Hebrews 2:5-9 | Humanity's Hope

This sermon was recorded at Faith Evangelical Free Church in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

Good morning.

Welcome.

Please take your Bible and open it to the Book of Hebrews with me.

Hebrews chapter 2.

Hebrews 2 · chapter mention

Beginning of September, we started working our way through this New Testament book.

And this morning we pick up where we left off last time.

Verse 5.

Hebrews chapter 2, beginning in verse 5.

Hebrews 2 · chapter mention

I don't know what mile marker it is, but there is a homestead that sits just off Interstate 29, somewhere in South Dakota.

So you're going south, it's off to the right.

It's an old house that barely looks like it's standing.

From the highway, the the roof looks like it's it's sagging.

The whole structure sort of leans a little bit.

You know what I'm talking about, right?

Like just one Dakota wind will just push it right over.

The only color is weather beaten gray.

If you know a history of this part of the country, you can tell a little bit of that homestead story.

Somebody at some point, a hundred or more years ago, decided that that was the place to put down roots.

Maybe it was a place to start over.

So they broke ground for a garden.

Maybe for some crops.

Maybe raised some animals.

Someone somewhere cut logs and lumber for the home and they hauled it to that building site.

Now, a hundred or more years later, the Dakota wind and winters eat away at what's left.

That's the feeling that Hebrews 2, 5 begins with.

The writer to the Hebrews calls, recalls God's intention for his world, and you still get a glimpse of that hope.

But something happened, and that original hope wasn't fulfilled.

Now, last Sunday, the preacher of Hebrews asked, How shall we escape if we neglect a great salvation?

And that's a probing question that the author didn't answer.

This morning, as we continue in verse 5, we're going to hear more about that great salvation.

And to understand it, the author looks back to the very first homestead in Scripture, in the Garden of Eden.

But he looks at that through the lens of a song.

Look at it with me.

Hebrews chapter 2, beginning in verse 5.

Hebrews 2 · chapter mention

It says, For it was not to angels that God subjected the world to come, of which we're speaking.

It has been testified somewhere, he doesn't say where, because he wants us to all understand that these quotes are God's words.

What is man that you are mindful of him, or the Son of Man that you care for him?

You made him for a little while lower than the angels.

You crowned him with glory and honor, putting everything in subjection under his feet.

Now, in putting everything in subjection to him, he left nothing outside his control.

But at present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him.

But we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.

The section begins with angels and ends with death.

And in between, the preacher of this first sermon quotes a psalm about how small we are.

And he says the world isn't as it should be.

Then he connects two concepts that generally don't go together: glory and death.

And all of that only makes sense when we connect two different points.

This author is talking about our great salvation in Christ and what he calls the world to come.

So elements of our faith and our hope run through these few sentences, showing us that our hope as a human race, as mankind, rests only in a man who was crowned with glory and honor through the suffering of his death.

And he wants us to see this through God's intent for his creation.

So to get there, we need to first understand that there is a prelude to everything.

There's a prelude that comes before everything else we need to think about.

And that is that God made humanity for a dominion, a rule, that we gave up.

We lost.

He starts out by saying, it was not to angels that God subjected the world to come, of which we are speaking.

That first sentence takes us back to the comparison between God the Son and angels that ran through chapter 1.

The great salvation comes from the greater son.

Now, the comparison between the greater son and angels keeps on going.

But here it keeps on going by taking us all the way back to the very beginning, to the Garden of Eden.

And he does that by taking us to Psalm 8, which he begins to quote in verse 6.

But his point here is that God didn't hand his ultimate intent for the world to come to angels.

Now that that might not seem controversial to you.

But the role of angels in the world has been perceived very differently across the span of world history.

For example, when the Old Testament was first translated from Hebrew, in which it was written, into Greek, for Jewish people who could no longer read Hebrew, about two to three hundred years before the time of Jesus, a verse in Deuteronomy 32, verse 8, was translated in a way that suggests that God divided the nations of the world among the angels.

Deuteronomy 32:8

Daniel chapter 10, verse 20, also speaks of angels that are apparently assigned to particular world nations.

Daniel 10:20

So there's some biblical evidence that suggests that God uses angels, both good and evil angels, as powerful influencers and maybe even rulers of this world.

But that will change in the future, verse 5 says.

