Colleen and Nikki talk about the book of Hebrews’ teachings of the humanity of Jesus and why He had to be human. Podcast was published April 28, 2020. Transcription by Gwen Billington.
Colleen: Welcome to Former Adventist podcast. I’m Colleen Tinker.
Nikki: And I’m Nikki Stevenson.
Colleen: We’re so glad you’re with us again today as we continue our journey through the covenants. Today we’re going to look at what Hebrews 2 tells us about Jesus. But before we do that, I just want to say, we appreciate all of you who have subscribed to the podcast, and we just want to urge you to do that wherever you listen to podcasts and to write a review wherever you listen to podcasts. And you can also follow us on Facebook and Instagram, and we’re just grateful that you are enjoying studying who Jesus is along with us. Nikki, while we were talking about doing this podcast, you had a really interesting observation about how Hebrews 1 and Hebrews 2 fit together.
Nikki: Yeah. I was just noticing, Hebrews 1 reveals the deity of Christ in a powerful way. You have the writer of Hebrews talking about Him as being eternal Creator, which makes Him self-sufficient, self-sustaining. He’s omnipotent, the Son of God, holy, righteous, just, the judge. All of these attributes of God are applied to Jesus in the first chapter. And I notice the second chapter, we’re reading about Jesus as the man. And so you have chapter 1 and chapter 2 working together to speak of the hypostatic union of Christ.
Colleen: Exactly.
Nikki: And it sets the whole stage for the rest of the letter. Because without understanding who Christ is and why He had to be who He was, the rest of it is harder to understand.
Colleen: It doesn’t really completely make sense. I think that’s one reason Adventists have had such a hard time with Hebrews. Adventism tried to make Hebrews fit the Adventist theology instead of shaping their theology around the Book of Hebrews.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And the reason that we’re going through Hebrews as we discuss the New Covenant, which may actually be a bit of an unusual way to teach the New Covenant and to learn about it, but the reason we’re doing it is from our past, with an Adventist understanding of who Jesus was, it’s become more and more clear to us that if we don’t know what the Bible says about who He is and who He always will be –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – that even though we understand the mechanism of the New Covenant and we can explain it to people, if we don’t know who Jesus really is, we will be vulnerable to getting off the rails down the road somewhere when a new subtle deception comes along. It’s only in knowing who Jesus really is that we can be protected against misunderstanding when we hear people talk about various views of atonement or salvation or how to live. So that’s why we’re doing this. Nikki, in Hebrews 2 we both, as we studied it, outlined it for ourselves in four essential sections, and it’s interesting how well this chapter, which is not long, it’s only 18 verses, but it divides up into four essential sections. What did you think about Jesus? Who was He, and why did He have to be human?
Nikki: I didn’t understand fully why He had to be human. You know, it’s hard to explain how as an Adventist you can have a few different narratives in your head at the same time, and they never touch. [Laughter.]
Colleen: Oh, that’s true. That’s a good way to put it. [Laughter.]
Nikki: Because, on the one hand, I understood, you know, the basic paradigm of Adventism, that Jesus came to show us that God’s law was fair and that we could keep it, and to be our example, and so I knew He was a human and that that’s why He came. I didn’t understand why He had to be a human who died.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: I didn’t understand propitiation. And I understood that He was showing humans that humans could keep God’s law. That was kind of the extent of why I thought He needed to be human, but when it came down to talking about atonement and propitiation, which was a word I never heard in Adventism, actually –
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: – then I’d jump to my other narrative without even thinking about the other. I started asking questions that really belong, in a lot of ways, to the emergent movement –
Colleen: Interesting.
Nikki: – although I didn’t know it at the time, that that’s where it was coming from. Looking back, though, I know that the pastor that I was looking up to quite a bit at that time was definitely part of the emergent framework –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – even as an Adventist pastor, but the question was: God, if He’s all powerful and He can do anything, why doesn’t He just forgive us all? Why doesn’t He just say, “I forgive you,” and it made the moral influence, the bloodless atonement theory of atonement, very compelling.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: So I didn’t have an understanding of why God had to be human and had to die. I thought that was one theory out there that people who didn’t understand the Bible had. I didn’t know the Bible really teaches that clearly, actually. What about you?
