"Hebrews 2:14-15" Sunday Evening Worship Service

Hebrews chapter two, verse fourteen, since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.

It's very interesting in the book of Hebrews that God did not come to earth as an angel.

And this is a main point that Paul makes as he goes through this earth, as he goes through this book.

You would be expecting the Savior to come as a powerful angel.

After all, the antagonist in the Bible, the great enemy, the devil himself, he came as an angel, a messenger of darkness.

He came as a messenger of lies to the earth.

He came as an angelic being in the form of a serpent to work his evil in the world.

And so you would think that when the Savior came, he would come as something more powerful than an angel.

But rather the Savior comes as someone less powerful than an angel.

And you see that throughout his ministry.

Jesus had to be ministered to by angels.

Jesus didn't sustain angels, he needed their help in his temptation.

They were ready to rescue him, and he made that known.

Had he called for help, angels would have come to him.

The angels had to help him.

So in the hierarchy, certainly Jesus outranks the angels in his deity and in his divine glory, but in his humanity, he was lower.

And that's the phrase that Paul uses in chapter one, lower than the angels.

The angels outranked him, so to speak.

And so it's a very fascinating question to think of why.

After all, angels are cooler than people.

We would agree that this is true.

Because they can do things like fly.

And that's pretty cool.

Also, and here's the biggest thing angels have going for them: they don't die.

Angels don't die.

People die all the time.

But angels don't.

And so it's fascinating to think that Jesus, the Savior, came as a person, and he came as a human being for really one main reason.

I mean, there's lots of reasons.

You can write books in them, and books have been written, but in Hebrews chapter 2, there's one main reason he came as a person.

Hebrews 2 · chapter mention

He came as a human being precisely because humans die.

The devil holds sway over the world because people are afraid of death.

People have a fear of death more than anything else.

In fact, most of the other fears people have are correlated to their fear of death.

I mean, nobody fears pythons just for the sake of pythons.

You fear a python because it will kill you.

Nobody fears a pit bull because of the sake of a pit bull, and the pit bull owners don't come rebuke me and say, actually, the little chihuahua is more dangerous than the pit bull, not buying it.

But you don't fear the pit bull because you, you know, his weird head.

You fear the pit bull because he eats you.

Behind human fears is the fear of death.

And behind the fear of death is, of course, the devil himself.

The devil was our first enemy.

A lie was his first weapon, and death was the first casualty.

When Adam and Eve ate the fruit, they died.

They died in that moment spiritually.

They died by doubting God.

Sin entered the world, and God's word was vindicated.

The day they ate of the fruit, they would most surely die.

And that is what happened.

And ever since then, as a punishment for sin, death has gone through the world like wildfire.

Animals die.

People die.

And people are held in the fear of death.

So you know why there's so many wars?

Because Satan hates people and he wants them to die.

There's so many false religions in the world because Satan hates people and wants them to die without hope.

And so Jesus comes taking on a human nature so that he also will die.

And of course, that's how the story of every human being goes.

And when you're familiar with the gospel, you recognize that Jesus didn't have to die.

Adam and Eve weren't designed for death.

And so it's possible, conceptually, in the mind of God, for a person to come who wouldn't die, for a human being to be born that wouldn't die.

And of course, the wages of sin is death, and so here comes Jesus, and he is sinless, and so he, of all people, should escape death, but he does not avail himself of that.

His sinlessness does not give him a get out of death free card.

His sinlessness removes the power of death from him, but instead he just takes our sin and becomes a servant, then, of God, a servant of us and taking our sin, and a servant of death because he dies.

If this COVID crisis has taught us anything, it is most certainly that people fear death, don't they?

People will do ridiculous things to avoid the threat of death.

And I won't name any of those ridiculous things at risk of offending some of you who might do them.

But people will go to extremes to avoid death.

Unfounded rumors, innuendo.

I heard that driving in a red car makes you more likely to catch it.

No red cars.

I heard actually only driving in a red car makes you less likely to catch it.

Everybody in the red cars.

And that's the way it goes.

What's behind all that is the fear of death.

