The book of Hebrews was written to encourage discouraged Jewish believers facing difficulties and to warn those who might abandon Christ. The author demonstrates the superiority of Jesus Christ over angels, Moses, and the Aaronic priesthood, arguing that Christ is the ultimate revelation and mediator. By identifying with humanity, suffering, and death, Jesus conquered sin and death, thereby enabling believers to endure in their faith and look forward to His future reign on earth. The sermon emphasizes that because Christ is the supreme and best, believers should persevere in their Christian life.
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We're now large for sound, so we'll open again to the book of Hebrews. One of the questions that we need to determine when we come to the book of Hebrews is, why was it written? Somebody has said the book of Hebrews is like one of the central characters of the book, Melchizedek. We know not whence it cometh or whither it goeth. In other words, we don't know who wrote it or who got it. Now we... recognize at the top of each page in this little book it says Hebrews. But as you look at the text of Scripture itself, that word's nowhere there. So we really don't know who received the book. We really don't know who wrote the book.
The church fathers identified it as the book of Hebrews for a number of reasons. That it was in fact no doubt written to the scattered believing Jews throughout the Mediterranean basin. who were having some great difficulties in their Christian life. It was written to Jews, we conclude, because so many things incidentally are stated that only someone with the knowledge of the Old Testament would understand. When we get to chapter eleven and chapter twelve, when the author just ticks off names, we're supposed to know all about those names. And the Jews would only be the ones who'd know that.
The Gentiles would have no idea of Jephthah. Do you have any idea of Jephthah yourself? I mean, you know, that's kind of a tough one, isn't it? But they just named these names, taking for granted that the history of these folk are known to the people who are the recipients. Hebrews received the letter. What was the problem, though, that gave rise to this kind of writing? And this we will get from the five warning passages that are found in the book of Hebrews. Unlike Paul, the author of Hebrews writes a little bit of doctrine and a little bit of warning or excitation, a little more doctrine and a little bit of warning. Paul's pattern is doctrine, excitation.
The author of Hebrews separates that throughout. You still want to know who wrote the book? I'll tell you later. We've just eliminated Paul, I don't know. The author of Hebrews interjects these warning, five major warning passages throughout the book. That's the tough section of the book, the warning section. And throughout the weeks in the evening sessions, we will look at a couple of the five warning passages. We won't have time to look at all of them, but we'll take a sample dip into a couple of the warning passages. They are not connected with the development. In the morning sessions, we'll be looking at the development of the book doctrinally and showing the superiority of Jesus Christ in a number of different ways.
We'll comment on that directly. In the evening we'll look at a couple of warnings. In the morning we'll just have a consistent study in the doctrinal section of the book as the author traces the superiority of Christ. Now why does he write in this way? Why does he warn these people? What is he warning them about? In each of the five warning passages there will be two segments to them in which on the one hand he will encourage believers and on the other hand warn people who have said they are believers in Jesus Christ, but have no manifestation of that in life. The Christian, he will exhort to get to work.
They were discouraged. They were worn down. They were ready to just throw in the towel in serving Christ. They were still bathed in Christ. And he is going to encourage them to get on with Christian living. There are perhaps some of us of that sort here who have worked and are tired of working for the Lord. Any of you feel that way? That's two of us. Ready? Three, three, three, three, four, four, four, four, five, six. He's speaking for your husband there, George.
Okay. Alfred Gibbs, some of you have heard of him. You used to say there are three kind of people in the church, shirkers, workers, and jerkers. And the worker type get a little discouraged from time to time. Somebody else do it now. I've done my share of it. We want to throw in the towel. How many years do we have to teach Sunday school? How many years to give out the bulletins? How many years? How many years and years and years? And we get weary and we want to just sit back and relax. The author of Hebrews will say, hey, it's not rest time yet, it's work time. We're still at work. The work doesn't end until we're gone. So some of us need to be encouraged to keep working, to keep growing, to strengthen our faith, to get into the meat of the Word.
And he writes, showing us. that in Jesus Christ, as we commented last evening, we have the very best possible. Don't throw in the towel on serving Jesus Christ. Now there are other people, Jews of that day, who woke up to the fact that by making a profession of Christianity, they had cut themselves off from all of their associates, from their relatives, from their friends, from the social life, yay, from religious life as well. Some of them got dragged into it secondhand. They really didn't have a choice. They were just little kids in a family of Jewish believers. And now Uncle Saul won't even talk to them.
