Hebrews 2:10-13

Hebrews chapter 2.

Hebrews 2 · chapter mention

Hebrews chapter 2.

Hebrews 2 · chapter mention

This is a uh picture of a friend of mine, a new friend of mine.

This uh this week I was thinking about a book that's been sitting on my shelf for a good four years, four or five years.

And um one morning, probably I think it was Tuesday or Wednesday morning, I thought, you know what, I'm gonna message this guy on Facebook.

And um his name is Ben.

And uh I felt like we, you know, he'd kind of at some point planted a church in and around um Washington, D.C.

And and one of his books had really impacted me, and there's another book that I wanted to read by him, and so um I thought, well, maybe he'll interact with me.

So I reached out to Ben, and uh he was super gracious in his interaction, and as within about 15 minutes of kind of looking him up online, I realized that he had bought this property.

Um, this is one of the things that he more recently did and kind of turned it into a retreat center for um homeschool families.

And as I looked more at this retreat center, I realized that he had bought this retreat center from a guy named Chapin Marsh.

And Chapin is the guy that I, back in 2010, took over Calvert Chapel University from.

And so as I was interacting with my friend Ben, I was realizing, wow, we have this thing in common where we're we're both running something that was turned over to us by this guy named Chapin.

And as I was pointing that out to Ben, I was kind of wondering like, what's the utility in sharing that?

Why did it kind of cause something in my heart to go, oh, isn't that cool?

We have this common ground, we have this shared experience.

And as I was preparing this week and looking at this material in Hebrews chapter 2, I realized that it's a similar idea.

Hebrews 2 · chapter mention

I asked you in the email this morning in the invite to church to think for yourself, what celebrity do you share something in common with?

Anybody, do you have a somebody who is famous that was born on your birthday?

Maybe somebody famous that was from your hometown.

Anything come to mind?

You know, Billy Graham's birthday was on November 7th, that's my birthday.

Jeremy Camp, the Christian musician, went to my Bible college.

I always thought that was cool, you know.

I know for uh Hayden, who's in the Baltimore School of the Arts, you know, they're Jada Pinkett Smith graduated from BSA.

What about you?

When you think of those things, like somebody is like, wait, you know, this person, like Hudson, we were talking the other day, and he was like, hey, this person goes to the same gym as me, and he was a YouTuber that he was watching, right?

It was like, oh, that's so cool.

Why is that cool?

Why is that cool?

Why do we grab on to those like shared experiences?

I know for me and with Ben, uh kind of what I boiled it down to was the fact that Ben is somebody that I've looked up to, that I respect.

He's older than me, and yet he's been very successful in a number of different ways.

And there feel there felt like as I was approaching him and hoping kind of for like a mentoring relationship, there was a sense of a big gap between who he is and what he's accomplished and who I am.

But once I found that shared common ground, there was a sense of, oh no, we've got this something similar, where he's not so far off from me than I thought he was.

So hold that thought, that idea in your head as we go through Hebrews chapter two.

We're gonna just look at four verses this morning.

We're gonna start in verse um 10.

Now you'll recall, we'll go back to this chart because I used this last week because this was the material from basically chapter uh two, verses five through nine, pointing back.

But let's look at Hebrews chapter two, verses ten through thirteen.

Here's what it says.

For in bringing many sons and daughters to glory, it was entirely appropriate that God, for whom and through whom all things exist, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through sufferings.

For the one who sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one Father.

That is why Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters, saying, I will proclaim your name to my brothers and sisters, I will sing hymns to you in the congregation.

Again, I will trust in him, and again, here I am with the children God gave me.

God, we ask that as we look at these four verses that you teach us by your spirit, there's a density about these verses.

It feels like kind of cutting through a dense forest.

And uh, Lord, it's hard to take it in and assimilate not just the ideas that are communicated, but then to apply it in our lives.

But yet we have you, you're the great teacher, and we ask that you would teach us through this text, you'd give us something that just enriches our own relationship with you, that you'd correct us and give us instruction and righteousness through this text.

So, Lord, we are open to hearing from you this morning.

We pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So, as um I was kind of alluding to last week, we looked at this idea that in Hebrews 2, the writer is pointing back to Psalm 8 and saying, and using Psalm 8 to say, Genesis 1 had this mandate, had this idea, this ideal for humanity.

This was it.

This is Genesis 1.27.

God creates humanity in his own image, which is unique.

He doesn't say that God created the plants in his image, God didn't create the animals in his image, he created humans in his image.

And then there is this vision for how humanity will operate, just really broad strokes.

This is what humanity is going to do.

He created them male and female, he God blessed them.

And then God said, Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth, subdue it and rule it.

We could say that that's that's the mandate.

This is what it means to be human.

Now, the writer of Hebrews, he's saying this here because he's making a point.

He's saying this.

Look, God didn't give that call to angels.

God didn't entrust the created universe for angels to run.

Instead, he said, I'm appointing humans to rule in my place over all this stuff that I created.

So God's the one who authors it, but then he says, I'm going to crown humans with glory and honor and have them steward over it, right?

Now, how long does that last?

Not very long, right?

Humans fail to do this idea here.

Instead, they decide to be independent of God, disobey God, and they fall from this beautiful vision of reigning over God's creation.

They fall from their place of cooperation with God.

And in what we said last week is they're using this idea of subduing it by either subduing one another, right?

Abusive relationships, or a perversion of what God's created, or a perversion of creation itself.

And thus begins God's plan of redeeming humans.

Now it's interesting, God doesn't, he has the angels the whole time, right?

Angels probably pre-exist, humans being created.

My professor, who teaches my seminary class, his hypothesis is that there's this cosmic battle that's going on between God and the fallen angels, and that God creates humanity into the midst of that cosmic battle to accomplish a great victory and to demonstrate his power in the midst of this cosmic battle.

That God's just showing off basically his great power through humans reigning and ruling.

So God could have, he, when Adam and Eve failed, he could have just said, okay, well, let's just go with the angels then.

I mean, that that that'll work.

But he doesn't, right?

No, thus begins a long thousands-year redemption of humanity back to this place of bringing all things in subjection under humanity's feet.

But what we saw last week is the writer, well, sorry, we got to go back to the chart here again.

So we see in Genesis 1 this beautiful mandate of how things are supposed to work, but then we know Genesis 3, everything fails.

It all falls apart.

Well then why is there Psalm 8?

Why is there Psalm 8?

If it already failed, why is there Psalm 8?

And so what the writer of Hebrews was saying is, hey guys, yeah, there's Genesis 3 right here, but then there's Psalm 8.

Every humanity's fallen from this reigning and ruling and high priestly call, and yet you get to Psalm 8, and still God has made humans a little lower than the angels, but crowned them with glory and honor, and he's put he's subjected all things under their feet.

And yet the writer of Hebrews, what he said last week, and I'm re-preaching my sermon from last week, but what he said last week is look, we don't yet see everything put under humanity's feet.

We don't see everything yet in subjection, but we do see one thing, and what is that?

We see Jesus.

We see Jesus.

So we're now living at this point where we see humanity being rescued and restored, and this week Jesus is going to be called the pioneer, the founder of our salvation.

The founder of our salvation.

So let's walk through this a bit.

Starting in verse 10, he says this.

If you're familiar with structural laws of communication, there are seven structural laws.

We oftentimes kind of refer to them, but and they're the way that ideas link together.

So when you're in English class, you learn what's a contrast and what's a comparison and the flag words that indicate that.

You learn what a causation and a substantiation are.

And this here is a substantiation.

The Hebrews that Jesus, that this writer is writing to, they're asking themselves, they're realizing that Christianity is costly.

They've inherited the Jewish traditions, and they're asking themselves, why should we leave the way of Moses and follow the way of Jesus?

And the writer of Hebrews is championing Jesus as so much better than Moses.

And as we've followed along with the way that the writer is laying this out, he's established that we see Jesus as the one that has suffered death and then been crowned with glory and honor.

That's where we left it off in verse nine.

And the question that is anticipated or must have been anticipated by the writer was wait a second, the hero of the story died?

Why did the hero die?

Like that doesn't seem to fit.

