Hebrews 2: Jesus is Sufficient to Help

Introduction

This series is an exploration into why Jesus matters for all of humankind and why He matters for your daily lives as well. Last week we looked at Hebrews one that Jesus is the exact representation of God. That he is superior. This week will look at Jesus becoming a little lower than the angels meaning becoming human. And we will see Jesus’s humanity placed in a very specific context that the chapter gives us, suffering.

You would think that suffering is a strange place to find God. But suffering is the great equalizer. That no matter who you are or where you are, you will experience difficulty, trial,. It is a place we cannot escape but would often give anything to escape.It becomes the place where we need the most help. It becomes the place where we would most want to find God, and it turns out in Hebrews 2, that we do.

But before we get there we need to see what suffering does

When we go through something that is hard, that causes suffering, maybe physical, mental, spiritual, all of your energy and time is spent on the cause or symptoms of suffering.

Say you are in a conversation with someone and you are getting out of your car door. You are in the middle of hearing a great story about their recent vacation and all of the sudden you slam your fingers into the car door as you close it. What will you remember about that vacation story? Nothing. All of your attention goes right to the place of most pain.

That is what happens in suffering. We go to the place of the most pain. The same way that gravity works is the same way that pain works, we follow it down to where it hurts the most.

And it’s in that place where it’s easy to lose focus and it’s easy to drift. It’s easy to get caught up in your world of pain. But when that happens it’s easy to get lost in it. that’s why right away in Hebrews 2 we hear.

Hebrews 2:1 ESV

Therefore we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it.

This is the first exhortation and challenge in Hebrews. The writer says, Pay attention and don’t drift away from it. 

Because it is easy to drift! It is easy to lose attention and to forget. To get caught up in situations like suffering and forget the reality of Christ

I was just talking to a friend this past week. He is a pastor on the Cape and just started there about a year ago. He was telling us the story that he went to use hot water in one of the sinks and found out there wasn’t any hot water. He began asking around about the hot water and found out that the church hadn’t had hot water for 17 years. He made one call to fix it and now they have hot water. 

But he made an interesting comment about it. He said, they didn’t wake up one morning and wish they had cold water. They never chose to have cold water. They just drifted and at one point did not only have cold water but accepted that cold water was all they had. 

I wonder how many things we do that with? We just accept something to be true, not because it is true but because we have just drifted. 

How can we help that? By paying attention. by locking our eyes and minds and hearts on what matters, on who has come for help. On who is showing up. 

The Scriptures this morning warn us not to drift! Because it is so easy to do so. 

And the scriptures give us the situation in which we most easily drift. Suffering. 

The only way to do it is if, when you come to the point of your greatest pain, you find someone there with you.

We will see that Christ is both superior to all things “for whom and by whom all things exist” and is equally able to “help those who are being tempted.”

And in suffering it turns out, we need both. If someone is actually going to help us in our suffering, we need both. That God is more powerful than our circumstances. That means He can act and see and move outside of it. But also we need someone who can walk with us in our struggles. Because otherwise we will never find our way through.

But as we will see in Chapter 2 Christ enter into our suffering, our brokenness, by becoming human and becoming broken Himself. It is because He has come close that we are able to pay attention. Because God has been revealed in the person of Christ that we do not have to drift.

Suffering can cause us to drift but we can trust God’s grip in Christ.

This morning we are going to look at

Christ who meets us in our sufferings and

yet exceeds beyond our suffering.

Christ Meets us in Our Suffering.

Chapter 2 begins with the fact that Christ became human.

Hebrews 2:9 ESV

But we see him who for a little while was 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.

Christ is superior in every way but has incarnated Himself to become “a little lower than the angels.”

Jesus becomes human in order to go through suffering and eventual death, ultimately to be raised from the dead. It is through the act of suffering that we see the work of God. It is through the cross that we see life happening.

This passage and the NT makes use of suffering. Christ became human.

Christ becomes like us and takes on human vulnerabilities. Christ suffers, takes on the limit extreme of what it is like to become a human, to “taste death” for everyone in order to be made “perfect through suffering.” Christ suffers, experiences the vulnerabilities of being human.

This is the nearest God got to humanity. The one shared place, He “tasted death” for us. 

This is good news for anyone who has ever drawn a troubled breath. We have a God who’s name is above every name. Who is crowned with glory and honor, but still knows what it’s like to suffer. He still knows what it is like to struggle (yet without sin).

That means He does not shy away from our own difficulty. He doesn’t squirm at our depression or anger. He doesn’t reject us in or for our anguish. In fact, because He has shared the very human place of suffering, He knows the address.

