(Psalm 2, Psalm 110:1-4; Hebrews 1:1-2:4)
When I graduated from Hope College, up in Holland, Michigan, in 1996, I was very pleased to have gone there—and not just because that’s where I met Sara. It’s a great school, and not just academically; my professors weren’t just names and lectures, but people I knew and could depend on, from whom I learned a lot outside of class as well as in it. I grew spiritually because of the chapel program, and made many wonderful friends; and it was interesting, when we visited this past April, to find that every single professor we talked to remembered us—even the one we’d only known as the father of a friend. As pleased as I was then with my choice of college, though, I’m even prouder to be a Hope grad now; during a time when many colleges have suffered great losses economically, and when many once-Christian schools are running away from the faith as fast as they can, Hope is weathering the economic and spiritual storm amazingly well. Wonderful things are happening there, and the folks tasked to lead the ship have the right vision to see that continue and grow.
Which is probably what one should expect from a school whose symbol is the anchor. You can’t spend any time at all around Hope without seeing it—the big anchor at the old entrance to campus, the anchor on the college seal, the anchor on the school’s more informal logo. It’s all over the place—and for good reason. The school was founded in 1854 as the Holland Academy, the work of one of the great figures in the history of the Dutch community in America, the Rev. A. C. Van Raalte; and in his dedication speech, he declared, “This is my anchor of hope for this people in the future.” From that line the school would ultimately take both its name and its symbol, and a profoundly important piece of its identity.
“This is my anchor of hope.” In saying that, Rev. Van Raalte was drawing on the book of Hebrews, specifically Hebrews 6:19-20, which declares our hope in Christ to be “a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul”; he wasn’t putting his faith in the institution, but in Christ. The institution of the school would be an anchor of hope because it in turn would be anchored in Christ, and only for as long as that remained true; and by the grace of God, so far, it has.
Of course, that hasn’t been without struggle or conflict; there are plenty of people who would like to see Hope anchored in something other than the historic Reformed understanding of the Christian faith. Some of them are even on the faculty, legacies of a previous administration that didn’t care about this so much. That’s really not surprising, because we all face the temptation to put our hope in something other than Christ, to find our soul anchor in anything but him; the world tells us that we can’t possibly put our faith in someone we can’t hear or see or touch, that there are far more sure and certain anchors for the soul than Jesus. Money, perhaps; a college degree, or maybe even a graduate degree; personal relationships; there are a great many things we value, and it’s easy to put our trust in them instead of in Jesus, to hope in our bank account or our marriage, our résumé or our children, instead of in Christ. It’s easy because we have some control over those (though not as much as we think we do), and we just find it easier to put our hope in our own work than in the work of someone we cannot control.
This is an age-old temptation, and we see it right here in Hebrews, because it’s the temptation the letter was written to address. We don’t know who wrote this letter, or to whom, and in fact that knowledge was lost very early on; but we can see clearly why it was written. Whoever the author or authors of this letter may have been, they had one single overriding concern: to demonstrate beyond any conceivable room for argument that Jesus Christ is superior to anyone else and anything else, that there is no one and no thing else in whom it makes any sense at all to put our faith and hope and trust. Christ alone is our soul anchor, he alone is our anchor of hope, and he’s the only anchor that will hold through the storms of life. He has no rivals; he never has.
This overriding concern, this overarching theme, is what we’re going to be focusing on for the next number of weeks as we spend time going through this book—which is a difficult book if you’re not familiar with it, because it draws heavily on the religious culture of the first-century Hebrews, which is thoroughly alien to us. Even so, the book’s main focus is very clear in our passage this morning, right from the very first verses. “In these last days, [God] has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe. The Son is the radiance of the Father’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven. So he became as much superior to the angels as the name he has inherited is superior to theirs.” And off the book goes for a while to talk specifically about that aspect of Christ’s superiority, that he is above all other spiritual powers.
We also see, in this passage, something about the structure of the book. Hebrews isn’t just saying all these things about Jesus so we know them, after all, but because the author wants to encourage people to put their faith in Christ and Christ alone, not in anything else, not in anything additional. With Paul’s letters, what you typically get is a long theological section and then several chapters of application, but Hebrews doesn’t work that way. Rather, what we see is a repetitive structure in three parts.
First, the author makes part of his case for the uniqueness and supremacy of Christ—in this passage, the argument that Christ is superior to angels. Then he applies that. Here, that application is quite brief, in chapter 2 verse 1: because Christ is superior to angels, and thus his message is superior to any message ever delivered by angels—which, as he reminds his hearers in verse 2, is no small thing—then we need to pay more careful attention to the message of the gospel of grace in Jesus Christ. We need to take that message seriously and respond appropriately, so that we don’t wind up drifting away and putting our faith and hope in anyone or anything else. Having said that, then comes the third part, the warning: if you ignore the only salvation God has offered, which is given through Jesus Christ alone, the only result will be ultimate and absolute disaster, with no hope of escape.
The key thing to understand here, though, is that this warning isn’t rooted in punishment—indeed, it isn’t really about punishment at all. It’s more like a sign reading “Bridge Out Ahead.” If you see a sign like that and insist on ignoring it and going around the barricades, unless there’s a cop sitting right there to stop you, you aren’t going to be punished for ignoring the sign; you simply won’t be able to get across, because there’s no bridge there to get you across. And if you insist on trying to cross it anyway, you won’t be punished for that, but you will suffer the consequences of trying to do the impossible: you’ll have an accident. That’s essentially what Hebrews is talking about in the beginning of chapter 2. It’s not that God is just waiting to punish you if you try to do things your own way—it’s that Christ is the only way, and if you put your hope in anyone or anything else, you are trying to cross the canyon where there is no bridge, and so you will inevitably fall.
But if you will hope in the Lord, he will never fail you; you may stumble, but you will not fall. The one who is the radiance of the glory of God and who upholds the universe by the word of his power is the one who upholds us, for he is the one who purified us from sin and now intercedes for us before the throne of heaven; no one and nothing else can save us, no one and nothing else could ever be enough, but he is enough, and he has done it—and he will never fail you. He is faithful who promised.