Reading:
Hebrews 2:5-12.
This
portion of the Scriptures is a condensation of all that
the Bible, and especially the New Testament, is about. It
is a strange thing to say, yet it is quite true, that at
this late hour in the New Testament dispensation our
greatest need, as the people of God, is to know what we
have come into, what Christ means, and what we, as the
Lord's people, are called unto.
The Need of Assurance
That
need has several aspects. You will, I am quite sure,
agree that one aspect of our need is that of assurance,
of confidence, of being settled, rooted, grounded with an
unwavering hope. We all have need of being so confirmed
in the faith, so established, that we are not easily
shaken in our minds nor moved in our confidence. That
need is present with us, and that need, I think, is going
to be felt more and more, as things become increasingly
difficult - the need for the Lord's people in this world
to be established and fully assured. There is need of
strength, real strength, amongst the Lord's people,
deliverance from weakness, from feebleness, so that they
can go on, make progress, and really grow, for where
there is uncertainty, where there is weakness, then there
will be slowness of progress, then there will be real
limitation in spiritual development.
The Need of Understanding
Further,
there is the great need of understanding, especially
understanding of God's ways and God's dealings with His
people, to know why the Lord deals with them and with us
as He does, to have the meaning of the Lord's ways and
the Lord's works which are so strange and often so
difficult for us to understand. These are aspects of the
great need which we all feel.
The Meaning of the Incarnation the
Answer to all Our Need
This
passage of Scripture, as I have said, is a condensed
statement of that which goes to the very heart of that
need. It brings us to the infinite wonder and mystery of
the incarnation. If we could grasp the meaning of the
incarnation, God manifest in the flesh, we should have an
answer to all our questions, and all our many-sided need
would be met.
Notice
this twofold "not". "For NOT unto
angels did he subject the world to come" (verse
5), and "verily NOT of angels
doth he take hold" (verse 1:6, A.R.V. margin), "but
he taketh hold of the seed of Abraham". "Not
unto angels", "not of angels". The first
is not angels, but man. What is man? The second, not of
angels but of the seed of Abraham. Man - that is
humanity; the seed of Abraham - that is covenant love,
love in covenant. You look in your margin and you
probably find a reference, taking you back to the Old
Testament, about the seed of Abraham (2 Chron. 20:7; Isa.
41:8), and you find the immediate context is 'Abraham,
the friend of God' - of the seed of Abraham, the friend
of God - God's covenant love. That is the direction in
which this wonderful mystery of the incarnation lies, in
the direction of man, of humanity, and in the direction
of man brought into the covenant love of God.
Here the
upshot, the issue, the grand climax of this whole
paragraph is - "We behold... Jesus".
Oh, the music of that Name - for we are permitted in
the right connection to use that name by itself. I know
the modern school drops all the other titles, speaks not
of Jesus Christ or the Lord Jesus, but is always talking
about 'Jesus', making Him one amongst many, though
perhaps somewhat better than other men; and that of
course is evil. But here and there in the New Testament
we have this name used by itself, and rightly so. "We
behold... Jesus... crowned with glory and honour". Jesus
is the name of Him who emptied Himself, of Him who became
man, who took our humanity, a body like our body, a soul
like our souls. He took our manhood - He, Jesus, crowned
with glory and honour - to bring to glory and honour our
humanity, our manhood. That is the heart of Christianity.
Consider
our humanity: let us look at ourselves, take account of
ourselves, what we are as human beings; these bodies, at
best, at worst; these souls - an everlasting trouble.
Yes, our humanity: what a thing it is! Those of us who
have come into touch with the enlightening Spirit of God
in any real way have nothing to say for our humanity. We
would be more inclined to apologize for BEING at
all. And He has taken hold of our humanity to bring it to
the place where it is crowned with glory and honour. That
is redemption. That is why the passage goes back to the
very first. "Thou didst set him over the works
of thy hands." "Thou crownedst him
with glory and honour" - potentially declared. "Thou
didst put all things in subjection under his feet." That
was man's creational purpose, but he failed of it, missed
it all, and became the humanity that we know him to be.
And there came from heaven One who took hold of that
humanity, and took it through all its trials, all its
temptations, all its pressures and its stresses, through
all its opposition and its antagonisms, through all the
full force that came to bear upon it for its destruction.
He took that humanity through it all, perfected it, took
it to glory - our humanity, your humanity and mine, this
troublesome thing, and made it fit to abide the
very presence of the infinitely holy and glorious God.
That was indeed "bringing many sons unto
glory".