I know many people make, you know, sacrifices they drive in the red cars or don't drive in the red cars for to protect loved ones, and I'm not trying to make light of that.

But you recognize even behind the things we do is this gnawing fear of death.

So much so that the Bible refers to this as the slavery to the fear of death.

And that's the phrase that you come across in verse 15.

People are subject to lifelong slavery.

Ever since Adam and Eve left the garden, death has been a cruel taskmaster, a cruel slave owner.

And he's made all of us his subjects.

You know, people are slaves to sin.

We're familiar with that language because of our depravity.

We are all born into this world slaves to sin.

We have a measure of will and volition.

We can choose different kinds of sin to do, but we can't choose to not sin.

We are depraved.

But a less familiar use of this metaphor here is found in Hebrews 2, verse 15: that we are held in slavery to the fear of death.

We will do whatever death commands us.

And yet nobody escapes it.

You know the stats.

One of one die, and there's no around it.

And so that's exactly the point where Jesus identifies with us.

That's the remarkable thing about Hebrews chapter 2.

Hebrews 2 · chapter mention

It makes this point in many, many different ways through the whole chapter.

Many years ago, we looked at the first half of this chapter.

I don't expect you to remember that, but we worked our way through the first half of the chapter and saw the different ways that Jesus is lower than the angels and yet identifies with us.

But tonight I just wanted to look at these two verses, verses 14 and 15, and draw out three words from them.

And these three words, I think, will help you understand why Jesus came identifying with us in exactly our weakest point.

Our weakest point is death, and he identified with us at precisely that point.

The three words I've got for you: sharing, destroying, and delivering.

And I'll give them to you one at a time now.

First, sharing.

This begins in verse 14 that Jesus came sharing with us.

And the example here in verse 14, since the children share in flesh and blood, and the word children there, it's being borrowed from verse 13, which is coming even before that in verse 12, that Jesus is not ashamed to call us back up in verse 12, his brothers.

And the word there for brothers is a delphoid.

It means brothers and sisters.

It's not gender-specific, it's it's universal here.

Everybody who has faith in Christ is a brother or sister of the Lord.

That's the word that's used there in verse 11.

And Jesus is not ashamed to call us his brothers.

He's not ashamed to call you his sister.

He rejoices in it.

You would think he would be ashamed of it because you're so weak, and he's not.

He has all the power of divinity, and yet he associates with you.

Think of the middle school playground where it's the odd kid who might be left out.

And when the cool kids identify with him and are friends with him and draw him in, that's a statement of virtue.

It's good for the cooler kids to do that, to draw in the odd kid.

That's a good thing.

And that's what is surprising to the Apostle Paul here, that Jesus draws us in.

He's not ashamed to associate with us, despite the great delta between his glory and our frailty, between his eternality and our humanity.

He bridges it and identifies with us, calls us his brothers and sisters.

Well, verse 11 says he calls us, brothers and sisters.

Verse 12, he's going to tell of the name of Christ to the brothers and sisters of the Lord and their congregation, as we put our trust in him, verse 13 says.

And verse 14, it's really speaking in the Savior's voice, the children that God has given him.

So the Savior calls us, brothers and sisters.

We sing praises as if we're brothers and sisters.

God has given us to him as his brothers and sisters.

But is this just words?

Is it just God calling us?

Is this wordplay here?

Is it a legal name change where we're declared to be part of his family just by the judge?

Or is there something more going on here?

And I think there is in verse 14, because the children all share one thing.

Every human being who is part of the human race shares this basic component, flesh and blood.

We all have a human nature, we have a human will, we have human emotions, we have a human life, we have human flesh, we have human blood beating through us.

We are all one race.

We all descend from Adam.

We all descend from Noah.

We are all brothers and sisters with the same kind of will, the same kind of affections, the same kind of corporal body here.

And so it's not just that Jesus identifies us as his brothers and sisters, and we sing songs as if we are all part of the same family, and he calls us part of his family, but he actually becomes part of our family.

He takes on a human nature.

He shares with us, is the language Paul uses there.