Colleen: I believed He had to be human to show us that we could keep the law. I believed He had to be human to reveal the Father, whatever that meant. Basically, I understood that to mean He came to show us how loving God was by the loving life He lived.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: About the death, that was more vague to me. I heard He had to come to die. He came to die for us. It never made sense to me as a sufficient death. I sort of thought of it as a representative death, and He did all that and went through all that somehow so I could prove myself obedient enough I could kind of access the benefits of His having died. I mean, it didn’t feel like a substitution to me –
Nikki: Uh-uh.
Colleen: – and I didn’t know that that’s what it actually had to be. And I remember very clearly early in the ’80s – I don’t remember why I was thinking about it, but I remember I was, and I was thinking, “I can back up in my head and think, ‘I can see how God, as the Creator, would have felt responsible for ultimately taking care of our sin, because if a parent has a child and the child does something destructive, the parent is responsible for rectifying that problem with whomever was wronged.'” I could see how God could take responsibility for our sin in that way, but I can remember feeling absolutely stumped as to why He had to be a man to do that because God could just do it.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: It fed right into that moral influence theory, which I was beginning to hear in Loma Linda from people like Graham Maxwell: “God is a loving God. Why would He need Jesus’ shed blood in order to forgive us? He would forgive us just because He loves us.”
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: That’s what I thought. I couldn’t quite figure out what to do with Jesus’ humanity and His death.
Nikki: It’s funny, I think I almost felt a little bit proud of the fact that we had a higher view of God than those people who think He required death for sin.
Colleen: I came up with that idea too. I mean, I wouldn’t have articulated it, but it felt superior.
Nikki: Um-hmm. I knew Him better.
Colleen: Yeah. “Oh, He’s a good God.”
Nikki: These other ideas, they’re just primitive.
Colleen: That was the word I was just thinking. That was the word that came up, and I heard that word used.
Nikki: Really?
Colleen: The whole business of the bloody atonement is so primitive. It’s what had to be done for primitive people. All those sacrifices in the wilderness – I did hear this from Adventists: “All those sacrifices that God gave Israel. That was just primitive because they were primitive people, and that’s how they thought, and they lived among primitive pagans. This is what they understood. Today God would use a different model because we’re not primitive.” I heard that. I had forgotten that. That’s kind of horrifying.
Nikki: It is kind of horrifying, and it makes me think about the fact that we hear Jesus saying, “My sheep know my voice and another voice they will not follow” –
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: – and this side of being born again, I get that.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: And at the same time, I feel like I recognize the voice of demonic mockery of God. I can recognize that from my past in myself and from a lot of the narratives that really dethrone Christ.
Colleen: I agree. In fact, I kind of cringe looking back, realizing how dark those theories were –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – that I was embracing. Well, when we come to Hebrews 2, we have the first four verses, which actually are a bit of a warning. I mean, we’ve just gone through that chapter 1, which exalts the Lord Jesus and shows Him to be superior to everything –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – Creator, God Almighty, superior to all the angels, superior to everything the Jews honored, and we come to those first four verses of Hebrews 2, and the author is reminding his readers: If you thought that that whole Mosaic covenant was wonderful and if it was, if it actually did set up a strict standard of punishment for disobedience, you need to think twice before you just dismiss the reality of Jesus and what He did. So do you want to read those four verses, Nikki?
Nikki: “Therefore, we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it. For since the message declared by angels proved to be reliable, and every transgression or disobedience received a just retribution, how shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation? It was declared at first by the Lord, and it was attested to us by those who heard, while God also bore witness by signs and wonders and various miracles and by gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to His will.”
