Hebrews 2:10
The big idea the author of Hebrews has been hammering on is that Christ is supreme and sufficient––supreme meaning He is all powerful over the entire universe, and sufficient meaning He is totally able to save those who come to Him in faith. And as the argument goes, since He is supreme and sufficient, we must cling to Him and persevere in following Him. To abandon Him or to turn to some other so-called means of salvation is going to leave us utterly without hope, because Jesus is the only One who can truly save.
——-
Today we look at just one verse, Hebrews 2:10.
Part of the reason we’re only taking one verse today is because there is so much depth in this one verse, and so much to examine that I think that’s all we will have time for.
Another reason is because this one verse is kind of like the thesis statement for the rest of the chapter and if we can grasp what this verse means then next week we can roll through the rest of chapter 2 no problem.
But what I really want you to know about this single verse is that this verse sheds light on an aspect of who Jesus is that is both beautifully unexpected and vitally relevant for your life.
If our story of redemption were a movie, this would be the plot twist.
And honestly - If the story of salvation were up to you or me, we almost definitely wouldn’t have written it like this.
In fact, this is the part of Jesus’ identity that threw everyone for a loop, including the religious leaders, including the Jews at large who had been anticipating their messiah, and even including His own disciples and family members.
Let me show you what characteristic of Jesus I’m referring to in verse 10.
Hebrews 2:10 (ESV): 10 For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering.
Up until that word ‘suffering’ everything tracks just fine, right?
For it was fitting that He (that is, God)
For whom and by whom all things exist (yes, we can get behind that)
In bringing many sons to glory (yep, I like that! Looking forward to glory with Jesus one day…)
Should make the founder of their salvation perfect (yes, God the Father sent Him to live out perfect obedience in our place… still sounds great to me…)
How has God seen it fitting to make the founder of our salvation perfect? Through suffering.
Really? ‘Cause I was thinking God should make our victorious leader perfect through power, or wealth, or status or political dominance. Suffering?
Now, if it sounds normal to you that Jesus came as a suffering Savior and died on a cross, that’s just because we’re used to hearing it in the Church.
Think about it from the perspective of those who were anticipating the Messiah.
They were expecting a military leader. A political revolutionary. A king! Someone to overthrow Roman occupancy and rule with an iron fist.
The Jews had always conceptualized God as high and exalted, not as a suffering servant.
Even the pagan nations around them had always boasted of their false gods as strong and powerful, not as meek and mild.
Everyone anticipated a strong commander.
Instead they get the son of a carpenter. Born in an animal feeding trough. Raised in a backwater town. Itinerant and homeless through his ministry. Riding into the capital city not in a chariot, but on a donkey. And finally killed in a humiliating manner as a common criminal would have been.
This is not the Savior anyone was expecting.
But as it turns out, He is exactly the Savior everyone needs. The manner in which He came was perfectly fitting, to borrow words from the author of Hebrews.
And here’s why: Because suffering people need a suffering Savior.
Remember, the church the author is writing to is a suffering church. They are facing tremendous pressure from the outside to abandon Christ.
They are like a little boat tossed by a raging sea of criticism, ostracism, social pressure, and physical persecution.
Fellow Jews are pressuring them to abandon this silly idea of Jesus as Messiah.
They are also facing persecution from the Romans under Nero.
For all of these reasons, they are tempted to throw in the towel and turn back.
They’re thinking to themselves, “maybe I should re-think this whole Jesus thing. Maybe I should go back to the old tried and true theology of the Old Covenant. It’d be easier on me, easier on my family…”
So the author writes to lovingly warn them not to turn back, and to remind them that part of what qualifies Jesus to be the perfect Savior of those who suffer is that He Himself came and suffered.
In other words, it’s not only His divinity, but also His humanity that qualifies Him as our Savior.
He stepped down from His lofty position as the eternally exalted One and stepped into our world, felt the things we felt, overcame the same kind of temptations we face, and suffered in our place in order to carry us into glory with Him.
This is designed to be of great comfort and encouragement to them and to you and I as we live in this world where we do not yet see all things in subjection to man. Where suffering and evil and death reign.
