Hebrews 2

Today’s Passage: Hebrews 2

The first chapter took your breath away with the height of the Son. This chapter does two things with that height, and they belong together. First it turns it into a warning, and the warning is the first of five in this book. If the message that came through angels was binding, and every transgression under it met its just penalty, then what happens to people who simply let a greater message slip away from them? Notice the shape of the danger. He does not say if we reject it or if we renounce it. He says “so that we do not drift away,” and drifting is a quiet thing that nobody decides to do. Then, having sounded the alarm, the chapter turns and descends, and the descent is as astonishing as the ascent. The world to come is not subject to angels but to man, says the eighth Psalm, crowned with glory and honor with everything under his feet. And then the preacher looks around at the world as it actually is and says the honest thing: at present we do not see everything subject to him. What we do see is Jesus. Made a little lower than the angels, crowned now with glory and honor because He suffered death, tasting death for everyone by the grace of God. From there the chapter goes down and down, into the family likeness the Son took on Himself, until it reaches the sentences that have comforted more frightened believers than almost any others in Scripture: He shared in flesh and blood, He broke the power of the one who holds the power of death, He set free those whose whole lives were held in slavery by the fear of dying, and He became a merciful and faithful high priest who is able to help, because He Himself suffered when He was tempted.

As you read, hold this: Because so great a salvation came to us by the Son, we must not drift away from it; and that same Son took our flesh and blood so that He might break the power of death and become a merciful and faithful high priest who is able to help us.

Hebrews 2:1–4 (BSB)

¹ We must pay closer attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away. ² For if the message spoken by angels was binding, and every transgression and disobedience received its just punishment, ³ how shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation? This salvation was first announced by the Lord, was confirmed to us by those who heard Him, ⁴ and was affirmed by God through signs, wonders, various miracles, and gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to His will.

That little word therefore is doing heavy work, and you must not step over it. Everything in the first chapter, the radiance of God’s glory, the exact representation of His nature, the throne and the scepter and the seated Son, exists in this letter for the sake of what comes next. The preacher did not paint that portrait so that his hearers could admire it. He painted it so that they would pay attention. And the danger he names is not the one we expect. He does not warn them against being argued out of the faith by clever opponents, or against a dramatic renunciation. He warns them against something far more common and far quieter: “so that we do not drift away (παραρρέω) pararrheō, pronounced par-ar-REH-oh. Strong's G3901, to drift away, to slip past like a boat past its moorings. Pararrheō is a word from the water. It means to flow past, to slip by, to be carried away alongside. It was used of a ring sliding off a finger, of a crumb of food going down the wrong way, of something that escapes your notice, and, most vividly, of a boat that drifts past the landing place because nobody was minding the rope. Picture that, because the whole warning is in the picture. A vessel is tied at a quay. Nobody unties it, nobody hauls it out to sea, nobody makes a decision. The knot works loose in the current, and the hull begins to move so slowly that for a long time you would swear it was still. And then one morning the mooring is out of reach and the shore is going by. That is how believers are lost to a church, and it almost never happens the way we fear. There is no announcement. There is a season of tiredness, a run of weeks away from the gathering, a Bible that stays shut because the day was long, an old comfort that costs nothing quietly taking the place of the living Christ. This is why the antidote the preacher prescribes is not heroic. It is simply to pay closer attention, to hold the rope with both hands, to keep listening hard to what we have already heard. Attention is not a dramatic virtue. It is the ordinary daily work that keeps a soul at the quay. .” That is not the language of rebellion. It is the language of a boat.

Then he makes his argument, and it is a hard one, so let it be hard. “If the message spoken by angels was binding, and every transgression and disobedience received its just punishment, how shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation?” The law was real, and its penalties were real, and God enforced it. That is the lesser case. Now measure it against a word that did not come by angels but by the Son Himself, the One whom the angels are commanded to worship. The greater the messenger, the greater the accountability. And observe that the sin here is not attacking the salvation. It is neglecting it. The preacher’s question has no answer, and it is meant to have none. It hangs in the air over the congregation and it hangs over us. How shall we escape? Not by any route this book will ever offer, because there is no second Son, no further sacrifice, no other name. A person who lets so great a salvation slide out of reach has nowhere left to go, and it is a mark of love, not cruelty, that the preacher says so out loud to people he calls brothers. If you feel the weight of that, do not rush to put it down. He means you to feel it. The whole reason he speaks this sharply is that he intends to keep every one of them, and a warning is one of the instruments God actually uses to keep His people, not merely a threat He holds over them.