And so the writer here comes along and he says, no, this is appropriate.

This is the right way.

It's fitting for the story, for the hero of the story, for Jesus to die.

On the way there, on the way of bringing us, sons and daughters, to glory, on the way there, it was fitting for Jesus to die.

Notice this term here that this is a really kind of a messy sentence.

You just gotta be honest.

It's like there's a lot going on here.

Um but he calls Jesus, he's the pioneer of their salvation.

The salvation pioneer was made perfect through suffering.

So it's a substantiation that says to the person who's kind of like back there waving their hands, going, like, wait, why does Jesus have to die?

And he, in a sense, answers the question.

He says it was fitting that he would die.

Now, why he dies isn't explained in this verse.

It's just stated as a substantiation that it is fitting.

That's important to point out because it's confusing because you intend when a substantiation is provided, you're looking for an answer to the why question, and you don't really have a full answer that is given.

He's simply saying that it is appropriate.

Now, when we get to verse 14 next week, we're going to see that the answer the question is answered a bit better.

But it is this idea, the general idea of the book of Hebrews for the next at least eight chapters, nine chapters, is this idea of common ground, that Jesus in his incarnation, even though he is so much better than Moses, better than the angels, better than Joshua, better than the Sabbath, better than the high priests, better than the old covenant, even though he is better, he's like us.

And that's what makes him effective in his ministry.

Now, one other note about this first, because this could be confusing, because we believe that Jesus was a sacrifice in our play in our place.

He was an acceptable sacrifice because he was perfect.

But here it says that he was made perfect or should make the pioneer of our salvation perfect through suffering.

What does that mean?

I'll give you two quotes that kind of explain this.

The first is from uh Warren Wearsby.

He says the word translated perfect means complete, effective, adequate.

Jesus could not have become an adequate savior and high priest had he not become man and suffered and died.

Another commentator says this three times we are told that he was made perfect in the book of Hebrews, also chapter 5, verse 9 and 7, 28.

There is no sense in which he was morally imperfect, but by suffering and temptation, his death and heavenly exaltation, he was qualified or made completely adequate as the savior of his people.

So he was made qualified.

He was proven out to be the perfect savior for us.

Let's go to the next, the next verse, verse 11.

For the one who sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one father.

That's why Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters.

The writer has just stated that the father put the son on an appropriate path when he had the son suffer.

And the question that comes back is why was suffering the thing that made Jesus qualified or complete as the pioneer of salvation?

And the answer that he provides here in this, also, what is a substantiation, is it's because we all have the same dad.

We all end up with the same dad.

He's emphasizing the common ground that Jesus and his followers have.

It's this common ground of sanctification.

And so the one who sanctifies, who's that?

Who's the one who sanctifies?

That's Jesus, right?

He's the one who's sanctifying.

Who's the one that is sanctified?

That's us, right?

We all, it's because there's that shared common ground.

That's why we all have one father.

And that's why Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters.

This is really kind of the the a causation here.

You see, he says, that is why Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters.

And he's gonna go on, he's gonna quote verses 12, 12, and 13 in order to get there.

But I but I have this question for you before we get to 12 and 13.

Why was it through suffering that Jesus was made the perfect pioneer of salvation?

Why was it through suffering that Jesus was made the perfect pioneer?

The reason, the reason why is again, we have this shared common ground, this humanity.

If you go back to Genesis chapter one, we have all of humanity that becomes condemned through the line of Adam.

All of humanity has fallen.

And so it was necessary not just that a new human would come and be perfect, but that he would enter into this greatest enemy of humanity, being death, and would rescue and redeem us from that place of death.

That's why Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters.

In verse 12, he's gonna quote from where is it?

He's quoting out of Psalm 22 and Isaiah 8.

Psalm 22 and Isaiah 8.

He says, I will proclaim your name to my brothers and sisters.

I will sing hymns to you in the congregation.

Again, I will trust in him.

And again, here I am with the children God gave me.

Now, this is a quotation from the Septuagint version of Isaiah 8 and Psalm 22.

The writer here of Hebrews has such a sense of familiarity with the passage that he is um what would you call it?

