Hebrews 2:9-18

But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels, for the suffering of death crowned with glory and honor, that He, by the grace of God, might taste death for everyone.

For it was fitting for Him, for whom are all things and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons to glory, to make the captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings.

For both He who sanctifies and those who are being sanctified are all of one, for which reason He is not ashamed to call them brethren,

saying: “I will declare Your name to My brethren; In the midst of the assembly I will sing praise to You.”

And again: “I will put My trust in Him.” And again: “Here am I and the children whom God has given Me.”

Inasmuch then as the children have partaken of flesh and blood, He Himself likewise shared in the same, that through death He might destroy him who had the power of death, that is, the devil,

and release those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.

For indeed He does not give aid to angels, but He does give aid to the seed of Abraham.

Therefore, in all things He had to be made like His brethren, that He might be a merciful and faithful High Priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people.

For in that He Himself has suffered, being tempted, He is able to aid those who are tempted.

The True Meaning of Christmas

Around this time, we hear all kinds of people, radio announcers, TV personalities, politicians, movie celebrities and others begin to say things about Christmas. And those things are usually along the lines of wishing everyone goodwill, happiness with loved ones, peace, and some extra fun in the season. And some of them will season their words with sayings about being generous and giving, being hopeful, and forgiving, being kind and extra thoughtful.

It all sounds warm and nostalgic, but I can’t help feeling cynical when I hear all that. Because truth be told, if those folks truly understood the meaning of Christmas, they would not feel warm and fuzzy, they would probably feel convicted. They might feel judged. Some might feel offended. And some may even feel desperately sorry, and wish for change.

Because the message of Christ’s birth is not a message of brotherly kindness of men to men, or of niceness to my neighbour during December. The message of Christ’s birth is one of the central doctrines of biblical, historical Christianity: God became a man.

Now say that in public, and see how many people are not offended. And if that does not upset them enough: He became a man because we as a race were wretched, rebellious, and destined for Hell, a place of eternal fire where God pours out justice forever. This is not the message in the malls, the message in the corporate Christmas cards, the messages of the celebrities, or the messages of the Christmas movies.

The grand message of this time of year for Christians, is the message of the Incarnation. God became a man. God became one of us.

Charles Wesley put it this way:

Men stand amazed! It seems unjust!
The Lord of earth and skies
Is humbled now with bonds of dust,
And in a manger lies.

Some of you might remember that in 1995, Joan Osborne released a hit song called One of Us.

What if God was one of us
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on the bus
Trying to make his way home

Osborne’s blasphemous lyrics showed she had no idea of the message of Christianity, of why God did become a man. But I wonder how many Christians would do better, if you asked them, why did God become a man? Why did that have to happen? Why is the message of Christmas so fundamental to the Gospel?

You might not expect to find the answers in the book of Hebrews, but Hebrews is full of the message of the Incarnation. In this section of Hebrews we’ll see four reasons God our Saviour needed to become a man.

I. Our Saviour Needed To Suffer and Die

But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels, for the suffering of death crowned with glory and honour, that He, by the grace of God, might taste death for everyone.

For it was fitting for Him, for whom are all things and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons to glory, to make the captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings.

The writer of Hebrews has two goals throughout his book. He wants to show how Christ is superior to the Judaism that had rejected him, and he wants to warn people from going back to it, and urge them forward in faith.

Some of the Jewish opponents of Christianity liked to point to their fascination with angels, and their beautiful Temple, and compare it to the rather plain and humble appearance of Christianity. So here the writer is explaining how Jesus is superior to angels, and why His incarnation was in fact beautiful and glorious.

The first thing he tells us is that Jesus, for a very special purpose, was made lower than the angels, insofar as humans are less in glory than angels. But why did he do that? First reason: so that He, as the pioneer of our salvation could suffer and die.

We all know Romans 6:23: the wages of sin is death. So for there to be a Saviour from sin, that saviour needed to be able to face the consequence or the judgement for sin: death. Now the problem is this: God is the only true Saviour. Hosea 13:4 says, “Yet I am the LORD your God Ever since the land of Egypt, And you shall know no God but Me; For there is no Savior besides Me.”

So God is the Saviour. But a saviour from sin must die.