Colleen: How amazing. It’s interesting to me, in verse 2 there, that the writer of Hebrews, who is not known, by the way, he’s anonymous, it identifies this “word spoken by angels,” and I feel like we just need to say something about that.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Hebrews more than once mentions that. There was a Jewish tradition that angels mediated the giving of the law, that angels were present and helped mediate it to Moses, and it’s also interesting that in Deuteronomy 33:2 and in Psalm 67:17, both Moses and David talk about the thousands of angels that were present at Sinai when the law was given. So this is built on not just a tradition, but actual words in the Bible –
Nikki: Wow.
Colleen: – in the Psalms and in Deuteronomy, that angels were in attendance when the law was given. But it’s interesting that the focus here is – the Jews would have understood this – that the angels were a big part of what happened on Sinai, even though they knew the law came from God, but the contrast is being developed, that thismessage from God’s final Word, Jesus, is different from that. What was your takeaway on these first four verses, Nikki?
Nikki: Really the same thing, that if we pay attention to the Mosaic Law, and, boy, did they –
Colleen: [Laughter.] And, boy, did I.
Nikki: [Laughter.] Yes! How much more should we pay attention to what Hebrews 1 has just outlined as God Almighty coming with another message now. He has spoken – finally spoken now –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – how much more should we pay attention to that. And so that was really a stark contrast after studying Hebrews 1, and I also noticed, kind of related to what we were just talking about – why can’t God just, you know, forgive everybody – it says here that that first covenant demanded a just retribution.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: Our God is just. He’s just in both covenants. In the New Covenant, He’s just and the justifier, which we’ll talk about more as we go, but He’s not just going to turn His face away and just, “Oh, no, you know what? You’re all forgiven.”
Colleen: Because if He did that, He would not be just, and He could not be God if He were not just.
Nikki: So that stood out to me too, and the fact that this incredible message, God attested to. He bore witness with signs and wonders and with His apostles and what He did in the early years of the formation of the church.
Colleen: Yeah. That stood out to me too. It’s really, really significant. He attested to the gospel of the Lord Jesus, the final Word of God in these last days. He attested to it with signs and wonders, both through Jesus, declaring Him to be the Messiah that had been expected, and through the works of the apostles, who carried the message into the world and established the church. You know, I did not understand, as an Adventist, how significant the Book of Acts was. I remember thinking of it as actually, frankly, pretty boring, and it was a nauseating litany of suffering and journeys and preaching and stonings, and it would tire me out. I could hardly concentrate when I tried to read Acts as an Adventist, and when I finally understood that Acts was the singular book of history in the New Testament that actually explained how the church was founded, it was like that entire book revealed the period of time when the gospel went from the Jews to the Gentiles and into the world and that that whole thing was a singular, unrepeatable event, the planting of the church. There will be no other gospel, there will be no further revelation, there will be no restored message that was not given then. It puts the lie to the entire notion that in 1844 something happened that had been forgotten or misunderstood. No. The church and all it stood for was known and planted and established in the world, and there isno new light. So God confirmed this message of Jesus by giving His apostles, who planted the church, the ability to do signs and wonders to confirm their message, showing the people that they had the same Spirit of Jesus that Jesus Himself had had because their miracles were the same miracles that Jesus had done to declare His identity.
Nikki: And remember, the beginning of chapter 1 says that this message that God bore witness to and that His firsthand witnesses, the apostles, bore witness to, clearly is that after making purification for sin He sat down at the right hand of the Father on high, so we have here in the first chapter of Hebrews and the first four verses of the second chapter, Adventism is shredded.
Colleen: Absolutely. You can’t have Adventism if you have these two chapters of Hebrews. If that’s all we had –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – we’d have to know Adventism can’t hold up.
Nikki: I just want to squeak this in really quick before we move on. I remember being in an Adventist congregation, and the pastor at the congregation said, “Nobody really likes to preach on Hebrews. It’s kind of hard to understand.”
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: And I don’t remember anything else about the sermon, but I remember thinking, “Oh, what’s Hebrews? It’s confusing? Why?” And I flipped over to it. And that just stuck with me, and I just find it really funny now when I look at it. Of course it was confusing to them.
