The Suffering Saviour
"In bringing many sons and daughters to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through what he suffered." Hebrews 2:10
Main Readings: Psalm 22 & Hebrews 2
Supporting Readings: Isaiah 8 & 1 Peter 2
I’d like you to think of today's sermon as part 2 of last week’s if you can. Last week was a massive encouragement on the back of a stern warning. Last week told us that we are one’s who God has chosen to subject the world to come to.
And I’d like you to think of last week as the foliage of a huge tree. I’d like you to think of it that way so that this week you can regard the verses we have in front of us a the branches and the trunk – all the way down to the roots of this amazing tree God has made.
It really feels like the author of Hebrews has started out at the top of a compelling argument and is working his way to the bottom of it – root and all – for this one purpose: that our confidence to remain close to Jesus be increasingly solidified.
I want this for you, because I believe God wants this for you, that your appreciation of your connection with Jesus strengthen and strengthen.
As we move into verse 10 of chapter 2 the author has still got you and I in mind. You can see that because he wants to tell us more about what occasioned the bringing of these sons and daughters of God to the glory of the world to come.
Back in verse 5 the glorious new creation is seen as a future reality. But here in verse 10 it’s seen as a past accomplishment.
And this isn’t an unusual way for the New Testament writer to talk. It serves to convey to us that God is so unchangeable; so faithful in his nature and his ways, that what God has purposed and started will certainly come to pass. God is not like us.
We make plans that sometimes never get started. We get started and often don’t finish. That’s not the case with God. What God purposes he starts, what he starts he finishes.
And that is so inevitable that he can talk in terms of something being finished before the accomplishment of the task is actually done.
And if you think about it, that is very hope giving. It’s very encouraging to our faith. It helps us to believe that what God has said he will do, is so certain, that he can talk about it in accomplished tense, even though it’s not completed yet.
We have something of that going on here. The whole of verse 10 is in the past tense. And it’s especially because he wants to focus on the past work of Jesus as the ground of our future glory that he goes past tense.
He wants us to know that there was appropriateness about the way this was done. The way our future glory was secured. It’s not like this could have been accomplished some other way.
And what he specifically has in mind is the fact that Jesus had to suffer to bring us to glory.
He’s saying that it was consistent with God’s character and purpose that it should happen this way – through the suffering of Jesus.
So, you can see that if this is true, this connects us with Jesus in a deep deep way. Not superficially. Not in a way that we could easily drift from him.
What is it, then, about the suffering of Jesus that is so necessary? Well essentially, we’re going to see the answer to that question unpacked for us by the author through the remainder of this passage.
But as a heads up, we should keep a look out for three things: the family problem, the death problem and the sin problem.
Jesus’ suffering is necessary for resolving all three of those problems – which are our problems!
Here in verse 10, Jesus - who the writer of Hebrews calls the pioneer [or author] of our salvation – was made perfect by God through his suffering on the cross.
‘Suffering’ here refers to his whole ordeal. It includes his temptation in the garden, it includes the mockery of the trial, and the pain of the cross, and the agony of death. It’s a kind of shorthand expression for everything Jesus went through to bring us to glory – to pioneer our salvation.
When he says, ‘made perfect’ he doesn’t mean that Jesus was somehow imperfect and that his suffering filled up what was lacking in his perfection.
This great salvation he’s speaking of doesn’t work unless Jesus is, and always has been, spotless. So it doesn’t mean morally lacking. What it means is perfect in the sense of his vocation; his purpose.
In other words, the completion of this great salvation is being described as him ‘becoming perfect’ – accomplishing what he set out to do. And that could only be, by virtue of suffering. Google couldn’t redirect this plan to avoid the suffering part. The destination was on the other side of suffering.
And it has the elevated sense of perfection because, his final accomplishment of the plan would be signified by his arrival in perfection. That is in heaven. Through suffering, through death, through resurrection, through ascension and into the perfect presence of God.
There is in the middle of verse 10 a confidence boost that this plan is the best plan and indeed the only plan that will work to remedy our situation. And that is to say that the whole cosmos was made by God and exists for God, so if this is what he has planned to redeem the cosmos – us included – then we can be confident that this plan will work.