They can't go to the local delicatessen and buy food from their relatives. And church religion is a joke. While their cousins and uncles and aunts are worshiping at the temple, or while they are involved in synagogue worship with all its ritual and beauty, they mean in somebody's home. And they start out singing a song, and wouldn't you know it, there's too much tune for the word. And they'll run it again, and this time, too many words for the tune. And then some brother will read it. And finally get to the point where somebody got a tune that matches. So for the fourth time we've been through that hymn.
It doesn't look very beautiful. Very little ritual. No roots. My roots have all been broken. No tradition. You just don't know what's going to happen the next time around. No form. No pattern. And then somebody asked them a really hard question. What is your religion? I'm not a pagan and not a Jew. And some of these folks who were taken along with Christian parents, who had made a profession at Galilee Bible camp or some such thing, now woke up to the fact that they had cut themselves off from, oh, it meant anything to them.
And they're deciding to go back to Judaism. The author of Hebrews is going to address that kind of person and say it's very dangerous to come so close to the truth and reject it. He's going to say that in Jesus Christ, we have the very best. Jesus Christ is greater than angels in chapter one and two. Jesus Christ is greater than Moses in chapter three. The Lord Jesus Christ is greater than the Aaronic priesthood. and all involved in that priesthood in chapters five and seven and eight and nine and ten. Jesus Christ is better than any of those.
And to go back to that or to give up on Jesus Christ and living for him is to choose what is poor in this world for what is best in eternity. Jesus Christ, did you get the outline of the book? is greater than angels, first of all, in chapters one and two. He is greater than Moses in chapter three. He is greater than Aaron in chapter five and seven and eight and nine and ten. And you get some picture as to what his main theme is. He wants to talk about priesthood so much you can hardly bear it. He'll talk about angels for a couple chapters. He talks about Moses for six verses. And then he talks about Jesus Christ, our great high priest, for chapter five and seven and eight.
and nine and ten. And then he exhorts and illustrates in the rest of the book what living on for Christ is all about. In a brief word, the message of Hebrews is because we have the Lord Jesus Christ the very best. Let us endure in the Christian life. That's what it's about. First of all, the author of Hebrews is going to show that the Lord Jesus Christ is superior to angels. In the early church there were influences from the Gnostic religion that would relegate the Lord Jesus Christ to a second class God, someplace between true God and true man, angel realm, spirit realm of some sort, but not fully God.
As well the Jews honored angelic beings. The angels were active in the history of the children of Israel, and they held angels in high esteem. The author of Hebrews in chapters one and two will establish the fact that the Lord Jesus Christ is superior to angels in chapter one because of his deity, in chapter two because of his humanity. And I'd like to look briefly at those two segments in our time together this morning. In chapter one the author quotes seven times from the Old Testament, and we will not look at all those quotations.
Let's just read them, and then we'll comment on them. Verse four of chapter one, being made so much better than the angel, as he hath by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they. For unto which of the angels said he at any time, thou art my son? This day have I begotten thee again. I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son. And again, the third quote, when he bringeth in the first begotten into the world, let all the angels of God worship him. And of the angels he saith, who maketh his angel spirits, and his ministers a flame of fire. But unto the son he saith, I throne, O God, is forever and ever. A scepter of righteousness is the scepter of thy kingdom. Now it's love's righteousness, and hated iniquity.
Therefore God, even thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows. And thou, Lord, in the beginning, hath laid the foundation of the earth. And the heavens are the works of thine hand. They shall perish, but thou remainest, and they all shall become old as thus a garment. And as of Escher shall they fold them up, and they shall be changed. But thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail. But to which of the angels said he at any time sit on my right hand until I make thine enemies like footschool? Are they not all ministering spirits? Send forth the minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation. Seven quotations. Really six, because the first two are the same. The first two are the same. The first one is from Second Samuel seven, in which Nathan is telling David about what God is going to do for him.
And he says, you're going to be the son. God is going to be your father. And that was a promise made to all the kings of Israel, culminating in the Lord Jesus Christ. The second quotation is just the setting of Psalm two. Thou art my son. This day have I begotten thee. It's the same statement. And here we have the name son identified with Jesus Christ. He is the son. Possesses all the qualities of the father. When the Lord Jesus Christ said he was the son of God, the Jews wanted to stone him because in saying that, he made himself equal to God.
And the author of Hebrews captures that thought and says, this is the Son. In the fullest sense, Jesus Christ is the Son. The first two quotes establish the deity of Christ because of his name. He is called Son, and no angel was called in that unique sense, Son. This is my only begotten Son. Now, in the other five quotes, establishing the deity of Jesus Christ and his superiority to angels. Because of that, we see certain qualities of deity stress. Angels are susceptible to change.