Colleen: It doesn’t fit when you try to explain Adventism, and I find myself angry because Adventists actually use the Book of Hebrews to try to support their supposed sanctuary doctrine.
Nikki: Yeah, they proof text.
Colleen: And their sanctuary doctrine is blasphemy that directly opposes the Book of Hebrews.
Nikki: Yes.
Colleen: So, no wonder the book was confusing.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Do you want to read the next section, Nikki.
Nikki: “Now it was not to angels that God subjected the world to come, of which we are speaking. It has been testified somewhere, ‘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 have 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. At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to Him. But we see Him who was for a little while 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.”
Colleen: This section is amazing. It quotes from Psalm 8:4-6 and explains it, applies it, explains that God originally made man to have dominion over the creatures of the earth, which I think sometimes we forget that. You know, He created Adam, asked him to name the animals, told him to fill the earth and subdue it, and gave him authority over the created things on the earth. And when he sinned, Adam lost his authority and was put into the bondage of spiritual death. But originally, man had a high position on the planet, and that’s what Psalm 8 is explaining. And he’s also commenting, this author of Hebrews, that even though this happened, we don’t actually see it like that right now, we don’t see everything under the feet of man. And then he does this remarkable thing that the Book of Psalms didn’t do quite as directly. In verse 9, the author of Hebrews applies Psalm 8 to the Lord Jesus and explains that Jesus came as that perfect man who restores authority to man over the earth. And He does this because Jesus is obedient to His Father, because He suffers, He goes to death for the sins of the world, and God crowns Him with glory and honor, and he shows how Jesus is the one that comes and fulfills and restores and redeems the original intention for mankind. What did you think when you read this passage, Nikki?
Nikki: When I looked at verse 5, where it says, “Now it was not to angels that God subjected the world to come, of which we are speaking,” it made me think about chapter 1 and how the writer was making it very clear that Jesus is much higher than the angels and that they are here to be ministering spirits, and then you have this, that God didn’t plan to subject the world to come to angels, that Christ is higher than the angels.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: The world to come will be subjected to Christ, not to angels. And talking about how, for a little while, man is under the angels, but Christ has done away with that. What He did, the work of Christ, has now put everything in subjection to Him. Like you said, we don’t see that yet. We have Christ sitting at the right hand of God, with His work completed, and it will happen, we will see this, the world to come will be subjected to Christ and His authority, not to some angel.
Colleen: And the interesting thing is that along with this, as this passage goes on, as this chapter goes on, it explains how, because of Jesus, we who believe become His brothers –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – and become children of God. And Romans 8 tells us that when we are born again and adopted as God’s children we become joint heirs with Christ, if indeed, it says, we share in His sufferings. So Jesus is not only taking complete authority over the creation which He made, but as a man He is redeeming the position of man. He is going to be the one in charge, not angels.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And He’s going to take us along with Him as joint heirs –
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: – which is almost more than I can comprehend.
Nikki: It’s pretty exciting. [Laughter.]
Colleen: Yeah! And that passage in Psalm 8 is actually saying that God made man for a while a little lower than the angels, and when we read that we are going to be joint heirs with Christ, we see that ultimately our position as brothers and joint heirs will redeem and restore us to the original position God intended, and our authority over the earth will be different from that of the angels, it will be joint heirs with Christ. I almost hesitate to say that because it almost sounds presumptuous, but that’s what the words say.
Nikki: This biblical teaching completely eliminates any angel worship or praying to angels or – so much of that is out in the New Age movement. There are Christians who believe they can do that now, and so if you’ve left Adventism and you’ve come to understand the New Covenant and you’re in a church where people are praying to angels, think about Hebrews 1 and 2 and ask yourself if this is a great church for you.
Colleen: That’s a really good point. Angels are God’s servants, as we learned in Hebrews 1:14, who minister to those who are inheriting salvation. We’re not to see angels as the people we pray to or ask to help us. We pray to God. We pray to God in the name of our Savior, Jesus.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And He sends helpers as needed, but the angels are not the people we focus on. They’re not the beings on whom we focus. So, Nikki, do you want to read verses 10 to 13.
