(Psalm 95:6-11; Hebrews 3)

As we saw last week, we’re into the second part of Hebrews’ argument for the uniqueness and supremacy of Jesus Christ. In the first part of this section, which we read last week, the author argued powerfully that Christ has authority over all creation, having been given that authority by God the Father. The world raises an objection to that, what’s usually called the problem of evil: if all the world is really subject to Jesus, why don’t we see it? Why do we still see suffering?

The author of Hebrews acknowledges that indeed we don’t see all things subject to Jesus, at least not in the obvious way; we don’t see a worldwide political regime that acknowledges his authority and seeks to rule according to his will, nor do we see a world free of senseless tragedy, devastating illness, or natural disaster. Rather, we see a world where sin often seems to have the upper hand. Hebrews doesn’t try to pretend otherwise; rather, the author contends that while we don’t see obvious signs of Jesus controlling things from on high, instead, we see Jesus suffering with us, and at work in and through our suffering for our good, and the good of others. We don’t see him reigning as king, but we do see him exercising his authority as high priest to bring about our redemption, and to set us free from our slavery to sin.

Now, as I noted, the author’s ultimate aim in this section is to establish that Jesus is a higher authority than the law. Many Jewish Christians still kept the whole Jewish law, and often they tried to force other Christians to do the same; they believed that even if you worshiped Jesus as Lord, you still needed to keep the whole law in order to be saved. The goal of the author of Hebrews is to convince his audience that this isn’t true, that they are saved through faith in Jesus Christ alone—and indeed, not only did they not need the Jewish law, but that if they put any of their faith at all in the law, they would be turning away from Jesus. As C. S. Lewis would later put it, Christ plus nothing equals everything—but Christ plus anything equals nothing. Hebrews wants to make sure we hold fast to Christ alone and so end up with everything instead of nothing.

To that end, having asserted the absolute authority of Christ over everything, the author turns to apply that by showing that Jesus is superior to Moses, through whom God gave the Old Testament law. He doesn’t in any way disparage Moses, but affirms him as a servant of God who was faithful in all God’s house, someone who is worthy of glory for doing the work God gave him to do, and doing it faithfully; Moses deserves the honor he receives, and there’s no need to diminish him. Actually, that Moses was indeed a great man of God is part of Hebrews’ point: even as great as Moses was, Jesus is greater. Come up with the greatest, most admirable, most important person you can find—it doesn’t matter who, Jesus is greater.

The argument here is simple: like Moses, Jesus was faithful to God, but Moses was only God’s servant, Jesus is God’s Son. Moses was faithful in God’s house, which is worthy of glory and honor, but Jesus is faithful over God’s house, which is worthy of far more. Moses is a servant in the house; Jesus is its builder and the one who has all authority over it, and he has been completely faithful in all that the Father has given him to do.

Then in the second half of verse 6, we get this interesting transition: Christ is faithful over God’s house, and we are his house. We’re moving away from the cosmic reality of Christ as the one who is above all the angels, who made the whole world and has authority over all of it, to focus on Christ as the one who has authority as high priest over the household of God, which is his people. There are several reasons for this shift, some of which we’ll get into as we go further into the book; in part, though, it’s part of the comparison of Jesus to Moses. Hebrews isn’t just saying that Jesus is greater than Moses because he made the world and Moses just lived in it; that wouldn’t really be to the point. Rather, Hebrews is saying something much more relevant: yes, Moses was a great leader of God’s people, but in this way, too, Jesus is greater. He’s worthy of more glory than Moses not just because of his work as creator and sustainer of the world, but because of his work here on earth.

Now, the interesting thing here is that the author actually goes on to make that argument in his warning section. You may remember, if you were here two weeks ago, my talking about the three-part sections of this book—first, the author presents an argument for the supremacy of Christ, then he applies it, and then he warns you what will happen if you turn away from Christ—and beginning in verse 7, we get the second warning of the book. Once again, he starts by quoting one of the Psalms, Psalm 95, which is a telling choice, I think. It starts by giving praise to God as Savior, then as the creator of all things and the God and King above all other powers; then it makes the transition and says, “Let us worship him specifically as our God, for we are his people.” This is the same shift we see in Hebrews. And having made it, we get this passage which the author of Hebrews quotes, which references the Exodus in warning us not to harden our hearts against God.