So that leaves an open question.

If God won't have angels in their place of power and authority and rule in his perfect, restored world to come, who will rule the world?

That's where the author opens his Bible and points back to Psalm 8.

He said, it's been testified somewhere.

That somewhere is Psalm 8.

So if you have a Bible, I encourage you to keep your finger in Hebrews and turn back to Psalm 8.

Psalms is about in the middle of your Bible.

It's a pretty long book, so you should be able to just go to about the middle and find your way to the book of Psalms and then make your way to Psalm 8.

This is a hymn to be sung by a choir written by the great king of Israel, David.

You might be familiar with parts of it.

It starts out by naming Israel's covenant God, Yahweh.

That's your Bible might have the first Lord in all capital letters, and then it has another word after that that isn't in capital letters.

O Yahweh, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth.

You have set your glory above the heavens.

Notice the spacing there.

There's this majestic glory that is even greater and higher than the heavens that we look at.

Even out of the mouths of babies and infants, you have established strength because of your foes to still the enemy and the avenger.

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you've set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the Son of Man that you care for him?

Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings, and you've crowned him with glory and honor.

You've given him dominion over the works of your hands.

You've put all things under his feet.

All sheep and oxen, and the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens, the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the sea, O Yahweh, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth.

I like to think that David wrote that song at night.

He says, look up at the moon and the stars.

And then ask yourself, how great is the being that made all of that?

If you've ever looked at the stars at night, away from the light pollution of cities, you know the feeling.

It's just awesome.

You feel about an inch tall.

What am I that the God who made all of that would think of me?

Then comes the answer.

You made him, mankind, a little lower than the angels.

You've crowned him with glory and honor, putting everything in subjection under his feet.

So David here is thinking about Genesis 1.

When God put the man and the woman in his world and he told them to rule it and to have dominion over it.

They weren't powerful as angels, they weren't as glorious as angels, but lower on God's creation scale, yet he still crowned them with glory and honor as his representatives in a perfect world.

Now the Psalm goes on to list sheep and oxen and birds and fish.

But the author of Hebrews doesn't do any of that.

He stops with verse 6.

Most likely that's to keep us from getting bogged down in those details, because the author of Hebrews wants us to keep thinking that God made mankind to rule and to have dominion over all of the earth.

Now, David, as king, most likely, is writing this early in his reign as king over Israel.

Many scholars think that David is writing this to thank God for establishing his rule as an aspect of God's intent from the very beginning, saying, God, what you've given me is what you intended for man from the very beginning.

Maybe even suggesting that this is God's step towards rebuilding what was broken in the garden.

So David's rule is a small taste of what God intended as he made all of us for glory and honor and dominion.

And Psalm 8 considers that under the night sky.

God must be unimaginable to make stars, constellations, and galaxies with his fingers.

Do you know what finger work is?

My wife likes to cross stitch, and she does it with a magnifying glass, or she can do this with her fingertips.

You're working with something small, right?

When you do finger work.

So God is doing finger work with the galaxies of the universe.

How awesome and majestic.

Yet you've crowned mankind with glory and honor.

You've given him dominion over the work of your hands.

You've put everything under his feet.

God made human beings as his image to rule and to exercise dominion over the earth.

That's what he made us to do.

So any dignity, any worth that you feel in your place on this earth and the work that you do in going about life points to what God designed you to be and to do.

And that realization shouldn't puff us up and make us proud of who we are.

It should move us to worship and to awe at God's greatness, just as it did for David.

If David is writing this early in his rule, he is astounded that the maker of the universe would give him the position of king.

What would make God think of us so highly as to crown humanity with glory and honor and dominion?

That's the prelude.

That's what comes before.

It's what we need to hear before we get to the main part of our text in Hebrews.

So you can flip back to Hebrews now as we return to consider the present reality.

We've gone from before to now considering the present.

And the present, he says, is not exactly what we would expect.

God handed Adam authority and rule and dominion and honor and glory from the very beginning.

It was a glorious beginning.

But now the writer of Hebrews explains what that means in verse 8.

He says, by putting everything under his subjection, he left nothing outside of his control.

Adam was responsible for everything, and that was to have continued all the way down the human line.

But at present, we don't see that.

We do not yet see everything in subjection.