Nikki: “For it was fitting that He, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering. For He who sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one source. That is why He is not ashamed to call them brothers, saying, ‘I will tell of your name to my brothers; in the midst of the congregation I will sing your praise.’ And again, ‘I will put my trust in Him.’ And again, ‘Behold, I and the children God has given me.'”
Colleen: This is a really amazing passage to me. Do you have any first responses to it, Nikki, as you look at it?
Nikki: In verses 10 and 12, Jesus was perfected through suffering. That was something that I had to work through as I was reading Hebrews for the first time, coming out of Adventism, because we had this idea that He came with the same nature we had and He showed that you could keep God’s law, and I understood that through keeping God’s law I would be made righteous and sanctified, through keeping commandments, keeping Sabbath, and so I had that kind of in my head. So when I saw that God thought it was fitting that He should make the founder of our salvation perfect through suffering, I read that right into the text, and I had to –
Colleen: Oh. You read law-keeping into the text?
Nikki: I did. I did.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: You know, proving keeping the commandments, because He was just like us; right? No advantage we didn’t have. So, yeah, I used to read that right into the text. So I had to unpack that one as a former, and a couple things, it makes me think now of 2 Corinthians chapter 1 verses 3 through 7 where it talks about God being the father of mercies and the God of all comfort. At the end of that verse it talks about us sharing abundantly in Christ’s comfort, as we also share in His suffering.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: And so I was able to see verse 10 in the context of Christ being able to be a merciful high priest who through suffering, His purpose, He was perfected in His purpose. He was never flawed –
Colleen: – but He was completed.
Nikki: Yeah. Kind of the example that I gave when we were talking about this before that was helpful to me.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: If you have grape juice that is set aside and purposed to become wine, that is something that you’re going to use for wine. It’s not wine until it has passed through time and it has become fermented. But in its grape juice state, it isn’t flawed. It isn’t imperfect.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: There’s a purpose. I’ve been able to look at this verse and see that Christ was a man born under the law with the purpose of being the fulfillment of the law and the propitiation for human sin, and it all kind of goes along now with the whole idea of the fullness of time. It was in the fullness time that Christ would go to the cross and die for our sins and be buried and resurrected, and that whole process was a time – He was a man of sorrows. It was a time of suffering, a time of temptation, and He was perfected for His purpose during that, and that’s kind of how I think about it now.
Colleen: That’s a cool explanation. I see it that way too. It’s really pretty awesome. I think it’s really interesting that this is actually talking about the incarnation aspect of Jesus. His God the Son-ness didn’t have to be perfected, but His incarnation as a man did.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Because to be made like us He had to experience suffering. I mean, He came to an earth that was plunged into suffering. He was sinless, we are not. But He had to experience the suffering in order to be made complete as our sacrifice. It’s our suffering He took into Himself and redeemed. It’s our sin and everything that the sin caused, and as I was looking at this in verses 10 and 11, “It was fitting for Him” – referring to the Father – “for whom are all things, and through whom are all things, in bringing many sons to glory, to perfect the author of their salvation through sufferings.” And I thought, it’s so interesting that in this one verse, in this one sentence, it is saying that all things are through God and for God, everything that has been made, everything that is done, even, may I say, this whole pandemic –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – is not outside of God’s purposes. Everything is through Him and for Him, and in bringing many sons to glory, part of what is for Him and through Him was the suffering of Jesus. That was His intention when Jesus came.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: It was His will to crush Him, it says in Isaiah. I know Adventists and others have said, “That’s divine child abuse.” No. Jesus was fully God, as we learned in the first chapter of Hebrews. This was His will as well. So His suffering, being perfected as a human who obeyed His Father to the bitter end through suffering, was part of bringing us to glory, and it was God’s will that this be so. And I thought 11 was so remarkable, “For both He who sanctifies” – that would be Jesus – “and those who are sanctified” – that would be us – “are all from one Father,” or the ESV says, “one source.” So we who are sanctified, as it says in John 1:12, are born of God. You know, that’s the new birth.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: It’s not in Adam anymore. So when we’re sanctified, we have a new Father. We have the same Father Jesus has. And because He was willing to come for the pleasure of God, for God’s good pleasure and for our sanctification and glory, He suffered. That suffering has qualified Him to be our brother because He fully experienced the dreadfulness of our sin without sinning, and it qualifies us to be His brothers. Because we shared in the same flesh and we shared in the suffering of sin, we have become partakers together of brotherhood, and because our Father is the same. It’s remarkable. We don’t become little gods, we don’t become gods like the Mormons teach or like even the Word Faith movement teaches, but we become redeemed humans, and Jesus became a human and shares that with us.