Hebrews 2:10 (ESV):
Now, as I said, verse 10 forms the thesis statement of this next section, which is part of the reason we are going to spend our entire time making sure we understand it. That way we can move on next week and understand the rest of the chapter.
Let’s go through verse 10 piece by piece.
10 For
That word ‘for’ puts us in a bit of a situation doesn’t it? We can’t begin a teaching with the word ‘for’... we have to go back and see what the ‘for’ is there ‘for’.
So back up to verses 8 and 9 in your Bibles…
In verse 8, the author says that we don’t yet see creation subjected to humanity the way God ultimately intended… We are still waiting for that dominion mandate to be recovered and realized… We’re still waiting for man to reach his destiny.
Then in verse 9 he says…
Hebrews 2:9 (ESV): 9 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.
So Christ is the one who is plowing the course ahead for us and bringing us into our destiny… into glory… and the way He does that is by coming down to our level (a little lower than angels), by tasting death for us… by dying in our place to pay for our sin…
By the way, this is unique to Christianity. Every other religion is about man trying to ascend to God. Christianity is about God descending to man.
And now in verse 10 he’s saying… to expand on the fact that Jesus suffered for us and tasted death for us (verse 9)…
For it was fitting
That is, it was appropriate… it was the right thing to happen…
The suffering and death of Christ was not plan B.
It’s not as though God sent Christ into the world hoping people would accept Him, and then things went sideways and God had to improvise.
No. Isaiah 53:10 says, “it was the will of the Lord to crush him”.
Acts 2:23 says “Jesus [was] delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God”.
1 Peter 1:19-20 speaks of Jesus as the sacrificial lamb who was planned before the foundation of the world.
Jesus said of Himself before His betrayal and death, “the Son of Man goes as it has been determined…” (Luke 22:22)
So it was fitting…
For it was fitting that he
(God the Father),
for whom and by whom all things exist,
And I would just pause there and remind you that that IS the reality of the universe we live in.
The lie our culture tries to sell us is that we are the center of our own world and everything revolves around us; the Bible shows a very different reality.
Remember what Paul said in Romans 11?
Romans 11:36 (ESV): 36 For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.
In other words, according to the Bible, our world is not anthropocentric, it is theocentric. God-centered, not man-centered.
Everything revolves around God and exists for God.
And by the way, our lives only make sense when they revolve around God, not ourselves.
“I made my life ALL about ME, and I’m SO happy about it! I’m so content! I feel such a sense of purpose!”... said nobody ever.
Missionary Jim Elliot: He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep, to gain what he cannot lose.
So…
For it was fitting that He, for whom and by whom all things exist…
in bringing many sons to glory,
This one brief transitional line tells the whole story of history, doesn’t it?
If you’ve ever wondered about the meaning of life… Why am I here? What is the purpose of this world we live in? This is it.
Ever since the fall of man after creation, God’s program has been to redeem humanity from the curse of sin and death and bring us into glory, and all of this is to the praise of His glorious grace (as Ephesians 1 repeatedly reminds us).
But notice, who exactly is he bringing into glory? Sons. Not everyone; those who have been adopted as sons…
John 1:12 (ESV): 12 But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God,
If you want to be a child of God, who is being carried into glory, you must place your trust in Jesus.
In John 3 Jesus said you must be “born again”.
In other words, we aren’t born into God’s family; we are re-born into His family by faith in Christ.
So, it was fitting that God, in bringing those who trust in Jesus into our rightful destiny of dominion (as described in Genesis 2 and Psalm 8, and echoed by the author of Hebrews in verses 5-8 which we looked at last time)...
should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering.
That word founder could also be translated, pioneer or hero or captain.
Jesus is the pioneer, the captain, the heroic leader of our salvation. When we are saved from our sins and adopted into God’s family by faith, it’s all because of what Jesus has done to get us there.
Just as Moses led God’s people out of slavery in Egypt and into freedom, so Jesus, our leader, our pioneer, leads us out of slavery to sin and into freedom and glory with Him forever.
Just as David marched out on the battlefield to slay Goliath, so Jesus marches out ahead of us and leads us in victory over sin and Satan.
…To use just a couple popular Biblical examples.