The children share in flesh and blood, so he likewise partook of the same things.

That word partook is the word that we use for communion.

He takes it into himself.

He becomes a partaker at the same table we are.

We all eat together.

Not speaking necessarily of the communion table, but speaking just of our life.

We all eat the same kind of food.

We all have the same kind of bones and the same kind of blood, and the same kind of will.

We're the same kind of people.

And Jesus takes that for us.

He comes to earth fully in a human nature.

The result is that there is a real solidarity between Jesus and us.

This is what theologians call the hypostatic union, which is a, I think, a great word.

Hypostatic union is this idea that there's two different natures in Jesus and they make one person.

Jesus is not two persons, but he has two natures that are united in him.

He has his divine nature, where his all the essence of deity, all the divine prerogatives, all the divine glory.

The two natures are united in one person in perfect harmony.

Those two natures don't mix.

The hypostatic union says they're united, but without mixing.

And it's important that they don't mix because if they mix, his deity would swallow up his humanity.

You know what I mean?

He'd be walking on water all the time.

Or the other way, if he only operated out of his humanity, there'd be no validation of his miracles.

There would be no walking on the water.

So it's fascinating to look at the person of Jesus Christ and see him resisting temptation in his humanity.

Tempted in every way like we are, he resists entirely in his humanity.

Yet possessing all the prerogatives of deity, receiving worship as if he were God, in fact, commanding worship.

All of that mixed perfectly into one person.

Now that's a fancy theological phrase, hypostatic union.

What it means practically is that Jesus would die a real death.

Because he's really a person.

Really a human being.

Not ashamed to call us his brothers.

He would suffer.

He would weep at Lazarus' grave.

He would go hungry.

He would go thirsty.

He would see the fears of mankind as his friends were shouting out on the boat in the storm.

He would experience the lostness that his friends have.

He was right alongside them when they couldn't understand what he was talking about.

He would experience the love of a mother.

He would experience the death of his human father, his adopted or his stepdad.

He would experience the grief of family that denied him.

All these human experiences, he had them all.

For this reason, suffering produces sympathy.

And it makes people, specifically Jesus, able to identify with those who suffer.

And in his deity, of course, Jesus knows all things.

And he doesn't need to come to be a person to learn what it's like to be a person.

But by coming a human being, leading a human life fully, there's a sympathetic resonance that we have with him now.

He can identify, and that's the word I love.

He can identify with those who suffer.

He can identify with those who are victims.

He can identify with those who are downtrodden in this world.

He knows what we're going through.

And Paul's going to say that later on, that we have this sympathetic high priest who's able to identify with us.

That's why he became a human being.

To take our nature, to share in it in a real way.

Well, through this sharing, the second word I have for you is destroying.

His sharing in our human nature.

Secondly, destroying.

He shared with us in our human nature so that he can destroy death.

And that's the middle there of verse 14.

That through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death.

And of course, he's talking about the devil here.

The dying part of this is the key.

He could have locked up the devil and thrown him into the dungeon, thrown him into the lake of fire.

He has the authority and the power to do that without becoming a human being.

He didn't need to become incarnate in order to do that.

And yet he became incarnate because his method of defeating the devil was not simply about locking the devil up, it was about actually robbing the devil of his chief weapon, namely the fear of death.

And so by suffering and by dying, and then obviously by rising again from the grave, the devil is defeated.

The devil no longer has the power to keep some people in the fear of death.

The ultimate purpose of the incarnation is, of course, the death of Christ.

And his death is what he uses.

The devil, I think, claims victory at that point, but then by rising from the grave, the victory is snatched from the devil's hand.

And the devil has been robbed.

He's been bound, is the language Jesus uses.

Bound.

You can't rob a strong man's house without first binding him up.

That's the idea here, that the devil had to be bound for Jesus to deprive him of the fear that he instills in people.

This is why Jesus didn't come as an angel.

Locking the devil up isn't the point.

And this is exactly why, if you if you go back to the fall, that Adam and Eve were fooled by the serpent.

They did fall into sin.

The point was to get Adam and Eve to rebel against the way that God had designed humanity.