He's paraphrasing in a sense, or he's kind of invert, not inverting, but he's using his own language to summarize and quote from these passages.

But all of this is because um the writer wants to hold up and just say, look, Jesus is not ashamed to call us brothers and sisters because he entered into this work of being sacrificed and dying on the cross on our behalf.

He went and shared in humanity and shared in death with humanity so that he could take this position, this uh beautiful position of saying, Look, this is my family.

The the writer of Hebrews has been emphasizing this idea as we've gone through.

Back when he wanted to make the case that Jesus was better than the angels in chapter one, he said, look at these seven passages from Psalms and 2 Samuel.

And what I want you to see from this is that Jesus was given a better name.

Jesus was given a better name than the angels received.

What was the name that Jesus was given?

You are my son, right?

The Father said to Jesus, You are my son.

He never said that to the angels.

It was A special name that was given to him.

Now, fast forward, and the family language is still being used, and it's here where there's a specialness that you and I are to hear from this passage that here Jesus is saying, Look, these are not just, you know, mutual club members at Costco with me, you know.

These are not just fellow citizens in the state of Maryland with me.

They don't just live on my street.

No, these are my brothers and sisters.

This is my family.

Jesus isn't saying that.

The father isn't saying that about the angels.

He's saying that as the pioneer, the salvation pioneer, the founder of our salvation, he's saying, look, this is my family.

For us and my family, we've gone through this season of a blended family where we've got kids that were not born of us, right?

Between Crystal and I, right?

We have kids, and so as a family, we're like working through like what do we call each other, right?

Mom, dad, stepsister, stepbrother.

And sometimes we're like tripping over language, and meanwhile, our relationships are kind of growing at home.

Like we're getting to know each other better and better in our home, right?

And it wasn't until I went we went through that experience as a family that I began to appreciate the way that here the writer is saying, like, look, there's a specialness about God stepping on the scene, authoring a plan that is fitting and appropriate to have his son go through a suffering experience so that he can stand in the room, in the assembly, and say, Y'all are my brothers and sisters.

There's a specialness about those terms.

We're still kind of in the place, and you've probably gone through blended families.

Like when you get married and all of a sudden you've got in-laws, and you're like, Dad, mom, like, what do I call you, right?

It's kind of weird.

And yet, Jesus, because of his suffering, his death on the cross, he's able to stand and say, Look, I am not ashamed at all.

There's no hesitation, there's no like like tripping over my language.

There, there's not this like, you know, kind of trying to figure out what the, what the, what do I call you guys?

No.

You're my brothers and my sisters.

It's beautiful.

You're grafted in, you're you're my family.

And so we have this vision of Genesis 1 where humanity is, it's it's created.

God's made Adam and Eve to hold this beautiful position.

They fall away from it.

And Jesus is pioneering the recovery of that lost position.

And he's like, you know, you're not second-class citizens.

You are like, this is family.

This is family.

It's beautiful.

It's a beautiful thing that Jesus is pioneering.

I just want to close with this idea.

The vision that the Bible describes for humanity is incredible.

God made this amazing universe, and then he says to humanity, I want you to rule over it, subdue it, be fruitful, multiply, have dominion over the things that I've made.

And then humanity falls from that position, from that original design, which is tragic.

Death comes in, suffering.

Death and suffering are like the perfect inversion of all that God wanted.

He wanted humanity to be blessed, to be fruitful, to be multiplying.

Instead, they're suffering and they're dying, right?

There's death in relationships, ecological death, psychological death, spiritual death.

But God wants to rescue humanity from their fallen state, so he sends this pioneer, the founder, the captain.

God isn't trying to get you away from your human experience.

Listen to this, okay?

God is not trying to get you away from being human in order to be his follower.

To be his sons and his daughters, it doesn't mean being less human.

We often think that it's our human nature that's getting in the way of us being good Christians.

That some, and then you see the early church wrestling with this with the monks, right?

It's like humanity is getting in the way.

So I'm going to go find a cave, I'm going to isolate myself and just read the Bible, completely isolated from relationships and work and every kind of aspect of humanity, because humanity is getting in the way of me being what I my concept is spirituality.