And then, having pressed hard, he tells them why the message is worth holding: it has an unbroken chain of witness behind it. It was “first announced by the Lord,” so it did not begin with a preacher’s idea. It “was confirmed to us by those who heard Him,” so it came through people who had been present. And it “was affirmed by God through signs, wonders, various miracles, and gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to His will.” God Himself stood behind the founding testimony and authenticated it. Notice the last phrase, which is easy to skim: distributed according to His will. Even in that founding era, the gifts were never at anybody’s disposal but God’s. He gave them out as He chose, to confirm His word, and the confirming was His work and not the church’s achievement. So the salvation you are being told not to drift from is not a private opinion that has been handed down. It came from the Lord’s own lips, through witnesses who heard Him, with the signature of God upon it.

Hebrews 2:5–9 (BSB)

⁵ For it is not to angels that He has subjected the world to come, about which we are speaking. ⁶ But somewhere it is testified in these words: “What is man that You are mindful of him, or the son of man that You care for him? ⁷ You made him a little lower than the angels; You crowned him with glory and honor ⁸ and placed everything under his feet.” When God subjected all things to him, He left nothing outside of his control. Yet at present we do not see everything subject to him. ⁹ But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels, now crowned with glory and honor because He suffered death, so that by the grace of God He might taste death for everyone.

Back to the angels, and now from a new angle. The world to come, the age that is arriving, was never handed over to angels. It was promised to man. And to prove it the preacher quotes the eighth Psalm, that great night-time meditation of David looking up at a sky he could not measure and asking why the God who made it should bother with creatures like us.

"what is man that You are mindful of him, or the son of man that You care for him? You made him a little lower than the angels; You crowned him with glory and honor. You made him ruler of the works of Your hands; You have placed everything under his feet:" Psalm 8:4–6 (BSB)

That is the charter of the human race as God wrote it in the beginning. Made lower than the angels, and yet crowned, and given dominion over the works of God’s hands. Then comes one of the most honest sentences in the Bible, and I love the preacher for writing it: “Yet at present we do not see everything subject to him.” He will not pretend. He looks at the psalm, and then he looks out of the window at a world of graves and tyrants and failed harvests and sickbeds, at a species that cannot govern its own appetites let alone the works of God’s hands, and he admits the gap. That is not weak faith. That is faith with its eyes open. If you have ever read a promise of God and then looked at your own circumstances and felt the distance between them, you are standing exactly where this verse stands, and Scripture does not scold you for it.

But hold on for the next word, because the whole chapter turns on it. “But we see Jesus.” We do not yet see man crowned. We do see a Man crowned. He was made a little lower than the angels, which means He entered our exact condition, took the very nature the psalm describes, lived under the sky as one of us. And He is “now crowned with glory and honor because He suffered death.” Read the logic of that slowly, because it runs against every instinct we have. The crown was not given in spite of the suffering, as compensation. It was given because of it. The road to the throne went through the cross, and the preacher wants his hearers, who were paying for their faith, to see the shape of that road and recognize it as the family road. And then the reason for all of it: “so that by the grace of God He might taste death for everyone.” Taste does not mean a sip. In the Hebrew way of speaking, to taste death is to experience it fully, to know it from the inside. He did not observe our death from a safe distance. He drank the cup down. And He did it by the grace of God, which is to say it was a gift given, not a debt paid to us or a price extracted from a reluctant Father. The crowned Man we see is the crowned Man who died, and that is where the whole human vocation, so long lost, comes back into our hands.

Hebrews 2:10–13 (BSB)

¹⁰ In bringing many sons to glory, it was fitting for God, for whom and through whom all things exist, to make the author of their salvation perfect through suffering. ¹¹ For both the One who sanctifies and those who are sanctified are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers. ¹² He says: “I will proclaim Your name to My brothers; I will sing Your praises in the assembly.” ¹³ And again: “I will put My trust in Him.” And once again: “Here am I, and the children God has given Me.”