Some angels sin. But the Lord Jesus Christ does not change. He does not decay. He does not degenerate. He is not subject to change. He is immutable. Angels worship the throne. Jesus Christ sits on the throne. Angels serve the throne. Jesus Christ is the one that is served. Angels were created. Jesus Christ is the one who created. And as you go through these seven quotations that he makes, you find that this one is called Son, who sits on the throne, who rules over angels, who does not change, who directs angels, who receives worship from angels.
And in a very few quotations, the author of Hebrews establishes the fact that the Lord Jesus Christ is superior to angels. He made them. He does not change. They do. They serve Him. He gives the orders. He does not change. I said that already. They do. He sits on the throne. They worship the throne. You see, he is superior by his very nature. What I am interested in particularly is what he says in chapter two about angels. Because this is something we do not understand quite as much. Because of his deity, he is clearly superior to angels. But he is also superior to angels because of his humanity.
And what goes along with that? In verse five of chapter two we read this, for unto the angels hath he not put in subjection the world to come of which we speak. And then he gives an extended quote from Psalm eight. What is man that thou art mindful of him? For the son of man that thou visitest him. Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels. Now Psalm eight that is being quoted is usually thought of as showing the insignificance of man.
David sits down on the Galilee or Judean hillside, looks up at the star, the moon, sees the sun, looks at himself and says, what is man that thou art mindful of him? Or the son of man that thou visitest then? But we don't read the rest of the psalm. In the original language in psalm eight it says, Yet you made him little less than God. It says in psalm eight that you have put all things in subjection unto man. Psalm eight is not talking about the lowly position of man.
It is talking about the exhausted position of man. as the zenith of God's creation in this realm. And he is saying, man is little less than God. Man is made in the image and likeness of God. God made the universe that we see, and he says, this is yours. Exercise dominion over it. Man is the king of the earth. We know that instinctively. Do any of you exercise that kingship over this dominion that God has given to you? I try. I live at home under two acres of land, and we're trying to get grass to grow in one spot.
I've been out there doing all sorts of foolish things trying to get grass to grow. I will get that grass to grow. There are ruts and one slope, but by the end of the summer, Lord willing, there'll be grass there, even if I had to buy sod. I'm stooping to that at this point. Why is that? I want to exercise a little dominion that God's given to me. Over that little plot of ground, it will not conquer me. Do you all know what snow is? We had three feet of snow outside our front door most of the winter last year.
That's really interesting to watch. The view got a lot of snow last year. And the schools were closed and I'd go in and shake John and say, John, we got to dig out. And the big snow would come. And as soon as morning dawn comes, you see all the doors pop open in the community and people come out with snow clouds and stuff. no shovels and we're going to bring into dominion our little part of the earth. It will not conquer me. John and I are shoveling and he said, Dad, when it comes to nature and man, nature wins every time. That's his mentality. So he threw the shovel down and went back in. And my father peers out of his little window and says, David, get in here, you're going to have a heart attack.
Get the boy to do it. Well, that's impossible. You know, I'd have a heart attack getting him to do it, as a matter of fact. If he'd do it, I'd have a heart attack. But we struggle, don't we, to bring into dominion that little part of the earth? Would you get in a space shuttle? Even before the disaster, would you? I'd love to. Now, I don't think I'd float in the base. I'd drop back to something, I'm sure of that. But the fact of the matter is that's exciting. I love to do that kind of thing.
We were talking just the other day about the Great America, a ride place, a six-legged kind of thing. Do you like to do those things? I'd love to get on those rides. See if I can go upside down without losing my cookies and all that kind of thing. That's fun to do. How far can we reach out? And the young people will be doing that all week at camp. The ludicrous things they will do in demonstrating that they're in control. Because God has instinctively put that to us that we exercise dominion. That's why we do it. That's why you climb Mount Everest.
It's there. You can't stop the quest in the human heart to bring into dominion under His control all that God has made because God put that there in the first place. That's what we're supposed to do. We're supposed to walk on the moon. We're supposed to go to Mars. We're supposed to explore the outer reaches of God's universe because He said, the works in my head, they're under your dominion. But we do not see all things subject to man yet. We've never seen it. Because it was not long after God said to the first man, look, you're the king of the earth, exercise dominion over all that I've given, that he revolted against God.
And we do not say see earth subject to man. We see drought. We see runaway temperatures. We see hurricanes. We see land just the milk of its strength. Nick's metaphor. We see not all things subject to man. We don't have it in control. Between you and me and the fence blows, it's never been in control from the Garden of Eden. We try. We weed. We work. We build. But we cannot bring it into control. This earth has never had proper government.
