Sermon Tone Analysis
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George Baily in It's a Wonderful Life thinks that his life doesn't matter because he hasn't done anything that important or that significant.
Through a series of bad events George cries out in a moment of frustration that he wishes he had never been born.
He's granted his wish.
And through the rest of the film we see what life would have been like if George had never existed.
He thought his life didn't matter to anyone at all.
He thought all he did was make a mess.
But in the end he sees that his life did, in fact, matter a great deal; that he had a tremendous positive impact upon many lives.
And that's really what George Baily wants to know—that his life matters.
It may be true for many of us as well, to know that we matter, that our lives have value for something.
Call it what you want: significance, or a noble cause, or legacy.
All people who have ever lived in any time or from any culture have always had an inward impulse to reach up to something higher.
The Bible has a word for that too.
It's called holiness.
To be set apart; set up as significant or worthy.
We all desire holiness because we have all been created to reach for something higher--we all want our lives to matter.
It's why we love movies and novels about heros who rise above their circumstances to become something more—something that matters.
It's built into us; hard-wired; we can't help it.
The Reach for Holiness
Let's start with that today.
We all reach for holiness in some way.
That is to say, we all want to achieve something higher in order to proclaim that our lives matter in some way.
And ever since the fall of humanity into sin we have been trying quite unsuccessfully to find our way to holiness on our own.
The tower of Babel
Make a name for ourselves
Take it back to a story very early in the Bible.
In Genesis 11 we find the story of the tower of Babel.Genesis 11:4
Today
We still long to build our own towers today with our name plastered all over it.
Maybe we can't all have our own private TRUMP tower.
But what is it that we do want?
How does our built-in desire to matter in this life show up?
For some of us it may be Career.
Others it may be Money.
Maybe we desire Popularity at school or to be the best on our Sports team.
Beauty
And we do this no less as Christians.
If I am good enough, live a moral life, give enough to charity, serve enough and volunteer enough.
Sometimes we fall into doing these things because we mistakenly believe it helps us reach up to God.
That it is somehow right behavior that makes us holy before God.
Am I good enough, moral enough?
Do I give enough, serve enough?
But wait.
If all that is true.
If we can achieve some sort of holiness on our own by what we do.
Then why do we need Jesus?
Who is Jesus?
If we can reach holiness on our own, then Jesus becomes the model—he is the example of how to live so that we can be holy like he is holy.
But is that right?
Lots of people think so.
But the problem is that—when we are all truly honest with ourselves—we know that we cannot do that.
We cannot live like that.
We cannot follow the model that Jesus gives.
The author of Hebrews sets it straight for us.
So who is Jesus?
Today's passage: NIV Hebrews 2:10-18
Two Natures (a brief history of Christology)
Council of Chalcedon
The council of Chalcedon met in 451 AD to clarify ongoing disputes concerning Jesus.
The church could not agree on the "natures" of his divinity and humanity.
Was Jesus half-man and half-God?
Did Jesus start out as just a man, but then rise to a place of divine appointment?
Do the two natures mean that Jesus has two beings?
Or does he somehow hold two natures within one being?
These are questions we probably don't lay awake sleepless at night relentlessly pondering these days.
But back in the early days of the church this was a big deal.
They had to figure out who Jesus really is.
And I guess in some ways this is still true today.
people today still need to ask the question, who is Jesus?
The church has been asking this question for 2000 years.
It is something that theologians call Christology.
And in 2000 years of Christology the church has had to face some instances when people have had the wrong answer.
So it might be good for us to take just a few minutes this morning and plow our way through a very short history lesson on Christology.
Because I think that will help us get a much better handle on what the author of Hebrews is trying to tell us about Jesus in today's passage.
one being; two natures - fully God & fully human
Docetism
I had a church history professor who used to say, "There are no new heresies, only new expressions of old ones."
He's right.
The misconceptions we have about Jesus today are really the same mistakes people have made about understanding Jesus for 2000 years.
One of the earliest mistakes was called Docetism.
From a Greek word that means "to seem" or "seems like."
The idea was that Jesus only seemed to be human; but really his human physical body was just an illusion.
He was actually just a spiritual being that had a sort of human appearance.
Jesus only seemed to be human, really just a spiritual being
This idea was popular because of something in the Greek world at the time known as Gnosticism.
The gnostics taught that all the of the physical material world was corrupt.
Only the spiritual realm was pure and good.
Therefore, there was no way that a perfect God could ever actually take on a corrupt evil physical body.
From Gnosticism | claimed that all physical world was bad
But this is not what we read in Hebrews.
Jesus is actually fully human.
Adoptionism (Apollinarism)
On the other side.
There were those in the early church who taught something called adoptionism.
This was the idea that Jesus was born a human—a regular human just like you or me.
In fact, as Jesus grew up there was nothing divine or God-like about him because he was not divine.
It was only later in life that they would say God chose him—or adopted him—to be the Son of God.
Jesus was not really divine, just an exceptional man
God adopted/appointed Jesus for divine purpose at baptism
One of the teachers in the early church, a man named Apollinaris taught that Jesus was never truly divine, never truly God.
Rather, he was given a special connection to the Spirit of God the Father.
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