Nikki: It’s interesting too because this makes me think about the fact that we have become an inheritance to Christ.
Colleen: Yes. Um-hmm.
Nikki: We are His inheritance. I believe it’s Ephesians 1:18, it talks about us being the inheritance of Christ. But Romans 8 also talks about us being co-heirs with Christ.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: Which means you are my inheritance. [Laughter.]
Colleen: [Laughter.] That’s so cool!
Nikki: I love that!
Colleen: And you are mine!
Nikki: Yes. And that same verse in Hebrews says that if we’re heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ provided we suffer with Him. So we see suffering – the suffering of Christ has made us brothers, and we are His brothers and co-heirs provided we suffer with Him.
Colleen: In 12 and 13, with quotes from the Old Testament again, from Psalms and Isaiah, the author is emphasizing the fact that we who are being sanctified are Jesus’ brothers, and these quotes are being used and applied to Christ, so Christ is saying, “I will proclaim your name to my brethren.” He’s applying this Psalm to Jesus saying to God the Father, “I will proclaim your name to my brethren,” which is what Jesus came and did. “‘In the midst of the congregation I will sing your praise.’ And again, ‘I will put my trust in Him,'” which is what He did through all of His suffering. And then in the end of 13, “Behold, I and the children whom God has given me.” This passage the author of Hebrews is applying to Christ, saying the children that are born of God, who become God’s children, God gives those to me. So Jesus is saying, “You’re my brothers. God has given you to me. You are His children, and He has given you to me.” He’s claiming us. We’re His brothers, we’re God’s children. We are members of the same family of God when we are born again. And then we come to the last five verses, and I have to admit these last five verses of this chapter have been a watershed for me, even from shortly after leaving Adventism and continuing. As I study this passage, it just seems to be richer and deeper, but this is the section of the chapter that really showed me why Jesus had to be human. Do you want to read those verses, Nikki?
Nikki: “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. For surely it is not angels that He helps, but He helps the offspring of Abraham. Therefore He had to be made like His brothers in every respect, so that He might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For because He Himself has suffered when tempted, He is able to help those who are being tempted.”
Colleen: That is so amazing. I remember when I was just, like, stopped in my tracks by verse 14. This was years ago, and we were studying Hebrews in FAF. Galatians was the first book that our fledgling FAF group went through, and Hebrews was the second, and I’ll never forget the impact of this verse, “Therefore, since the children share in flesh and blood,” – and we’ve already established, the children are the children of God who are being sanctified by Christ – “He Himself likewise also partook of the same, that through death He might render powerless him who had the power of death, that is, the devil.” This verse is saying Jesus had to be human in order to do the work necessary to triumph over Satan. He had to be human like us in order to die the death that would redeem us from sin. That was an astonishing thing to me. This is clearly saying God couldn’t just sovereignly declare that we were innocent or that we were forgiven or that we would just walk away without any reparations that we had to make because of our sin. This is clearly saying a human had to die in order to stop the power of Satan over humanity, and I had never understood that as an Adventist. He had to be human because only a human could pay for human sin. We couldn’t have justice if God just declared we were forgiven. There had to be a human death for human sin.