“It was fitting.” That is a striking thing to say about the suffering of the Son of God. The preacher is not merely reporting what happened; he is telling us that when God arranged salvation this way, it suited Him, it was fitting to His character, it was the beautiful thing to do. And notice the aim He set: “bringing many sons to glory.” Not a few. Many. The crown that man forfeited is being restored to a great company, and God will not be satisfied with a remnant huddled at the edge of it. The road there runs through the sufferings of the author of their salvation (ἀρχηγός) archēgos, pronounced ar-kay-GOSS. Strong's G747, leader, pioneer, originator, author. Archēgos is a rich word with no tidy English equal, which is why translators reach for different ones: author, pioneer, founder, prince, captain. It is built from the words for first and to lead, and in ordinary Greek it described the founder of a city, the head of a family line, the first man over the wall, the leader who goes ahead into the ground nobody has walked yet and opens a way for those behind him. Every sense of it fits here. Jesus is the founder of our salvation, the one who originates it rather than merely announcing it. He is the head of a new family line, the beginning of a humanity that will actually wear the crown. And above all He is the trailblazer, the one who went first into the country of death and came out the other side, so that the path exists. That is why His being made complete through suffering matters so much to a hurting believer. A guide who has only read about the mountain is no comfort at all on the mountain. This Guide has been over every foot of the ground, including the last and worst of it, and He did not go around the hard part. When the letter says later that we should run the race fixing our eyes on Jesus, it uses this same word for Him again. He is not standing at the finish line shouting. He is on the road ahead of you, and He knows it. , who was made perfect through them. That word perfect does not mean He had a flaw that got corrected; the letter will say plainly that He was without sin. It means completed, brought to His appointed end, fully equipped for the office He was to hold. A high priest who had never suffered would be qualified on paper and useless in the room.

Then comes a sentence to stop and stare at: “both the One who sanctifies and those who are sanctified are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers.” The Son who is the radiance of God’s glory, whom the angels are commanded to worship, whose throne endures forever and ever, is not ashamed of us. Think about how much there might be to be ashamed of. He knows the whole record, every hidden thing, every failure we have managed to keep from the people who love us. And He calls us brothers. Not as a courtesy. The preacher’s point is that a real kinship now exists, because He took our nature and we have been given His holiness. The sanctifier and the sanctified are out of one family.

And he proves it, as he always does, from the Scriptures, with three quotations put into the mouth of the Son. The first is from the twenty-second Psalm, the psalm of the sufferer that begins with the cry Jesus made from the cross, and here the preacher takes the moment when that sufferer turns from agony to praise: “I will proclaim Your name to My brothers; I will sing Your praises in the assembly.” Consider what a picture that is. The risen Christ standing among His people, calling them brothers and singing the Father’s praise in the middle of the congregation. When the church gathers to sing, He is not the audience only. He is the lead voice. The second and third come from Isaiah, from a dark hour when the prophet was left with a hostile nation and a handful of disciples, and he said, “I will put my trust in Him,” and, “Here am I, and the children the LORD has given me.” The Son takes those words as His own. He stands with us in the posture of trust, a true man living by faith in His Father, and He stands before God holding out His people and saying, here am I, and the children God has given Me. Not the children I recruited. The children God gave Him. He has us by gift, and He presents us as His.

Hebrews 2:14–18 (BSB)

¹⁴ Now since the children have flesh and blood, He too shared in their humanity, so that by His death He might destroy him who holds the power of death, that is, the devil, ¹⁵ and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death. ¹⁶ For surely it is not the angels He helps, but the descendants of Abraham. ¹⁷ For this reason He had to be made like His brothers in every way, so that He might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, in order to make atonement for the sins of the people. ¹⁸ Because He Himself suffered when He was tempted, He is able to help those who are being tempted.

Here is the summit of the chapter, and one of the summits of the whole Bible. Take it slowly. “Since the children have flesh and blood, He too shared in their humanity.” Flesh and blood is a plain Hebrew way of saying a mortal human being, a creature that can bleed and grow tired and die. The children were made of that, so the Son took the same. Not the appearance of it, not a costume worn for thirty-three years and then discarded, but the actual stuff of us. He knew hunger. He slept in a boat because He was worn out. He wept at a grave. He bled. The One who upholds all things by His powerful word lay as an infant who could not hold up His own head, and there is no explaining it except love. The apostle Paul, writing to Philippi, set the same wonder to music.