And it says that God the Father made the founder of our salvation, Jesus…
perfect through suffering.
It’s a little confusing that God made Jesus perfect, isn’t it? I mean, wasn’t Jesus already perfect? Isn’t His moral perfection part of what qualified Him to be our Savior in the first place?
Yes and yes.
Then why does the author say that God the Father made Jesus perfect through suffering?
The answer is that, while Jesus was morally perfect from eternity past, He walked out perfect obedience to the Father on earth, as a man.
At every turn of His earthly life, we see Jesus doing it perfectly.
He handles His temptation in the wilderness perfectly
He handles all relationships perfectly.
He exalts God the Father perfectly.
And He handles suffering perfectly.
So it’s not as though Jesus was deficient of any goodness before He came to suffer and die… but He had to follow the course that the Father had preordained for Him, and He followed it perfectly. For us. And it was a course of severe suffering, obviously culminating in the cross.
From manger to cross, our Savior suffered perfectly for us.
It is trendy right now among some more progressive Christians to think of Jesus’ suffering and death as merely an example to follow. He suffered well so that we can suffer well.
But that is not compatible with the way the Bible describes the death of Christ.
Christ’s death is shown to be not just an exemplary death but a substitutionary death.
One small proof of this (and there are many) is seen in verse 9 where it says he tasted death for everyone.
He didn’t just die to give you a pattern to follow; He died for sin in your place, so that you don’t have to.
Next time we will see down in verse 17 that His death was propitiatory. That is, it was a sacrifice that appeased God’s wrath and brought atonement for our sins.
Jesus is not just an example to follow; He is our victorious captain who liberated us by dying for us.
Under the Old Covenant, which the Hebrew readers would have been exceedingly familiar with, the High Priest would enter into the Holy of Holies once a year on Yom Kippur to make atonement for the sins of the people. They would take a goat and sacrifice it as a sin offering and sprinkle its blood on the mercy seat.
Hebrews 9:22 tells us without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.
This was a foreshadow of Christ as our great High Priest who would atone for our sins, not by the blood of an animal, but by the shedding of His own blood.
FF Bruce summarizes it like this:
FF Bruce: He is the Savior who blazed the trail of salvation along which alone God’s “many sons” could be brought to glory. Man, created by God for his glory, was prevented by sin from attaining that glory until the Son of Man came and opened up by his death a new way by which humanity might reach the goal for which it was made. As his people’s representative and forerunner he has now entered into the presence of God to secure their entry there.
This is all part of what qualifies Him to be our perfect Savior. Not only is He the One whom chapter 1 tells us created all things and upholds all things by the word of His power… He is also the One who…
Philippians 2:7-8 (ESV): …made himself nothing, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. 8 And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.
So now that we know He is perfectly qualified to save us as the suffering Savior, the question becomes, what exactly was accomplished by his suffering? In what ways does the suffering of Christ bring us into glory?
That is what the rest of the chapter is about.
There are 5 reasons given in the following verses, which we will look at next week.
Jesus suffered…
1. To bring us into God’s family (11-13)
2. To destroy the devil (14)
3. To deliver us from fear of death (15)
4. To become our High Priest (17)
5. To help us in our temptation (18)
Those five reasons will form the outline of our sermon next week.
But for now, I want to invite you to consider the simple fact that you have a Savior who is perfectly fitted to save you.
In your sins and rebellion against God, you needed nothing less than God Himself to break the curse of sin and death. And, you needed nothing less than a man to die in your place.
So Jesus, who is fully God, became a man so that He could die as a man, to provide salvation to fallen men.
He did all of this because of His great love for you.
Romans 5:8 (ESV): 8 but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
Augustine wrote: the cross was a pulpit, in which Christ preached his love to the world.
Do you ever doubt whether God really loves you?
Look at your perfect suffering Savior.
Do you ever wonder whether His grace is actually enough to cover your sins, past present and future?
Look at your perfect suffering Savior.
Do you ever wonder whether God understands the hardships you’re going through?
Look at your perfect suffering Savior.
Do you ever wonder how you’re going to reach eternal glory with God, given the state you’re in?
Look at your perfect suffering Savior.