Nikki: The other thing that jumped out to me about this passage is in verse 16 where it says, “For surely it is not angels that He helps, but He helps the offspring of Abraham.”
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: And as I thought about that, He did not say the offspring of Adam.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: He says the offspring of Abraham. It’s those who place their faith in Him. If we had a God who came and He died to just prove God is loving and really God can just forgive everybody, then why wouldn’t that say that He came to save the offspring of Adam? All humanity?
Colleen: That’s a good point.
Nikki: He’s specifically speaking about Abraham because the promise came through Abraham, and it’s a promise of faith.
Colleen: Yes. Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness. And his offspring, his seed, would be the children of promise, not the children of works, not the children of obedience to a law, the children of promise, that God declares, “You are mine because you believe me.” That’s such a great point. And I also think it’s interesting because Ellen White said that God pled with Satan after his rebellion in heaven and offered him a chance to repent, but he was stubborn and refused to do so. The Bible never, ever, ever says that.
Nikki: Uh-uh.
Colleen: The Bible says that Jesus came to help man. He took on human flesh because God’s eternal plan was to redeem us from our sin. And in the process, 14 and 15 are so interesting in this, in freeing us from sin and destroying the curse of sin, He is freeing us from the fear of death. Now, you know, that’s a very interesting thing because as an Adventist I did fear death, and I remember our friend, who died actually several years ago now, Stanley Rouhe. He was a former Adventist who used to come to FAF with us, and he said that as a neurosurgeon he watched many people die, and he said, “I noticed that Adventists die very badly, but the Christians that I knew were not afraid.” They knew where they would go. They knew they would be with the Lord. They were not afraid. And he said, “One of the things that drove me was I had to figure out why Adventists were afraid to die and Christians weren’t.” And this verse comes right out and states that Jesus, in doing what He did, in taking our flesh and taking the curse of our sin and dying, He has rendered powerless the devil, who would create in us the fear of death and had the power of death over us. Now, we know that Satan does not have ultimate control over our lives, but when we are not born again, we do not have assurance of salvation because we are not born again and we are not saved, and we did fear the devil, and we did fear death. But Jesus’ death frees us from that fear and releases us from the tyranny of the fear that Satan would wield over our minds.
Nikki: And for us who were in Adventism, it was the power of the law that really fueled that for me. Because of my fear of death, I was frantically trying to keep that law in a way that would make sure –
Colleen: Exactly.
Nikki: – that at least when Jesus came back maybe I had a chance of something after death. It was slavery.
Colleen: It was slavery. The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. That’s exactly right. Jesus had to be made like us in all things so that He could do what?
Nikki: So that He might become the merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. And I just have to say, in order to do those things you have to be human.
Colleen: You do.
Nikki: You can’t accomplish those tasks as an animal.
Colleen: No. A lamb, a bull, a goat, no. And you can’t even only be God because the human need would not be met if you did not have a human sacrifice.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And a high priest has to represent both parties, man and God, and it’s so interesting to me, in 1 Timothy Paul talks about Jesus being – he says there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus. And to be that mediator, Jesus has to represent both parties, the ones who are unreconciled from each other. And interestingly, Jesus has in Himself both parties. He is fully God, He is fully man, and He can fully intercede for us before God because He has shed His human blood, which forever ensures our reconciliation with God when we trust Him. In Himself He represents both parties, and that’s what this is talking about. He had to be human in order to be the perfect high priest, and you know, one other thing that struck me just last night when I was looking at this text, He actually functioned as a high priest of a new order that day when He hung on the cross and offered Himself as the sacrifice of atonement for humanity. There was no other priest offering Him. He offered Himself. He was the sacrifice and the high priest that day.
Nikki: He said, “No one takes my life from me, but I lay it down.” He was the high priest who laid the sacrifice on the cross.
Colleen: Absolutely. That just kind of overwhelmed me, when I realized that. His high priesthood isn’t something that just happened after He rose from death. It happened that day.