At first glance, it seems like a jarring change—but when you stop and think about what the psalmist is saying, it really isn’t. Israel affirmed God as the rock of its salvation—why? Because of the Exodus. The Exodus was the defining event of Israel’s history and identity; it was during the Exodus that he gave his people the Law, and it was through the Exodus that he established the corporate relationship with his people that would set the terms for their national existence from then on. And here’s the key: the Exodus was God saving his people as a people from slavery to a power which they could never have overcome, then leading them out of exile in a far country and back to the home which he had promised them and prepared for them.

Underlying this warning in Hebrews, though the author doesn’t explicitly come out and say it, is the understanding that Jesus came to lead the people of God in a new and greater Exodus. That was something God had promised through his prophets, as a consequence of the exile: though God had punished them by sending foreigners to conquer them and drag them far from home, he would raise up a leader who would bring their exile to an end and return them to Jerusalem. Those promises were fulfilled at the most basic level when Cyrus of Persia decreed that the Jews were free to go back to their own land, but there was much in them that was not fulfilled; even though they were back in Israel, the Jews were still a conquered people, and the throne of David was still vacant. Over time, they came to the conclusion that in some ways, they were still in exile, and still needed God to send his Messiah to bring about the new Exodus which he had promised long before. This, says Hebrews, is exactly what God did in Jesus.

Of course, as we’ve noted before, the problem was that it didn’t look like what people expected; it wasn’t a political victory, and it didn’t result even in political freedom for Israel, let alone a politically and militarily powerful Israel that could bring the Gentiles under the rule of God’s law. It certainly didn’t produce anything that looked like the promised messianic kingdom. So if we do not see everything subject to Jesus, then what is it we see? Hebrews answers that by saying, what we see is Jesus leading a new Exodus, not out of earthly slavery to an earthly government, but out of the far more oppressive and far deadlier spiritual slavery of all human beings to the power of sin and death.

This is a profound thing: Jesus has inaugurated God’s ultimate work of deliverance, that of all his people—now expanded to include all the peoples of the world, not just Israel—from all that has been set wrong in his creation, and all the effects of that blight. This is no mere partial solution, quick fix, or treatment of symptoms; this is the healing of the whole disease, right from the root. However, as the language of Hebrews acknowledges, it is a deliverance which is still in process. God through Moses led the people of Israel out of Egypt, but they didn’t simply cross the border into their own land—he led them out into, and through, the wilderness. He took them into a period in which they had already been delivered, but their deliverance was not yet complete; they were already out of slavery, but not yet experiencing everything he had promised them. They were living in between. God had promised them a new home, he had begun the process of getting them there, but they had not yet seen it.

It’s out of that reality that the warning comes, both from the psalmist and from the author of Hebrews. God took his people out into the wilderness, and they promptly started complaining, and finally rebelled; as a consequence, he kept them there for an extra forty years, until that rebellious generation had died off. His people wouldn’t put their whole faith in him to take care of them, because they didn’t really believe that they would see the rest which he had promised them; and so God judged them, and they didn’t. Instead of focusing on God and his promises, they focused on their circumstances and difficulties, and when push came to shove, they believed in their circumstances more than in God. God said, “Go into the land, and I will give you the victory,” but their eyes said, “Those enemies are too powerful for us, we’ll lose”; they trusted their eyes over God, and refused the gift. They refused their promised salvation, out of unbelief and fear.

The concern driving the author of Hebrews is that some of his readers are being tempted to make the same mistake. We are in the wilderness, and so we do not see all things subject to Jesus; we are halfway home, in between the land of slavery and the land of promise, and all the promises Jesus has made to us are already assured, but most of them are not yet fulfilled, though we have started to see the fulfillment of many of them. The road through the wilderness is not an easy one—that’s why the Israelites kept thinking that maybe they’d be better off going back to Egypt, forgetting that slavery was even worse than the challenges of freedom; it’s easy to start to wonder sometimes if we’re really getting anywhere, and if it’s all really worth it. It’s easy to start to think that maybe that glimmer off to the left there is actually an oasis, not just another mirage.

In response, Hebrews tells us to learn from history. To those who held fast to God, he was faithful; those who trusted that God would do as he promised saw his promises fulfilled. Those who did not, did not. If we’re faithful, we can be absolutely certain that God will be faithful; but unbelief is its own punishment, because however difficult the road may be to which God calls us, it’s the only road that will get us where we need to be, and the only road he’ll help us walk.

