Hebrews 2:10,11

Jesus became like us, and we will become like Him. We will share in His glory and we will become holy like Him. When it talks of us being brought to glory it includes many things, but one of the most important is that God will brings us to the same degree of moral excellences that Jesus has. Jesus was perfect, He loved us perfectly, He loved the Father perfectly, He trusted perfectly. We will be brought to the same level of faith.

Why is it "fitting" that God should make Jesus "perfect through suffering"? First, this does not imply previous imperfection. Think of it like this. Consider a mathematics graduate, they will be able to do all sorts of maths that they could not do when they were ten years old. This does not mean they were less mathematically able at that age, just that they hadn't studied lots of things yet. The suffering brought Jesus' work to completeness. The prime problem with bringing us to glory was our sin, Christ's death on the cross was the solution to this sin.

Verse 11 is amazing. We are of the same family as Jesus. Jesus is pleased to call us His brothers. Through Christ we are brought into unity with God.

Hebrews 2:8,9

At the moment we do not see everything subject to man. In fact we see man subject to all sorts of things. However, we do see Jesus. When we see Jesus we see what we should have been like, and we also see what we will become like.

Jesus is representative of man. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians, He is the second Adam. Jesus was made lower than the angels. He was subject to all that we are subject to, even to death. But now He is crowned with glory and honour. He received this honour because He was prepared to go the cross. When He went to the cross He tasted death for all of us.

The whole message here is that Jesus is representative of us all. We are not to focus on angels. If we look at angles we beings that are different from us, and that we can never become like. When we see Jesus we see what we will become like. Moreover, Jesus is greater than angels.

Hebrews 2:5-8

Having exalted Christ, the writer now turns to the humanity of Christ. Most errors boil down to either saying that while Christ is God, He was not fully human, or that while Christ was fully human, he was not God. Either of these is a perversion of the truth. Christ is both fully human and fully God.

First we come to Psalm 8, which speaks of man and his position. Man was made lower than the angels, yet is crowned with glory and honour, and everything will be put under his feet. False views of Christ also arise from a false view of man. We are the pinnacle of God’s creation. Man forgot this when he sinned, and people often desert God out of despair. We need to remember the goal that God has for us.

It is also significant that Psalm 8 uses the term son of man, for this is the somewhat ambiguous term that Christ used to refer to Himself. He did this deliberately, because anything else would have led people to day He was just a man, or that He was not really human.

Hebrews 2:1

The letter now has a series of warnings. The first one is to pay careful attention to what we have heard, ie to the message of the gospel. Some people rebel openly against the gospel, but many people just drift away. They don't deliberately reject it, they just drift. Jesus told the parable of the seed, with the two groups that started off well and then died away. One died because of opposition, the other because other things in life crowded in. The gospel affects absolutely every aspect of our lives, it has implications for everything. So we need to listen carefully.

The Law was believed to have been given by angels, hence the mention here. This does not necessarily mean that the writer is confirming this view. What he is saying is that his readers knew the law was important, and that was only given by angels. How much more important is the good news given to us directly by the Son of God?

We say that people are free to accept or reject the gospel, and this is true. But it is also true that there are consequences to our decisions. Whether we accept or reject the gospel has eternal consequences. The message was initiated by the Lord Himself, and then confirmed by the apostles who had heard Him. It is further confirmed by God Himself with signs and wonders, and the gift of the Holy Spirit. The Bible actually knows very little about blind faith, God repeatedly provides "proof". Nor is there any conflict between miracles and the message. The Biblical pattern is that the word is preached and taught, and God confirms it by signs and the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Hebrews 1:10-14

Verse 10-12 quote from Psalm 102. The words are directed to Yahweh in the original, but the writer applies them to Jesus. The Psalm also speaks of suffering, so it is apt that it is then applied to Jesus. Jesus brings together both humanity and divinity.
The Lord is eternal, whereas creation is not. There will be a new heaven and a new earth.
Finally the writer quotes form Psalm 110, the most messianic Psalm of them all, and one quoted by Jesus Himself.
The point of all these quotes is not so much to “prove” that Jesus is the Messiah, he takes that as read, but to tell the readers to stop being so stupid and stop being fixated by angels. Angels are only ministering spirits, and, moreover, they have been sent to serve us, who are inheriting salvation. We need to have a right perspective.

Hebrews 1:7-9

The quote in verse 7 comes from Psalm 104. This Psalm is all about God and His plans, and angels are merely the agents of His purpose. The people needed to have a right perspective on angels. Yes they exist, and yes they are important, but they are servants of God. Christ is the one we should worship. In Revelation the angel tells John that he is only a servant and must not be worshipped.

In contrast, he then quotes from Psalm 45. In the quote these is an ambiguity between God and the king, but this is fitting, for Jesus is both fully human and fully God. Jesus is the centre of it all, and He is exalted by the Father. The purpose of God’s plans is to glorify the Son, not angels.

We may find some of these quotes a little frustrating, for we would like a nice neat logical proof that Jesus is the Son of God, but the quotes do not provide that to our Western ears. However, to Jewish ears the quotes would be conclusive.

Many of these quotes had an immediate partial fulfilment, eg either in David or Solomon, and then their complete fulfilment in Christ. We were made in the image of God, but sin corrupted that image. Jesus showed us the man we were always meant to be, and that, in Him, we will become. So the quotes follow a pattern. We can see a glimmer of fulfilment in men, but we see the total fulfilment in Christ.

Hebrews 1:5

The writer now quotes from a number of Old Testament passages, especially the Psalms to demonstrate the superiority of Jesus. The first is from Psalm 2:7. Now we need to remember that often when a writer quotes a single verse, they may have a larger passage in mind. So it is useful to look at the whole of Psalm 2. In this Psalm David speaks of God installing His King in Zion, and making the nations an inheritance for Him. The whole Psalm is full of the idea that the king is the source of salvation, he is the one to be worshipped. The Messiah is the Son of God. Sonship here involves relationship, but also unity of purpose.
The next bit of verse 5 quotes from 2 Samuel 7:14 and 1 Chronicles 17:13. In these verse God tells David that he is not the one to build the temple, but one of his descendants. The second part of 2 Samuel 7:14 says “when he does wrong I will punish him with the rod of men, with floggings inflicted by men”. We find this difficult, for it seems to say that the son will sin. But that is to read too much into the quotation. It is also worth noting that Jesus was punished with the rod of iron, but for our transgressions, not His own.
In verse 6 the writer quotes from the Septuagint (Greek) version of the Old Testament, showing that God wants us to worship Jesus.