The
Bible is full of that in figure, in portrait - the union
of the Divine with the human. You have it in the figure
of the Cherubim, and in the figure of the Ark of the
Testimony - the wood, the common wood of the desert,
overlaid with the gold. You have it right through. God is
testifying - for this is the ark of testimony -
testifying that from glory He has laid hold on humanity
and is going to bring it through into the Most Holy Place
where it is to abide forever. The last picture of the ark
of the testimony is in that Holy Place in the Temple,
when they drew out the staves. It is there forever in the
presence of God. Its journey has ended, it is crowned
with glory and honour - Christ and you and I in union in
the presence of God. I say, that is the heart of
everything, and if you and I need, as I have said,
assurance and confidence, remember that God has entered
into covenant love with us to do this. Do we want
anything to give us greater and deeper assurance and
confidence and hope than this, that God has entered into
covenant love?
Every
time we gather at His Table and partake of the symbols,
we are entering into the meaning of that covenant love,
as the seed of Abraham. What a mighty covenant is in that
Blood! What a mighty covenant in that body of the Lord
Jesus! We are made partakers of His flesh, of His bone,
of His very life. This is covenant love. What assurance
that should bring to us, what strength for progress - for
if we have not that assurance and hope, how slow we are
to go on; how difficult it is to maintain a going-on
position and course. We may take a step forward - and
then there enter in thoughts about ourselves, some
accusation from our own hearts: the enemy comes because
of some thing that is in us, and we find ourselves two
steps backward. A little on, and then a rest, and then
back where we were, because of uncertainty springing from
the humanity that we are.
Jesus in Glory Our Confidence
The
absolute strength of certainty to keep going on is in our
faith hold on the humanity that is in heaven. "We
behold". You see, this letter eventually
arrives there. There are all those who have run this race
of faith, and they were weak men many of them. They are
not the pick of the world's best in themselves. The story
of their failures and of being men of like passions with
ourselves is not covered up by the Lord; it is fully
exposed; but they have run the race. And then it says,
"Let us run with patience the race that is set
before us, looking unto Jesus" - "crowned with
glory and honour": the guarantee that we will be
there crowned with glory and honour through faith in Him.
You can have as little faith in yourself as you like,
perhaps the less the better, but do not stay there with
your no faith in yourself. Your strength to go on is in
looking off from yourself unto "Jesus... crowned
with glory and honour". Does it convey something to
you, that here is a man tempted and tried, as we have
been, through the fires of antagonism and evil that were
always seeking to scorch Him, to mar Him? He got through,
He triumphed, "crowned with glory and honour".
Did He do it for Himself? No, He did it for us, as us.
Our strength to go on is in looking off.
The Explanation of God's Ways With
Us
And as
for God's ways with us, His strange ways, His sometimes
seemingly hard ways. What about understanding all these?
There is the explanation - "crowned with glory and
honour", "conformed to the image of His
Son". We are going through the fires; we are being
tried, tested, up to the hilt; we are really having a
difficult time in the hands of God. But what is it doing?
Well, sometimes it seems that the fires are just making
manifest all that is bad in us, as it comes to the
surface. But look again into the crucible. That scum,
that dross, is on the surface, it has come to the surface
all right. But what is underneath? The gold is
underneath. We see what is on the surface; it is the
things that are seen that we take note of - but God is
doing something deep down. It would not be for our good
to know all that God is doing deep down. We should, in
our poor humanity, at once become spiritually proud. The
last thing for our good is that. But He is doing
something deep down underneath. He is refining the gold,
even if we are more conscious of the surface dross than
of anything else. He is going to crown us with glory and
honour, that we should be held in honour before God. That
is a mystery, but we have to accept it.
Jesus
has actually taken our human nature and has carried it
through into the presence of God, and it is there through
all testing and difficulty and adversity. It is exalted.
Our humanity is already exalted in the presence of God to
glory and honour, and He, being there, is the pledge
that, whereas the presence of God would be our utter
destruction, we are going to abide the presence of God
without destruction. He is the pledge of that.
The Need for Objective Faith
I close
with this. If you have lost it, if you are in danger of
losing it, or if you have never yet adequately grasped
it, lay hold on your great objective faith. You may have
become so subjective in your faith, in your doctrine,
that you are wholly occupied with what is inside
yourself, and that is a devastating thing. You never have
any encouragement or hope along that line. May the Lord
recover our balance between objective and subjective
truth, and restore to us the full balance of this great
fact, this glorious fact, without which all the
subjective will be for our undoing. There is One in the
glory who, tempted in all points like as we, sin apart,
took our humanity through the fires, far keener and more
intense fires than we know anything about. He is there as
us - the pledge that we are going to be there. To me it
is wonderful. This is the Gospel, this is the substance,
the essence, the heart of Christianity. The incarnation
is the very core of Christianity. Oh yes, we are not
going, the longer we live, to have a better opinion of
ourselves, to begin to be able to congratulate ourselves.
It is going to be worse and worse along that line, but
the counter to it all is "Christ in you, the
hope of glory" - "crowned with glory and
honour".
From
"The Work of the Ministry" - Volume 1. First published in "A Witness and A Testimony" magazine, Jan-Feb 1953, Vol. 31-1.