Of course, “just have faith” and “just keep going” are both easier said than done, and sometimes by a long way; which is why we have this interesting statement in verse 13, “Encourage one another daily, as long as it is called ‘today,’ so that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.” We need one another. We need people to walk alongside us, to listen to us, to encourage us, to tell us we can make it; we need people we aren’t willing to disappoint, people we really don’t want to see us fail. It’s one of the key things that makes Alcoholics Anonymous work. If we try to go out there and just be strong, if we try to be Nike and “just do it,” we probably won’t; we’ll probably fall for lack of support, and there will be no one to help us up. But if we go together, we have the support of others to keep us from falling, and to help us get up and keep going if we fall anyway. We need each other.

And we need to encourage each other while it’s still called “today.” It’s easy for us not to do that; it’s easy for us to figure we have time, we can do it tomorrow. But you know, it’s always “today” when you actually do what needs to be done or say what needs to be said; we don’t live in “tomorrow,” we only live in “today.” If we try to hand things off to the future, when the future becomes the present, will we do them then? Or will we just kick them down the road again? And what if the future we imagine never comes? What if we actually don’t have time—what then? We don’t have tomorrow, we can’t count on it or control it; we just live in “today,” one day at a time, never knowing when this might be the last “today” we have. We only know what we can do now, and we have no assurance of any kind that we’ll ever be able to do it again; we need to take the opportunities we have while it is still called “today” to give others the encouragement they need from us, because we may never have those opportunities again—and who knows what may be lost? There are those who are gifted in this way, to whom seeing and seizing those opportunities comes naturally, and there are those of us who are much more likely to miss them; but gifted or not, this is something we’re all called to do, to actively look for chances to encourage those around us to follow Jesus, to trust him, to hold fast in their faith, in the assurance that however rough the road may be, he will bring us through the wilderness safe and sound, and into the promised land at last.

(Psalm 8, Psalm 22:22-24; Hebrews 2:5-18)

To listen to the sermon “Yet at Present” by the Rev. Scott Hoezee, to which this sermon and its author are heavily indebted—beginning from the opening line—go here.

“I read the news today—oh, boy.” So begins “A Day in the Life,” the closing track from the Sergeant Pepper’s album, one of the most influential songs the Beatles ever wrote. It’s a familiar reaction, isn’t it? On June 1, 1967, the day that album was released, someone picking up the paper might have read about civil war in Nigeria, or growing tension between Israel and its neighbors—the day before, the president of Iraq had declared, “The existence of Israel is an error which must be rectified. . . . Our goal is clear—to wipe Israel off the map”; instead, on June 5, Israel would respond with a sneak attack on Egypt’s air force, beginning the Six-Day War—and of course, there was always news from Vietnam, which by 1967 always seemed to be reported as bad news regardless.

Today, Israel is still threatened, though these days Iran is the big problem, and the looming bad news is that Turkey seems to be moving that way as well; we aren’t fighting in Vietnam, but Afghanistan just passed it as the longest sustained military conflict in our history, and the prospects there don’t look good; and of course, there’s always news from the Gulf of Mexico, as a blown-out oil well a mile under the water continues to spew while BP fumbles, and our government dithers and interferes. I read the news today . . . oh, boy. Oh, boy, indeed.

In the face of this, there’s a real temptation to just—not read the news today. Pull into our bubble, figure the rest of the world can do or not, and just make the best of our own little circumstances. There’s too much suffering out there; insulate ourselves from it, as much as we can. Just don’t think about it, unless you have to. Just go through life with headphones on, as Jars of Clay put it in a recent song; a friend of ours who’s a longtime flight attendant for United has commented, somewhat sadly, that people talk a lot less on flights now—as soon as the light goes off, the headphones go on, and most of the people on the plane disappear into their own little worlds, tuning out and ignoring everyone else. After all, isn’t it safer that way? After all, if you let someone else start talking, you never know what you might hear.

A lot of churches, you’ll find that sort of attitude in worship, too. It’s most visible in contemporary churches, not because there’s anything wrong with contemporary worship—I appreciate it, just as I appreciate the hymns, and there’s some truly great songs being written these days, and some great things being done—but simply because that attitude often drives contemporary worship leaders. Crank up the volume, crank up the tempo, generate lots of energy, get everybody whipped up—it’s a proven way of attracting people, in part, I think, because it lets hurting people pretend for a while they aren’t hurting. But those who are ready to deal with their hurt, or who could be, just get run over—there’s no room for that.

