approach, or in our case it may come with none of these attendant horrors. Dr. Hunter, in his last moments, grieved that he "could not write how easy and delightful it is to die". The late Archbishop of Canterbury quietly remarked, "It is really nothing much after all".

II. A second cause of this fear is a more reasonable one. We fear death because it brings to an end the only life we know experimentally.

But if we believe what both nature and Christ teach us, that this life is but the training-ground for another, that the powers here cultivated and the tools here whetted are for use in a larger and intenser existence; if we consider that once this life was as strange and new to us as any other can be, and that death is really the bursting of the shell that hinders us from entering the ampler air of our true and eternal life, we have surely cause enough to throw such regrets and fears to the winds, and even long, as some have longed, to learn what the true life of God and God's children is.

III. But this leads us to the most fruitful cause of fear, the consciousness that after death comes the judgment. Whatever men hold regarding the last judgment or the mode of it, all men feel that at death there is a judgment, that death ushers them into a fixed, final, eternal state. This is the instinctive apprehension of untaught men as well as the warning of revelation.

The natural boldness which confronts death cheerfully, or sullenly submits to the inevitable, disappears when this added knowledge of the significance of death enters in. Mere natural courage is irrelevant in facing judgment. This letter was written "to the Hebrews 2:14-15

"At another time," says Bunyan in Grace Abounding (116), "as I was set by the fire in my House, and musing on my Wretchedness, the Lord made that also a precious word unto me, Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, He also Himself likewise took part of the same; that through death He might destroy him that had the power of death, that Hebrews 2:15

In the preface to Colloquia Peripatetica (p. lxxv.), Prof. Knight remarks that, for all the genuineness of Dr. John Duncan's faith, "nevertheless, it is true that he was "all his lifetime subject unto bondage". His spirit did not live in the sunshine. Though he would have appreciated Luther's saying, "I sit and sing, like a bird on a tree, and let God think for me," he never entered into the core of that experience."

"O! Who will deliver me from this fear of death? What shall I do? Where shall I fly from it? Should I fight against it by thinking, or by not thinking of it? A wise man advised me some time since, "Be still and go on". Perhaps this is best, to look upon it as my cross; when it comes, to let it humble me, and quicken all my good resolutions, especially that of praying without ceasing; and at other times, to take no thought about it, but quietly to go on "in the work of the Lord".

—Wesley's Journal (January, 1738).

References.—II:14 , 16.—A. Ainger, Sermons Preached in the Temple Church, p87. J. Keble, Sermons for Septuagesima to Ash Wednesday, p391.

Hebrews 2:15

In1518 Erasmus lay dangerously ill at Louvain. After his recovery he wrote to Beatus Rhenanus: "When the disease was at its height I neither felt distressed with desire of life, nor did I tremble at the fear of death. All my hope was in Christ alone, and I prayed for nothing to Him except that He would do what He thought best for me. Formerly, when a youth, I remember I used to tremble at the very name of death."

Hebrews 2:16

He does not forsake the world,

But stands before it modelling in the clay,

And moulding there His image. Age by age

The clay wars with His fingers and pleads hard

For its old, heavy, dull, and shapeless ease.

—W. B. Yeats.

References.—II:16.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. ii. No90. II:17.—R. M. Benson, Redemption, p86. Expositor (5th Series), vol. vii. p369; ibid. (6th Series), vol. v. p155; ibid. vol. x. p182. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture— Hebrews 2:17-18

In a letter, written during May, 1851 , V. W. Robertson tells a correspondent that, "except in feeling a fellowship and oneness with that Life, and recognising parallel feelings and parallel struggles, triumphantly sometimes, I do not see how life could be tolerable at all. He was Humanity, and in Him alone my humanity becomes intelligible.... Was not He alone in this world?—unfelt, uncomprehended, suspected, spoken against? and before Him was the cross. Before us, a little tea-table gossip, and hands uplifted in holy horror. Alas! and we call that a cross to bear. Shame! Yet still I do admit, that for a loving heart to lack sympathy is worse than pain."

References.—II:18.—J. C. M. Bellew, Sermons, vol. i. p331. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. ix. No487; vol. xxxiii. No1974 , and vol1. No2885. Marcus Dods, Christ and man, p1. Expositor (4th Series), vol. ii. p373. II:26.—A. Tucker, Preacher's Magazine, vol. xix. p230.