So that sets us up now to see how this suffering of Jesus is necessary for our three big problems: family, death and sin.
Verses 11 to 13 are going to deal with the family issue.
And let me begin by pointing out that verse 11 identifies a category difference between Jesus and the people of his salvation – namely us.
And that difference is that by absolute nature, Jesus is holy. And by absolute nature we are not.
Jesus makes unholy people holy. That’s what the first part of verse 11 is saying when it uses the phrase ‘the one who makes people holy’. It implies that people are not holy and need making holy. And it implies that he is holy, because only a holy person can make unholy people, holy!
Jesus alone is holy and therefore in a whole different category of person to the likes of us. Yes he came in the flesh. Yes he had a body. But no he was not a sinner. No, he did not sin.
He came holy. He remained holy. He suffered and died, holy. And he makes his people holy though that holy suffering.
What does that mean for us who have been made holy?
Verse 11 says, we ‘are of the same family’. That’s incredible!
We are not of the same family as dogs. We are not of the same family as hedgehogs. We are not of the same family as dolphins.
We all recognise that there is a category difference between us and those animals.
And there is a category difference between Jesus and us, such that we should be able to say ‘we are of the same family as Jesus’. And yet we can!
That’s amazing. It’s even more amazing when you consider that the category difference between us and the animals is magnitudes closer than that between us and Jesus.
And yet, we wouldn’t ever think of demeaning ourselves so as to speak of ourselves as being in the same category as a cow for example.
But in spite of that monumental difference between us and Jesus – namely the massive aspect of holiness – it says here Jesus isn’t ashamed to call us brothers and sisters!
I don’t know if we can grasp the significance of that.
Let me try to express it in one very important way that we need to get a handle on.
Last week we spent some time thinking about the beginning – when God made people. And we know that God declared everything he made ‘very good’. One of the aspects of that ‘goodness’ was relationship.
We sense from the opening account that God walked in the garden with the two of them as a normal part of life together. There wasn’t any shame in their nakedness, even though God was there.
But after their disobedience they hid from God because they were naked. And God says, ‘who told you, you were naked?’
The point of telling you that is to show that one of our fundamental problems as human beings is that we have lost our relationship with God.
There are no grounds that we could ever call ourselves sons or daughters of God. And yet Jesus is not ashamed to call us brothers and sisters.
Jesus’ suffering re-establishes us in God family. We are his children. Jesus is our greater brother. It’s as though the category difference between us and him has been so obliterated that we now are counted the family of God.
And that is in fact what has happened, because we have been made holy. We are acceptable in God’s sight.
Think of a natural child in comparison with an adopted child for a minute.
In the case of a natural child, relationship between parent and child develops naturally and continuously from birth. There’s no doubt that the child knows it’s parents. And there’s no doubt that the child understands their position in the family either. Those things are so normal for them that they never think about them.
They never wonder: ‘who is my dad?’ ‘What is my mum like?’ They just know. They never stop and say, ‘oh so I’m their child, and they’re my parents’. Why would they? They just know it.
In fact, this is so true that under normal circumstances a child never gets his or her birth certificate out to prove to themselves that they belong to their parents. That is totally unnecessary!
And it’s the same here. We can point if we want to the status of verse 11 and say I’m a child of God. It’s true – a bit like a birth certificate is true.
But Jesus is not content that our family experience stop there. That’s not what God sent him to accomplish. It’s crucial – like a birth certificate is crucial, but it’s not the whole story.
And that’s where verse 12 comes in. The author quotes from Psalm 22 to make his point about how Jesus takes us to the relational level of knowing God and worshipping God. To knowing our place in the family and experiencing relationship with God.
The Psalmist says, Jesus will declare God’s name to his own brothers and sisters – those from verse 11 who he made holy – namely us.
Imagine you were asked to summarise everything that God is in one thing or one word, what would you choose? You couldn’t do it! You couldn’t do it for a human being, never mind for God!
The complexity of God’s character is so abundant that the closest you would be able to get in language terms would be to declare his name.
When you invoke his name, you invoke his essence. This afternoon we will be baptizing and we’re called by God to that in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
We’ll be invoking God’s name over these people as they identify with Jesus. That’s carries huge significance! These three are taking union with Jesus in the name of God. We are baptising them in the name of God. There’s so much more weight because of that name than there would otherwise be!