Now I am glad we live in the country in which we do. No place I'd rather live. Any amen to that? No place I'd rather live. But it's not perfect. Have you noticed that? Not perfect. We have not yet had proper government. The earth hasn't. The earth is not yet subject to man. Will it ever be? Yes, it will. Yes, it will. We see Jesus. You see what it says? We see not yet all things subject to man as God originally intended when he made man king of the earth.
But we see Jesus. It was made a little lower than the angels. for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honor. The Lord Jesus Christ comes into the scene as a perfect man. God says now we want to see perfect man in rule. But before he can rule, he has to do something. He has to reverse the consequences of sin. You see, that's why man doesn't rule properly. So in chapter two we see the Lord Jesus Christ coming in.
That's how I tell my students to read the Bible for school when they have to read the whole Bible. Getting a good breeze and it goes very quickly. Lord Jesus Christ comes and totally identifies with mankind. He takes upon himself the likeness of sinful flesh. He is a perfect man while fully God. As that perfect man, he does the same kind of thing we do. Look at verse ten of chapter two. It was fitting for him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all things, and bringing many sons unto glory, to make the captain of their salvation perfect through suffering.
You see, the Lord Jesus Christ comes as man. He says, I'm going to be just like every man. in that I'll come into this world and I'll suffer. I'll come into this world and I'll trust God just like they have. And there are a couple of quotations, strange and isolated quotations in which he says, behold, I am a children. We trust God. I'll declare thy name in the midst of the congregation to the brethren. And he calls us brothers. And he says, I will learn how to trust just like you have to learn how to trust. And he learns obedience. through his suffering. He goes through all the same kind of experiences, same kinds of experiences that you and I go through as human beings.
And if he's going to do that, there's a real biggie he has to go through. What's the worst of our experience? Death. And in coming and identifying with man, it is fitting that the Lord Jesus Christ should identify even to death. Look at verse fourteen. For as much then his children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the saying that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death that is the devil, and deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subjects of bondage.
The fear of death. Do you realize how that dominates our thinking? You have in your bathroom at home a little chest on the wall, a closet on the wall. You open that up with all those orange bottles in there. Any of you have that sort of thing? So we don't die. You get in the car and we have all sorts of laws now. A voice will come in and say, good morning. All monitored systems are okay. Please buckle your safety belt. Got to do that. Why do we wear a safety belt for fear of death? Death is everywhere around about us. We try to hide that in our society.
You go to a funeral home and we say, doesn't he look nice? Oh, that's beautiful. He doesn't look a bit nice. He looks dead and there's nothing beautiful about death. It's a result of sin, one sin, original sin. For as by one man sin entered into the world and death by sin, so death passed upon all men for all sins. That's ugly. That's not beautiful. And we're in bondage to death. Mankind as a whole is we die. And I would venture to say there are many who have passed from this scene in the thirty years of this camp.
Isn't that true? We're subject to death. Bondage. And if the Lord Jesus Christ is going to identify with me as a human being, he better die. because that's the worst of all the enemies. And he does that. And he comes in and he takes the sickness and uses death as the remedy and dies on the cross. But he doesn't remain dead. He conquers sin and death and hell and sets us free from the fear of death.
And we can say when we come to funerals, O death, where is thy sin? O grave, where is thy victory? Because Jesus Christ has conquered sin and death and hell and the devil in entering into death the consequence of sin and rising the third day. He conquered that once and for all. Now that the consequence of sin has been reversed. And the Lord Jesus Christ, as a perfect man, fully God, has overcome the consequences of sin in the human race. Now man can reign. And one day Jesus Christ will reign. And he will come to this earth as a perfect man.
It's one of the strongest arguments for a millennium there is. The earth has never seen perfect rule as God designed it. When Jesus comes, the earth will see that rule. Jesus shall reign. Where are the sun? does his successive journeys around. His kingdom spread from shore to shore. The moon shall wax and wane no more. And there will be perfect rain of man on this earth. It will cause the rain to fall on the desert. It will bloom as a rose. The lamb will lie down with the lion, not in the lion. Prepositions are very important.
There will be peace on this earth. It will be holiness to the Lord. He will reign with a rod of righteousness throughout this earth. And man will, for the first time, be king of the earth. The beauty is, will reign with him. Look forward to that day, where he will make us a kingdom of peace, and we shall rule with him on the earth. Jesus shall reign. No angel will do that. He is better than angels because of his deity. He is better than angels because of