He has been there before. And because He now has authority in it, will enter into your struggles.

Christ walks with you. He knows your most agonizing pain point. He shows up in that place because He has walked it before. But on this end of the cross HE shows up, to walk with us, but to do so with a promise.

John 16:33 ESV

I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.”

Whatever it is that causes you to limp is the exact place where Christ will walk with you.

Christ exceeds our suffering and suffers for us.

Christ’s suffering is not God out of control 

It is actually an example of God’s grace. 

We are assured that while Christ experienced suffering, it was not random, it was not chaos. Not for one moment was anything outside of God’s control. Christ suffered but it was not an act of random violence or the picture of God out of control.

This happens so that He can destroy the one thing we cannot, the power of death.

Hebrews 2:14–16 ESV

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.

Christ’s suffering is with and for a point. God did not send Christ, a human, “little lower than the angels” simply to suffer. Or even simply to show empathy. I am grateful that Christ walks with us and is able to help us. That He is able to empathize with our weaknesses.

But that is not what His suffering is for. His suffering and struggles were to suffer not just to understand us but to save us.

Christ is primary over all spiritual beings and over all humanity, “for whom and by whom all things exist”

He is the founder of our salvation.

So he suffered but did so to be made perfect. To show us grace in suffering. To walk with us but to suffer for us.

We see this in Heb 2:17-18

Hebrews 2:17–18 ESV

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.

Define propitiation here. Make sure to recognize that this is a bit of a technical letter. And it takes some work to understand.

But I recently heard a pastor. Another Pastor say, if you can order a Venti double caramel Frappuccino latte with two pumps of sugar-free caramel.

Then you can handle words like propitiation.

This is the act of providing a means of satisfying God’s justice. Christ removes our sin that gets in the way of relationship with God.

We begin to see grace in this suffering. That Christ was made human, and because of that He could offer a way out of our own ultimate suffering, our sin, that no one else could. that is why this passage calls Him the pioneer, the founder of our salvation, because He did what no one else could do.

He became what the Scriptures call the “faithful high priest.”

The book of Hebrews gives three distinct identities for Jesus. He is the final prophet. The One who speaks for God. We saw that last week. He is the Son. The second part of the Trinity. And He is the High Priest, the One who speaks to God on behalf of humanity.

The High Priest is found in the Old Testament. He is the one who is in charge of the worship of the temple. When people wanted to worship God, they would go through the instructions that the High Priest gave them. The High Priest was the One who stood in between God and God’s people to help them worship.

The High priest recieved his role hereditarily, based on coming from a certain family. The High priest entered the holy of holies, the place where God was on the day of atonement, to provide sacrifices for the people and act as a mediator between God and His people. The High Priest would be able to offer sacrifice to God on the people’s behalf for forgiveness of sins.

The book of Hebrews we will find makes use of this understanding, that Jesus is the High priest. He can actually provide help in time of need. Jesus the High priest can do something about our situation.

This is a small illustration of the kind of work the high priest does.

I was in a Uruguyan grocery store and had just walked through the entrance and had a bag with me from another store we had just been in. I don’t speak much spanish so I didn’t know I couldn’t do that, didn’t see the signs.

I heard someone behind me start speaking. But I didn’t know he was talking to me. SO I kept walking. He kept speaking, trying to get my attention. I turned around to follow the noise and noticed the manager talking to me.

Right while I was trying to figure out what to say, my host came up and answered the man in spanish and mentioned to me that we had to put the bag in a locker station. I was without direction and didn’t know what to do. I could not, on my own, accomplish what needed to be done. The manager had demanded I do something but I didn’t understand. My host was my mediator. He was able to do what I could not only my own.

In a very small way, this is Christ the High Priest. He provides in His suffering what we could not otherwise do.

On our own we will always end up at the lowest point of our suffering. On our own it will feel like a dead end. We always find an end in our suffering. We suffer and struggle. We experience sin or act in sin and we see it as an end. We see it as a road block or dead end. And if it is not dealt with it is a road block. IT is a dead end.

But Christ the mediator comes in and can actually provide something within our pain points. Within our sin and brokenness.

For Christ it is an intersection

We see suffering become a grace, because Christ can walk with us in suffering and Christ suffers on our behalf so grace is possible in our weakest points.

You can trust Christ to grip you so you don’t drift. Suffering in this way is an intersection. Meaning it allows for grace. Allow Christ to meet you in suffering. He has and will make it a point of life and grace, not death and ends.