We’re being told in verse 12 that Jesus communicates to us – his brothers and sisters – all that GOD is! That’s massive. If real relationship relies on intimate knowledge, then as adopted children into God’s family, we need to get this intimate knowledge of God. Jesus says, ‘I’ll supply that’. When you look at me, you’ll encounter God. I’ll communicate to you, everything you need to know about him.
Think what this means for our relationship with God! If we drift from Jesus, who will communicate God to us? And if we don’t know God because we’ve drifted from Jesus, how will we have relationship with him. And if it was for relationship that Jesus rescued us in the first place, then where does that leave us?
These are really important questions! They show us the significance of Jesus to us.
But then also in verse 12, we learn our position in the family from Jesus. And that position is the position of worshipper.
It wouldn’t be fitting if a child starting adopting the role of a parent in a family. And it wouldn’t be fitting if we started thinking that we can be the god’s of our own lives. It wouldn’t be fitting if we thought we could be worshipped.
Our position in the family is worshipper. God’s position is worshipped.
Jesus through the Psalmist says, ‘in the assembly of these brothers and sisters I will sing your praises’.
Jesus expects us to be worshippers of his Father – that’s what he’s rescued us for. And he anticipates that we will join together to glorify God, and that he will join us in doing.
I find this so humbling. There are no words really to express this. I’ll try. Jesus is so utterly worthy of worship. And he will be worshipped for sure. But here, in his humble humanity, he tells us that he will join us – as though he was simply one of us – to worship God together. I just can’t say it any better than that. And yet it seems so utterly unworthy. The beauty of Jesus is too much to take sometimes. It’s so overwhelming I cried when I wrote this part of my sermon. I’m so unworthy even to speak of it. But it’s here in God’s word – what more can I say?
I guess it made the author of Hebrews awe struck too because it’s like he asks the question at the end of verse 12: how can Jesus bring himself to talk this way? When he knows who he really is? How worthy of that praise he really is?
Verse 13 seems like an answer to that silent question. This time quoting from Isaiah 8, he put these words on the lips of Jesus: ‘”I will put my trust in him”. And again, “Here am I, and the children God has given me”’.
When Jesus identifies with his people like he does here – calling us his ‘children’ this time – it identifies him with people who once upon a time rejected God. It identifies him with those who were unholy. It also identifies him with those for whom he had to suffer so grievously.
What did it take for Jesus to do that? Think to the garden of Gethsemane, when Jesus prayed that the cup of suffering might pass from him, and how he endured in that suffering – right to the end. What did that take?
These words from Isaiah attributed to Jesus say it took faith. ‘I will put my trust in him’. Remember what Peter said: ‘When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly’.
I don’t know if you thought of this before. But the faith that is demanded of us, in Jesus, for our salvation – that same kind of trust was demanded of Jesus in his humanity for the undertaking of our salvation.
This is meant to deepen our appreciation of Jesus’ identification with us for our real inclusion in the family of God. Jesus has solved that massive problem that stood in the way of our being brought into the glory of God.
So that’s family. The second issue is death. Jesus’s suffering solves the problem of death.
I think it’s worth pointing out that the problem of death (verses 14 & 15) and the problem of sin (verse 17) express 2 different aspects of Jesus’ suffering work. One is Jesus as victor. And the other is Jesus as high priest. So, keep a look out for those.
Verse 14 makes Jesus’ death both the reason why he had to become a man and the means for destroying death.
We die because of sin. Last week we heard that the first sin brought in the curse of death. So, it’s not surprising that here in verse 14, we find that the power of death is held by Satan! It was Satan who enticed Eve to rebel. And when Adam followed suit, death entered the world. Therefore, death is Satan’s weapen. And it is a mighty powerful weapen. Death is the power of Satan this verse says.
So, Satan wields death, and we die because of sin.
We’re all locked up to death. And nothing’s ever going to break death. You might hear people espousing the virtues of Ai by talking about how it might create immortality for human beings. There are plenty saying the opposite, but you’ll hear some talking about it unlocking eternal life.
It's nonsense! Whatever Ai may be able to do, it’ll never defeat death. Death is THE consequence of spiritual rebellion against God and there’s no Ai solution of it.