The husband as the leader of his wife, the head of his home, the wife as the helper to the call of the husband.

This is exactly why the devil went at that point, remember?

It wasn't about the fruit, it was about the way God designed marriage.

The devil was attacking the very foundations of mankind by going right at the heart of the family.

And the devil succeeded.

It's in that same way that just locking the devil back, you know, back into the pit of hell does not undo that.

You have to rob the devil of the fear that he instilled in the world.

And you only do that by rising from the grave.

That's where that comes from.

The word destroy, by the way, of course, he doesn't ultimately destroy the devil here, his resurrection.

The devil's not destroyed.

I mean, after the resurrection, the devil is roaming about like a lion looking for whom he can devour.

After the resurrection, he's asking to sift disciples.

He's going after Peter.

That's all after the resurrection.

Of course, the devil hasn't been destroyed.

That's later on in the book of Revelation when he'd be finally cast in the pit of hell.

But the word destroyed here, it's not the normal Greek word for destroyed.

The word destroyed here, it's the it literally means in the Greek dictionary to deprive someone of their power.

When someone, you know, when a bully is shown to not have the power to really hurt you, he has lost his, his power has been destroyed.

His status as a bully has been destroyed, in other words.

And that's what's happening here.

The devil has the status of the destroyer of mankind.

He's the one who has the keys, being the idiom of power and control, the ability to loose and to bind.

He has the keys of death, and he's he has he's, in a sense, over death, and those keys are taken from him at the resurrection by Jesus rising from the grave.

He has stolen the keys from the grave from the devil.

His authority has been taken.

So when you get to the book of Revelation, chapter 1, you see Jesus with his in his blazing white light and his powerful eyes and just the whole image with the lampstands in his hands.

Revelation 1 · chapter mention

But do you remember what he's holding in Revelation chapter 1?

Revelation 1 · chapter mention

He's holding in his hand the keys to death.

They've been taken from the devil.

They're now in his looking for those devil?

They're right here.

They're in his hand.

That doesn't mean Christians don't die.

Of course, we die physical deaths.

But it means we don't have to live in fear of that anymore.

Because we understand life after death, the certainty of Jesus' resurrection gives us confidence in the face of death.

We too will rise.

As certainly as Jesus rose from the grave, we too will rise from the grave.

This is all accomplished by the work of Christ.

Well, the first word is sharing, that he shares in our humanity.

So that he can do the second word, he can destroy the power of death, but there's still something missing.

That's the third word, delivering.

Sharing, destroying, and then thirdly, delivering.

Verse 15 to deliver all those who through fear.

Of death, we're subject to lifelong slavery.

Jesus not only defeated death, but there remains the difficulty of actually persuading people that they are delivered from the slavery of the fear of death.

It's one thing to declare the freedom, it's another to actually experience it.

And so that's what remains there in verse 15, to deliver those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.

And here's where I think an example might help.

1 Corinthians 15, verse 54 says that death is swallowed up in victory by the resurrection of Christ.

1 Corinthians 15:54

When Jesus rises from the grave, the threat of death is swallowed up in the victory of Christ.

So nobody should fear death anymore by placing their faith in Christ.

But many people don't know that.

This week will be the celebration of Juneteenth.

The celebration of, perhaps you may not know what that holiday is intentionally celebrating, but the liberation of the slaves in particular the state of Texas.

The Emancipation Proclamation, January 1st, 1863, declared the freedom of all slaves nationwide.

But there's no internet back then.

No newspapers that slaves could read for the most part, particularly in Texas.

So do you know that there was still 30 months later, over two years later, there was still something like 250,000 slaves in Texas, having been declared free years earlier.

U.S.

government put together an army of 2,000 soldiers, told to go through Texas and proclaim the freedom to slaves.

They did so on June 19, 1865.

They chose June 19th, by the way, because six months before the Emancipation Proclamation, June 19th, 1862, President Lincoln freed all the slaves only in the District of Columbia, only D.C.

That's why that date was chosen.

So the slaves in Texas would be freed three years to the date after the slaves in D.C.

were freed.