This isn’t just a “contemporary” problem, though, it happens just as easily if you sing hymns; the only differences are the volume and the tempo. Just do our little bubble thing, sing songs about how great God is and how blessed we are, read happy Scriptures and say happy things, eat cookies, and go home. It’s easy to do, and again, it feels good; and again, it leaves real issues unaddressed. One of the reasons I appreciate the traditional liturgy is that it took its form during a time when the church couldn’t pretend that everything was ducky-wonderful, and so if we take it seriously, it holds us to confront and to address the realities of sin and pain; it directs us to the fact that this thing we do isn’t just for us, but is part of our response as followers of Jesus to this “lost and broken world so loved by God” in which we live.

Of course, it’s completely true that God is great beyond the limits of wonder, and good beyond the limits of joy, and that we are blessed far more than we realize or deserve, and that we do have profound reason to rejoice deeply; but to affirm that in a way which is really true and which really connects with and takes into account the sorrow of our world requires us to understand that in a different way than we often do—and here, Hebrews has something profoundly important to say.

At this point, I need to stop and acknowledge my deep debt here to one of my favorite preachers, Calvin Seminary’s Scott Hoezee, whose Worship Symposium sermon a few years ago on Hebrews 2 has permanently shaped my thinking on this passage; I think the only other person who has comparably influenced my understanding of any piece of Scripture would be Dr. Kenneth Bailey on the parables in Luke. You see, the Rev. Hoezee caught hold of something in this chapter that I hadn’t seen before, and it is, I think, what makes the whole thing turn.

As I mentioned last week, the agenda of Hebrews is to drive home that there is no one greater than Jesus, no other savior, no one who can add anything to the work he’s done, and no alternative in which or in whom we can place any real faith. First, as we saw, he compares Jesus to the angels, and shows how he is greater than any of them, or than all of them put together; this was a rebuke to those tempted to worship multiple spiritual powers, and also to those who insisted Christians must still keep the whole Jewish law, for Jewish tradition taught that the Law had actually been delivered to Moses by angels. Now, Hebrews builds from there to argue that Jesus is superior to the Law, that he is a higher authority—indeed, that he is the highest authority, having been given all authority over everything that is—though not as king, here, but as its great high priest. That’s a very important point in Hebrews, and we’ll come back to it in the weeks ahead. For now, just look what he says about it.

He starts with Psalm 8, and does something very interesting with it. Obviously, part of the reason it’s here is that phrase “son of man,” which Jesus used as a title for himself, and thus he takes this psalm as referring to Jesus—and rightly so, though some argue otherwise. The real turner, though, comes a little further on. You see, in the Hebrew, Psalm 8 says, “You made him a little lower than elohim.” If you were here when we started off in Genesis, you may remember my saying that the Hebrew word for a god is el; the dual form, which would mean two gods together, is eloah; and the plural, for three or more, is elohim. This is the word Hebrew used for talking about the gods of the nations; it’s also the word it used as one of the principal names for God. And this is the word we have here in Psalm 8, leaving ambiguity as to what exactly the psalmist means.

Now, the NIV, like a lot of translations, passes the ambiguity on. The first Greek version of the Old Testament, though, didn’t: it reads “angels,” following the common interpretation of the time that the psalmist is stressing human inferiority and insignificance. Hebrews takes that and combines it with the understanding that this psalm is referring not to people in general, but to Jesus, and comes up with this: God made the Son of Man lower than the angels for a little while, but has now crowned him with glory and honor and put everything under his authority. And just to ram that home, the author doesn’t stop with the psalm, but adds: “And when he says everything, he means everything. No exceptions.”

Up to this point in Hebrews, then, we’ve had this great long soaring arc of praise to Jesus Christ. He is the radiance of the glory of God, he is the exact copy of his nature, he is the one who upholds the universe by his word, he sits at the right hand of the Majesty of the universe, he is eternal and his rule is without end, he is above every other being that exists, and he has been given full authority and power over all creation. It’s like the Hallelujah Chorus, building and building and building to that last triumphant, overpowering declaration of praise . . . and then, suddenly, there’s the pause, and just when you expect this crescendo to hit a full-throated climax, something to take your breath completely away, the author breaks off, and says quietly, “Yet at present we do not see everything subject to Jesus.”