There is, however a Jesus solution for it. And according to verse 14 death finally succumbs to Jesus – and Jesus alone – by his death.
That’s why he had ‘share in our humanity’. As the children of God have flesh and blood, so he had to share in their flesh and blood. That way he could die. That way he could defeat death.
And surely, we would have to say that the greater power Jesus wields over Satan in his own death, is the power to rise from the dead!
Every one of us who belong to Jesus will know the power of Jesus’ resurrection on the day of resurrection. Our belonging to him guarantees our resurrection. Therefore, Jesus has broken the power of Satan over us which is the curse of death.
As verse 15 says, we are freed from the fear that death carries. Why? Because we know there’s stinger in the tail of death for us. In Jesus, we will rise from the dead to everlasting life!
That fear of death, whether people like it or not, defines humanities existence. I heard a prominent atheist talking recently about the purposelessness of everything when set in the dim light of death! That’s a pretty frank admission for an atheist! He said it explains why people have children and why they pursue legacy. These are things that give some glimmer of hope that something of themselves will remain after they are gone. It’s that fear of death that sits at the back of everyone’s mind and sometimes comes to the front and utterly terrifies them.
It's a fear, the writer says that holds people in slavery their whole lives. Jesus frees his people from that! And he does it by his suffering.
You see! It’s not angels that he helps, verse 16, it’s you and I. Abraham’s descendants. Abraham as the representative of all who have faith was a man. We have the same faith as he did and so Jesus counts us Abraham’s descendants and therefore his own family!
So, Jesus is the victor over our death. And that by his own death.
So, we’ve seen an end to alienation by inclusion in the family. And now we’ve seen an end to death.
Let’s see an end to sin, because that the third massive obstacle we face.
Verse 17 again, like verse 14, explains why Jesus had be made like us, fully human in every way. This time it’s not so that he can die. This time it’s so that he can take up a human role.
That role is high priest of God. It’s service role – you can see that expressed in the verse. He serves God and serves on behalf of God’s people. The high priest atones for the sins of the people. That was his job in the Old Testament. On the day of atonement, his job was to go into the holy of holies and make provision for the sins of the people thereby making them acceptable to God.
This is going to become a really high-profile idea in the book of Hebrews as it unfolds.
Chapter 5 picks up this theme and shows that God designated Jesus a high priest forever on the basis of his suffering and death. And by virtue of this fact, he became THE source of eternal salvation for his people!
The word used here to express that eternal salvation is atonement. We are saved for all eternity because our sins are atoned for – for all eternity. Atoned for means expunged; purged; obliterated.
Jesus has become our great high priest and by becoming a man and taking up that role, and expiating our sin, and ending the offence once and for all.
And here’s the massive encouragement, verse 17 says he’s a merciful and faithful high priest. Our sins do not deserve to be wiped clean – but he is merciful. And our ongoing trouble with sin might conceivably outlast the patience of the high priest – but he is faithful!
The depth and the length of our problem are covered by the eternal mercy and faithfulness of our Jesus.
So, these three massive obstacles to our being brought to glory (verse 9) – alienation from God; slavery to death; and persistent sinful rebellion are all personally dealt with by our greater brother – Jesus Christ.
Praise be to God for him!
They are dealt with by his suffering. Separation – dealt with by his suffering. Death – dealt with by his suffering. Sin – dealt with by his suffering.
We are counted family in Jesus; alive for evermore in Jesus; and holy in Jesus!
And that is the branches, the trunk and the roots of our being brought to glory. If we are going to arrive at the glory of verse 10 and the world to come of verse 5, it will be quite simply because of our close and intimate association with Jesus. It will be because he is not ashamed to call us brothers and sisters. It will be because he has brought back into relationship with God; has defeated death for us; and has atoned for our sins fully. This is our hope of glory friends.
And so, the final word is the same as last week, how can we wander from a Jesus like this?!
When you consider how utterly precious Jesus has been shown to be this morning, to each and every one of us, why would you want to allow yourself to drift from him?
Again, this is what it looks like to fix our eyes on Jesus. We had it last week. We have it again this week. This is what paying the most careful attention to Jesus looks like. And far from being arduous, look how glorious it really is!