General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, with his 2,000 troops and began spreading the word.

And that's the celebration of Juneteenth, June 19th.

It's strange to think that 30 months had gone by.

But then it's not so strange to think about it.

If you understand that every time you go back to fearing death, you're in the same boat.

Jesus has risen from the grave.

Death has been swallowed up.

Death is defeated.

There's no reason for you to fear it anymore.

The Bible makes that clear.

I know it's natural to fear death.

Of course.

It's natural to avoid death.

You're driving your car and, you know, an obstacle in the road.

You drive around it because you don't want to die.

That's a stewardship of your life.

God has given you your life.

You are a good steward to avoid death as long as you can.

But there is a difference between using wisdom and skills and stewardship to prolong your life, which is all good and blessed by the Lord.

It's a blessing to have a long life, as described in the book of Proverbs.

There's a difference between that and having a fear of death that controls you.

Being mastered by the fear of death, being put in slavery to the fear of death.

That is the language here.

And it is astonishing to realize how often, how easily we fall back into our fear of death.

But Jesus came not only to defeat the devil and deliver us, but to announce it for us to experience our freedom in verse 15, to deliver those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.

Even that verse right there, Paul exposes how the devil works.

It's through fear of death that keeps you enslaved to him.

Oh man, what power would your life have if you could be freed from that?

What power would your life have if you were freed from the fear of death?

You don't have to be held in captivity to it any longer.

Because it was swallowed up by the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

And I told you we might trespass into verse 16, but just briefly you can look at it.

For surely it is not angels that he helps.

In a sense, angels don't care that he resurrected.

He was made, he made the angels.

Angels came into existence and saw him already, saw Jesus in his triune glory when the angels first came into existence.

So the resurrected Jesus is not new to the angels, but it's not for them.

That's why Paul can say, obviously, he didn't resurrect from the grave for the angels.

I mean, they don't care.

But he didn't come for the angels.

He didn't come as an angel because he didn't come for an angel.

He came as a human being because he came for human beings so that he can deliver human beings, and he delivers us through one way.

Faith in his death and resurrection.

If you don't believe in his death and resurrection, there is no gospel.

If you don't believe he really died on the cross, then of course he really wouldn't have resurrected from the grave.

And if you reject those two components, then there is no such thing as Christianity.

The idea of some kind of liberal Christianity that believes the moral teachings of the Bible, but not the actual vicarious death of Jesus Christ and substitutionary atonement on the cross and bodily resurrection from the grave is just foolishness.

Because if he didn't rise, then everything else is pointless.

Namely, if he didn't rise from the grave, all of the nice moral teachings of the Bible don't do anything for you because they don't free you from the fear of death.

But once freed from the fear of death, you can truly say that God did not give you a spirit of fear or timidity, but a spirit of boldness and of courage for you to be a witness of the freedom we have in Jesus Christ.

Lord, we're thankful that you have freed us from the power of sin and death.

You freed us from the power of sin through bearing our penalty for sin on the cross.

You freed us from the power of death by rising from the grave.

You're not the Lord of the dead alone, but you are the Lord of the dead.

And the living, every soul will bow its knee before you.

Every tongue in heaven and earth will confess that you are the Lord, because you are indeed the Lord of life.

And so we're grateful to think of the ways that you defeated the grave and defeated our fears.

We know you can't put the you can't undo the fall entirely.

People still are born, they're still in justice, they still suffer, they still die, they still sin, all that still happens.

And yet you have the power to free us in a remarkable way from the fear of what happens next.

We give you thanks for the freedom of eternal life.

It's in the name of Christ we pray.

Amen.

And now for a parting word from Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thank you for joining Emmanuel Bible Church today through this resource.

It's my prayer that if you live in the DC area, I'll be able to meet you on some Sunday at Emmanuel Bible Church.

For more information on our church, you can go to iBC.church.

Or for information on the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.

location, go to tms.edu.

I hope this resource helps you seek God through Jesus Christ, serve the Lord with joy, and share him with boldness.

May the Lord bless you.