And yet if you read Hebrews and you see how God created humanity and then the mission of Jesus to be the pioneer human to restore us, he is trying to restore us to this full vision of flourishing as humans.

I think that when we have, sometimes we make this mistake in how we think of spirituality as moving away from the human experience to being more like angels.

Do you ever think about that?

When you think about spirituality, is it is the idea of like what you become like disembodied a bit, less hu less having a body?

I think that sometimes there is even like what do people think about heaven?

Oh, I'm gonna sit on a cloud, play a harp.

Like angels, right?

That is how people think about spirituality.

And yet, what is it saying in Hebrews chapter 2?

Hebrews 2 · chapter mention

It's saying, no, the pioneer of our salvation came to fulfill Psalm 8, which reflects back to Genesis 1, that you would become more human.

And so we often think that, like, hey, it's it's I want to be a follower of Jesus, but work is getting in the way.

And and like I need to like change my work.

I need to be like a full-time pastor or a missionary for God to be fully excited about who I am, right?

And people are afraid, like, oh, if I get really spiritual, God's gonna ask me to go to Africa, which isn't the worst thing that ever happened, I can tell you from experience.

But no, being work is a part of God's design.

It's not something we move away from to be a follower of Jesus.

Or pleasure.

We think that pleasure, this is the like the church.

Like, why do priests not get married or nuns like not get married?

It's because there's an aversion to pleasure.

And it's thought, well, pleasure must be something that is evil and less spiritual.

And that's not how that's not the human experience that God intended at all.

Or relationships, right?

This is what what the church in Corinth was struggling with.

This is why you have 1 Corinthians 7, where Paul says, look, yo, go get married.

Because you have desires, and yet there were this group of people who were thinking like it's more spiritual to just not get married.

That's what Paul warns of in 2 Timothy, right?

He says there's going to be people who think it's more spiritual and forbid marriage.

That's demonic.

And yet people have this conception of like, for me to be a good follower of God, I've got to move away from relationships.

If that's how we're thinking about our human condition, we're probably thinking that we need to be more like angels to make God happy, but God's like, no, I made you human on purpose and intended you, not the angels, I intended you to rule over the universe as a follower of Jesus.

Jesus came as a human and experienced the worst part of being human, suffering and death.

Jesus' mission was to restore us from that fallen condition of humanity.

He loves humans, he doesn't want you to be less human, he wants you to be less fallen.

He doesn't want you to be less human, he wants you to be less fallen.

That is what the pioneer of our salvation is trying to accomplish.

He makes us family, he's proud to call us his family before the work is even done.

Do you see that?

Jesus is standing in the midst of the assembly, boasting about us.

I'll proclaim your name to my brothers and sisters.

I will sing hymns to you in the congregation.

He's doing that.

This is Jesus' work on our behalf before the end is even experienced, before we see everything subjected under his feet.

Jesus is saying, We are his family.

He's calling us his brothers and sisters.

We have the same dad that Jesus has.

At the beginning of this sermon, I told you about a moment in my week with Ben, where I discovered, hey, there's this shared experience.

It made me feel closer to Ben once I discovered this shared experience.

I felt like I could relate to him better.

And that's what this text is aiming at.

That's where it's going as it proceeds through the next um through the rest of the chapter as we covered over the next few weeks.

It's we have this common ground.

There's this closeness that we're brought into because Jesus was born a baby in Bethlehem, took on flesh, was willing to go to the cross on our behalf so that we could feel like, oh, I have that in common with him.

So that you can have a sense of nearness to God because of what Jesus did.

Lord, we thank you.

We thank you that you came as the pioneer of our salvation, that you didn't come to try to make us like angels, but you came to restore us to that original vision of Genesis 1.

And Jesus, you you pioneered, you found it, founded it.

It's this beautiful thing that you did.

We're so grateful that we get to be in your family.

Lord, would you please continue to work in our lives this week?

We ask that you would um just the work of the Holy Spirit in our life would apply this general idea into our workplace, into our families.

Lord, that we would experience these ideas on a broader scale.

Thank you, God.

We love you.

Amen.