"Who, existing in the form of God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to death—even death on a cross." Philippians 2:6–8 (BSB)

And now the reason: “so that by His death He might destroy (καταργέω) katargeō, pronounced kat-arg-EH-oh. Strong's G2673, to render powerless, to put out of operation. Katargeō is a stronger and more precise word than our English destroy suggests, and getting it right changes the picture. It is built on the word for idle or inactive, and it means to render something powerless, to put it out of operation, to make it null. Paul uses it of a law that no longer binds, of a marriage bond released by death, of the fading brightness on Moses’ face. It does not mean annihilation. The devil has not ceased to exist, and any believer who has been slandered by his own conscience in the small hours knows it. What has happened is that his weapon has been unplugged. He held the power of death, and the power of death lay in sin, and the sin has been dealt with at the cross, so the accusation no longer carries a sentence. Think of a warrant that has been quashed. The paper is still in the officer’s hand and he may still wave it about, but there is no authority behind it and it cannot take you anywhere. That is the state of the enemy with regard to every soul in Christ. He may frighten. He cannot claim. And the same word will one day be used of death itself, the last enemy to be rendered powerless, when what was accomplished at the cross is made visible in every grave. him who holds the power of death, that is, the devil.” Weigh the strategy of it. The enemy’s one great weapon was death, and the Son did not disarm him by avoiding it. He walked into it. He let the weapon fall, and by falling on Him it was broken, because death could not hold the Author of life. The devil still prowls and still accuses, but the thing he held over the human race has been taken out of his hand.

Then verse fifteen, and this is the sentence to carry home: He came “to free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.” Look at how the preacher describes ordinary human life apart from Christ. Not merely mortal. Enslaved, and enslaved all their lives, by fear of the end. He is naming something the ancient world knew and our own age works very hard to hide. The fear of death does not usually announce itself. It goes about in disguise. It is in the frantic gathering of security, in the refusal to be still, in the desperate clinging to youth, in the noise we keep going so that we do not have to think. It has been sitting under human civilization the whole time like water under a floor. And the Son came into flesh and blood to end that slavery, not by helping us think better of death, but by going through it and out the other side, so that for those who are His the grave is now a doorway and not a wall. If Christ has broken that chain, then the last thing that could ever be held over you has lost its grip, and a person who no longer needs to fear dying is free in a way nothing in this world can touch.

“For surely it is not the angels He helps, but the descendants of Abraham.” He did not come to rescue fallen angels; He came to lay hold of the children of promise, everyone who is Abraham’s offspring by faith. And so, verse seventeen, “He had to be made like His brothers in every way.” Every way. Not most ways, not the pleasant ways. The whole human condition, tiredness and hunger and grief and temptation and dying, all of it, sin alone excepted, because sin is not part of true humanity but the ruin of it. And the purpose of that thoroughgoing likeness is stated in two words that ought to be carved somewhere you can see them: “merciful and faithful.” Merciful toward us, because He knows from the inside what it costs to be a human being. Faithful toward God, because He does the priestly work perfectly and never fails on His side of it. Here for the first time in the letter the great theme is sounded, high priest, and with it the phrase “to make atonement for the sins of the people,” which means to deal with sin so completely that the barrier is gone and God and His people are at peace. Nine chapters of this book will be spent unpacking that one clause.

And then the last verse, which is where the whole towering chapter comes down and rests its hand on your shoulder: “Because He Himself suffered when He was tempted, He is able to help (βοηθέω) boētheō, pronounced bo-ay-THEH-oh. Strong's G997, to run at a cry, to come to the aid of. Boētheō is a wonderfully concrete word and its parts tell the story: it is built from a shout and a running. The older sense is to run at a cry, to hurry toward someone calling out for aid. It is the word for what a soldier does when he hears a comrade shout, or what a neighbor does when he hears screaming in the street. It is not a word for advice given from a comfortable chair. It is a word for arriving. You will hear it in the Gospels on desperate lips: the father of the boy who cannot speak crying out, help my unbelief; the woman from Canaan who came and knelt and said, Lord, help me; the disciples in the storm. And it is the word used here of the ascended, glorified, seated Son of God. The One at the right hand of the Majesty on high is the One who runs at a cry. That is the note this whole chapter has been climbing toward, and it explains why the preacher spent so long on the height of the Son before he brought Him this low. A Christ who was only near would be a companion in misery. A Christ who was only high would be a spectator. This Christ is both, and so He is able. Whatever is pressing hardest on you today, the cry is enough. He has heard that cry before, from the inside. those who are being tempted.” He does not merely sympathize from a distance, and He does not merely understand. He is able, which is a word of power, and He helps. Do not let anyone tell you that the temptations of Christ were an easy performance because He could not fall. It is the man who resists to the very end who feels the full force of the pressure; the rest of us give in long before we find out how strong it was. He went the whole distance and never yielded, which means He knows what temptation weighs at its heaviest, and He carried it. So the throne you come to is occupied by One who has been where you are. Come to Him. That is what the verse is for.