That points to the authority and responsibility structure that God ordained in the Garden of Eden.

When God put Adam in charge to exercise rule and dominion, he put everything under Adam.

Nothing in creation was outside of Adam's control.

Adam's responsibility was to take that serpent by the neck and to throw him out of the garden.

But now we don't see that.

That's a reality statement.

The present world doesn't look nor function as God intended.

We don't see God's intent in how the world works today.

He doesn't say the world is better than it was, but that as we look around, we don't see the world in subjection to humanity the way God intended.

And that sounds pretty hopeless.

Because as we look around, we don't see glory and honor and dominion.

We see disorder.

We see death.

We were made to rule, and yet most of us can't rule our own appetites and desires.

We can't get along.

We can't keep marriages and families together.

We hurt one another.

We distrust one another.

We were crowned with glory and honor, yet all we see is living and toiling in our lives under the sun until we die, and then somebody else takes our place.

And death is the primary thing that undermines human dominion.

Even if you were able to conquer all of your human desires, your sinful desires, and use your mind and your body to perfection so that you're the most capable person on the world, death is still going to take you.

Preacher of Hebrews says that very plainly down in verse 15.

He says, We're all under the fear of death and subject to lifelong slavery.

From the moment in the garden that sin, and so death by sin, entered the world, the human race switched positions from dominion to slavery.

And we feel that.

And we carry it with us from the effects of aging and cancer to the deaths of the aged and the infants.

From family squabbles to divorces.

Now we don't see everything in subjection to God's image bearers as he intended.

It's broken.

We don't yet see that.

That could be very depressing.

We need hope.

And the hope here is a mercy.

Whoever wrote this book of the Bible knew more about Christ and his glory and God's purpose than most of us, I think, will ever know.

He looked around his world and he saw much of what I've just described.

He saw what we see.

And yet he said, we do not yet see.

Not yet.

He didn't say never.

He didn't say we won't see it.

He said not yet.

There's a present reality and there is something else coming.

We will see the world that God intended, but not yet.

But in the meantime, He's given us something else to see.

Jesus.

We aren't left only to watch the old dilapidated dreams and buildings fall apart and be overtaken by the wind and the thistles.

We are left to look at Jesus.

Which takes us from our prelude to our present to our future.

And it's a future that we can only see by faith.

And we see Jesus crowned through death.

Actually, it's a little more detailed than that.

He says, but we see Jesus, who for a short time was made lower than the angels.

Crowned with glory and honor.

Sounds familiar?

Because of the suffering of death.

So that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.

So the preacher of Hebrews is shifting course slightly and he's building anticipation.

He says, We don't see what God designed the Garden of Eden to be.

We don't see everything in a subjection to humanity as God intended, but we see one who.

One who, for a little while, was made, was caused to be.

Lower than the angels.

That's what we saw in Psalm 8 about humanity.

And that Psalm may apply it to David as the king.

But the author here in Hebrews isn't talking about humanity in general.

He's not talking about David, the king.

He's talking about someone that we see now.

We see the one who ultimately fulfills Psalm 8.

And his name that we now know for the first time in Hebrews is Jesus.

The book of Hebrews is all about Jesus, but this is the first time in the book we've seen his name.

Up until now, it's all the Son, the Son, Lord, God.

Now it's Jesus because Jesus is his ultimate human name.

He is the Adam that Adam was intended to be.

Jesus was made for a little while lower than the angels.

That's his incarnation, his birth when he's on the earth.

This Jesus, who is the creator of all, this Jesus who used his fingertips to hang the stars in space.

This Jesus was made for a little while lower than the angels.

This is about the movement from God's position of power, glory, and honor to a temporary position below angels.

So the author has spent almost the entire first chapter showing how the sun is greater than the angels.

And then he shifts course and he shows us that for a little while, for a short time, the sun became lower than the angels.

But at the same time as being lower than the angels, he is crowned in that lower place.

He's crowned with glory and honor, the same terminology that the Psalms apply to humanity in the Garden of Eden.

It's the crown and the honor of Eden.

What Adam and Eve relinquished in the garden is now seen in Jesus, the true Son.

And the reason that what God intended for humanity in the first place is now given to the Son, to Jesus, is astonishing.

He says it's given that glory and that honor are given to Jesus because of the suffering of death.