Nikki: I never thought of that. Wow. You know, it also makes me think – as you were talking about Him being the mediator, being man and God, it made me think about Abraham sleeping on the ground –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – while God cut those animals – or had Abraham cut the animals and then God Himself walked through it as a smoking pot and flaming torch, representing that God would take care of this on His own, and He did, as God and as God incarnate.
Colleen: It’s an amazing thing, and how all of that was prefigured, even in that ancient promise to Abraham, which Jesus Himself is fulfilling still to this day. And then that last verse. Tell me what you think about when you read that, Nikki. “For He Himself was tempted in that which He has suffered, He is able to come to the aid of those who are tempted.”
Nikki: Well, you know, I thought about that in the ESV. I’m having to rethink in the NASB. [Laughter.] Okay, it’s “For because He Himself has suffered when tempted, He is able to help those who are being tempted.” I don’t want to suggest that He was only tempted twice because we read that He was tempted in every way that we’ve been, but I was thinking about the temptations of Christ, and I was thinking about Him in the desert for 40 days, with the devil tempting Him. It’s funny that the moral influence people, at least the way I understood it, suggested that it was Satan who wanted Jesus on the cross, it was evil, it was demonic, that they wanted Jesus on the cross, but no, no, no, no. In the desert Satan wanted Him not to go to the cross. He wanted Him to give up the whole plan and to just worship him, and then Satan was going to give Him all the kingdoms of the earth, as if they were his to give. Anyway, that was a side note, but you have Jesus suffering there, and He prevails with obedience, and then again, the other time I thought of was Him in the Garden of Gethsemane. He was suffering greatly there, and like you’ve mentioned and our pastor has pointed out, Jesus said in that moment, “Not my will, but yours,” showing a different desire for Him, for His will, than for the ultimate will of the Father at that moment, and in both instances He obeys God, He submits His will to God and overcomes those temptations. I can speak experientially, as a child of God, that I know Christ has come to my aid when I have suffered in temptation. I have been in places where I have been tempted to be disobedient, and Christ Himself has strengthened me with Scripture and –
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: – with bringing to mind the moments in His own life where He too has suffered, and it has shored me up to walk in obedience.
Colleen: It’s a profound thing, Nikki. I think it’s also interesting that it points out here that Jesus destroyed the devil and the fear of death and the power of death that the devil has wielded over us because we were sinners, and he knew he could get our guilty consciences to know and to feel that we had no hope and to eclipse the reality of Jesus. But Satan wanted humanity destroyed, and Jesus was the perfect human, and Satan tried to take Him out, and he could not.
Nikki: Even Peter, when he said, “Surely Lord, not you,” Jesus rebuked him. He said, “Away from me, Satan, for you do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of man.”
Colleen: Wow. That’s true. Jesus had to go to the cross as a man, as the perfect sacrifice, and that was what was required in order to release us from our condemnation and the debt of sin. If, as you’re looking at the second chapter of Hebrews, you’re seeing things about Jesus that you never saw before, welcome to the crowd. I just thank God that He has given us His Word to teach us what is true and that we can trust every word that’s written in Scripture because it’s God-breathed. And if you haven’t trusted this Jesus, who is God the Son and the Son of Man, this Jesus who took on human flesh and died a human death and shed perfect human blood as a propitiation for human sin, if you have never seen Jesus taking your sin, I just ask that you look at what this Scripture says about Him and that you repent before Him and tell Him thank you and accept His shed blood as payment for your sin and allow Him to be your Lord and Savior. Thank you for joining us for another journey through another chapter of Hebrews. We look forward to continuing this study next week, and if you would like to write to us or if you have comments or questions, you can always email us at formeradventist@gmail.com. You can subscribe to Proclamation! magazine, to our weekly emails, at proclamationmagazine.com. And again, don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast, write us a review, follow us on Facebook or Instagram, and we just appreciate having been able to have this discussion with you, to know that you, who share our background in Adventism, are with us on this journey of allowing God’s Word to reshape our worldview. We’ll see you again.
Nikki: Bye.
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