Yet at present. As the Rev. Hoezee says, it’s a line with which every sane person in this world can agree—and if anything, an understatement. I read the news today, and did I see the world operating under the rule of Christ, acknowledging his authority? No, I saw wars and rumors of wars, earthquakes and floods, starvation and terrorism, injustice and indifference, death and betrayal, and somehow encapsulating the tragic mystery of our screwed-up world, the ongoing story of a 7-year-old boy who seems to have vanished into the thinnest of air right from the hallway of his school. If you believe his stepmother anyway, and it looks like the police aren’t so sure they do. You may remember Time magazine during the Rwandan genocide of the ’90s quoting a missionary who declared, “There are no devils left in Hell. They are all in Rwanda.” Sure, there are good things, too, saints and revivals and works of light, but precious little to match the horrors we keep concocting. This is the news as we know it; as the late Rich Mullins put it, this is the world as best as we can remember it. Oh, boy, indeed; oh, heaven help us all.

No, Hebrews declares, at present, we do not see everything subject to Jesus, and all God’s people say, “No kidding.” And it’s not just out there somewhere, where so many don’t want everything subject to Jesus—we see it in our own lives, and in our families. We see people we love who desperately want someone to love and marry, and can’t find them, or desperately want children, and can’t have them; we see children turn away from Christ to go their own way, and we see marriages shattered by betrayal or starved by indifference. We see cancer run amok and infections that won’t heal, and if we’re honest when we look into our hearts, we see that the spiritual disease we fight is even worse.

Even in our own souls, we do not see everything subject to Jesus; instead, we see self-will and distrust, rebellion and pride, and the desire to want what we want when we want it. Oh, we fight those things, to be sure, they are not the whole story of our lives, and we know the Holy Spirit is at work in us . . . but they’re still there. God has placed all these things under Jesus’ authority; yet at present, most days, we don’t see it.

But. But, says the author, this is not the last word. At present, we do not see everything subject to Jesus—but: we see Jesus. We see Jesus. And who is the Jesus we see? We see the Jesus whose crown of glory is a crown of thorns, who is honored for accepting dishonor—we see the Jesus who’s been reading the same news we read, and who not only observed our deepest tragedy, but lived it. We see the Jesus whom the world trampled under its feet; indeed, Hebrews affirms, that is exactly why God has now put that same world under his feet. We do not see Jesus distant and glorious, majestic and awe-inspiring to the point of being terrifying—we see him as he was made like us in every way and bore every grief and temptation we bear.

Indeed, as C. S. Lewis pointed out, he was tempted far worse than we ever are, because we only go so long and then we break; he never broke. Satan hit him with everything he had, and Jesus took it all and stood fast under suffering far greater than anything we could survive. And of course, he didn’t survive it; his victory required that he accept suffering to the point of death, and beyond—and he accepted that suffering, and so won that victory, for us. He did it so that he could pay the penalty for our sin, a penalty beyond all our resources and abilities put together to pay; and so that in so doing, he could set us free from our slavery to sin, and bring us out from under the dominance of death, which together were a bondage we could never have escaped, no matter how hard we might try. This is the victory he won; this is how he won it; this is the Jesus we see, and no other.

And in truth, how else could it be? We keep looking for God to win victories the same way the world does—but we have plenty of politicians and plenty of generals already; is one more of them, even a better one, really going to help? Is not the Jesus we actually see, the one who experienced the sorrow and agony of our world to its shattered-glass depths, who bears its marks deep in his being—isn’t this Jesus the Savior we truly need? Everyone else who claims authority in this world does so in some way on the basis of power—whether as brutal as a military coup or as gentle as a majority of the popular vote; Jesus receives it on the basis of sacrifice and suffering. They claim it for themselves; he claims it, in a very real sense, for us.

The one to whom God made this world subject is not some distant conqueror, mighty warlord, or calculating politician; he isn’t someone who just wants everything to run smoothly with no complications, and never mind what happens to individuals in the machine. No, he’s the one who grieves as we grieve for the sister who is addicted to meth, for the brother who has just been abandoned by an unfaithful wife, for the father who has Alzheimer’s and the mother whose husband no longer remembers her, for the daughter who longs to have children and cannot, for the son who has declared his hatred of God and started wearing pink triangles and rainbows.

No, with the eyes of this world, we do not see all things subject to him, not on this tortured, fractured planet of myeloma and Alzheimer’s, terrorism and murder, deformity and death, war and betrayal; but with the eyes of faith, we can look at the cancer clinic and the dementia unit, at the battlefield and the funeral, and at every other place where people sin and people suffer—which is everywhere—and we see Jesus. Because Jesus is there, bringing reconciliation, redemption, repentance, and healing. This is the gospel, not that Jesus is striding through the world preventing the bad people from causing suffering, but that when suffering comes, he is in it with us, working through it for our good, to bring us his victory—and that he is enough. He is enough for us now; he is enough for us for always.