Don't miss what God did.

Adam and Eve, through their sin and death by sin, lost the crown of glory and honor that God intended for them.

Death steals, death takes away.

But Jesus regains that crown through the suffering of death.

Christ's suffering and death were the path to glory and honor, not the end of it.

The crown came through the cross, which is why Jesus is the greater Son.

It's interesting that Islam teaches that Jesus never died on a cross.

Yet here in verse 8 and verse 9, we see it twice.

And when it says he tasted death, it doesn't mean that he had a sip of it.

It means he experienced it fully.

And that's why we see Jesus instead of the Son.

Because the only way that the divine Son can experience the suffering of death is by taking on flesh, humanity to die.

Even more astonishing than Jesus' crowning coming through the suffering of death is that his death came by the grace of God.

Jesus didn't die because the world was spiraling recklessly out of control.

He died because of divine grace.

By God's grace, Jesus tasted death for everyone.

He didn't have to.

He could have left us on the road that we were on and said, That's what you chose.

Now put verses eight and nine together.

We do not yet see everything subjected.

But we see Jesus.

That's faith, right?

As we've already seen, this the writer of this book wasn't one of Jesus' original followers.

And he's writing to other believers like him.

So this is seeing with faith.

In chapter 11, we're going to hear that faith is a conviction of things not seen.

And yet we see.

In chapter 12, we're going to see that we are told to run our race by looking to Jesus.

That's a pattern of seeing Jesus with faith.

This is the hope the preacher of Hebrews gives us in the midst of a broken world.

If we only use our physical eyes, we're going to see a fallen and broken world.

But if we look with eyes of faith, we see Jesus.

Christian hope, friends, is not a mood that helps you feel better in a terrible situation.

It's a direction that you turn your heart.

It's a focus on what you believe to be true that motivates how you look at everything else.

And if you have struggled with that, go outside at midnight and look up.

And the stars will remind you.

A collapsing farmhouse makes you feel something.

I think in part because you still get a sense of the intention behind it, of how it started, of the hopes and the dreams that were there.

Somebody intended to make a life there.

In some way, that's Psalm 8, standing in the hills of South Dakota or the plains of North Dakota or the forests of Minnesota.

Or anywhere else in the world.

God meant something for us.

And every once in a while we get a glimpse of what God intended.

But most of the time we see we see the weeds, we see the thistles and the leaning buildings and the graying boards.

Now the good news of Jesus doesn't tell us to ignore the broken world.

If anything, it tells us that's real.

That's very real.

But it also tells us why.

It reminds us that that's not what God intended.

And it's not what God intended because we sinned.

So that he too would experience the suffering of death that enveloped his world.

And instead of following the path of every other person who died, he rose again.

Crowned with the glory and honor humanity was intended to bear.

So that he becomes a new Adam.

And so the hope of our faith rests in Jesus, crowned with glory and honor through his death.

And if you've never trusted in Christ, you know that everyone dies and returns to dust.

That's a reality.

You know that, and you've experienced it if you've ever lost somebody close to you.

And you know, too, even though you might be trying to stave it off by working out hard and eating healthy, you know that you too will experience that suffering of death someday.

What the author of Hebrews wants you to know is that God promised an end to all of that.

And that end begins with the death of his own son, who conquered death.

Through his resurrection, he conquered death and becomes the first fruits of the fullness of God's restoring promises.

And that's the hope and encouragement for all of us, isn't it?

We do not yet see everything in subjection to Christ, the greater Adam.

But we do see Jesus.

So keep your eyes on him, for he is our hope.

Let's pray together.

Lord Jesus, may you always be our hope.

When we get discouraged by life in a broken world, cause us to look up, to be reminded of who you are and of your great grace given to us at the cross.

That you, the maker and sustainer of all that is, would take it upon yourself to enter your creation as a human being, like a slave, to die a slave's death, to break the slavery of death and sin.

Or cause us to hope in you.

And if there is anyone here this morning or even listening that does not yet have eyes of faith to see you, open their hearts to see and to believe that you've come to restore through forgiveness of sins.

May our hope be found in you and in you alone.

Amen.

That concludes this sermon from Faith Evangelical Free Church.

Our mission is to declare the Word of God and disciple believers into mature, devoted followers of Jesus.

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