But God cannot die. First Timothy 6:16 tells us that God alone has immortality in Himself. In God is life. First John 1 tells us that He is the Word of Life. You can no more kill God than you could put a stop to time, or put the universe in a box. He has always been and always will be. He did not gain His life from anyone. He has no origin. His is the only underived life there is. All other life received its awakening breath from Him, the self-caused life, the life that lives by Himself and through himself.

And God cannot suffer, not as we know it. Suffering is experiencing some kind of pain that you cannot avoid or control. But God does all he pleases so suffering never happens to God the way it happens to us. If God feels sorrow, or the pain of regret, it is because He has chosen it.

So how was the problem solved? By God becoming man. By having him join the human race, a little lower than the angels, and by being human, he could die. And this is a staggering thought: that on the cross, the Person of God the Son experienced death. No you cannot kill God. But what died on the cross was not just a human nature or a human body. The Person who was Jesus Christ, God the Son, by His union with moral human flesh, died.

And Jesus, the God-man, suffered. He experienced torture inflicted upon Him.

In fact, God chose to allow His Son to walk this path, so that in His humanity, He would achieve victory, perfection. The Person of Jesus Christ, by being united with humanity, had to face the challenge of embracing suffering and death. This was not a challenge He faced as the pre-existent God the Son. But in embracing the incarnation, and going all the way, Jesus truly blazed the trail for us. He did not love his own life to the death. The way to glory for both Christian and Christ is first through a valley of suffering. God the Father ordained that, and God the Son willingly submitted to that.

“There was once a man who didn’t believe in the incarnation or the spiritual meaning of Christmas, and was skeptical about God. He and his family lived in a farm community. His wife was a devout believer. One snowy Christmas eve she was taking the children to the Christmas eve service at church. She pleaded with him to come, but he firmly refused. He ridiculed the idea of the incarnation of Christ and thought it all contradictory.

After they left, the winds grew stronger and the snow turned into a blizzard. As he looked out the window, all he saw was a blinding snowstorm. He sat down to relax before the fire for the evening. But as he did so he heard the sounds of some animals in distress. It was a group of geese caught in this blizzard, unable to fly, but beginning to freeze.

He had compassion for them and wanted to help them. He thought to himself, “The barn would be a great place for them to stay! It’s warm and safe; surely they could spend the night and wait out the storm.” He opened the barn doors, but the geese remained where they were. Starting to get frustrated, he went over and tried to shoo them, run after them, and chase them toward the barn. They only got scared and scattered into every direction except toward the barn.

Feeling totally frustrated, he exclaimed, “Why don’t they follow me! Can’t they see this is the only place where they can survive the storm! How can I possibly get them into the one place to save them. If only I could become like one of them – then I could save them.”

He stood silently for a moment as the words that he just said reverberated back to himself in his mind: “If only I could become like one of them — then I could save them.” He thought about his rejection of Christianity for the very same reason – that God became one of us to save us. As the winds and blinding snow abated, his heart became quiet and pondered this thought. He understood what Christmas was all about. He knew why Christ had come.” (Source: Web, Author unknown)

God the Son become one of us. So much so, that we are spoken of as family.

For both He who sanctifies and those who are being sanctified are all of one, for which reason He is not ashamed to call them brethren,

saying: “I will declare Your name to My brethren; In the midst of the assembly I will sing praise to You.”

And again: “I will put My trust in Him.” And again: “Here am I and the children whom God has given Me.”

If there had been no Incarnation, there would be no human saviour to suffer and die, so there would be no salvation.

II. Our Saviour Needed to Die and Survive

Inasmuch then as the children have partaken of flesh and blood, He Himself likewise shared in the same, that through death He might destroy him who had the power of death, that is, the devil,

and release those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.

Here is the flip side of the coin. He needed to be human to suffer and die, but his death had to be different. He had to not only die but survive his death. The writer says that Jesus, through his death on the cross destroyed the devil, who held men in bondage through their fear of death. This doesn’t mean he put Satan out of existence, it means Jesus destroyed Satan’s dominion and hold over the world.

A recent psychologist wrote a book in which he traced all of the diagnosed anxieties and fears to one fear: a fear of death. Our fear of our lives ending, our fear of not knowing what is on the other side leads to every manner of sin.

It’s in thinking that I only have a few decades left to live that leads people to be greedy for pleasure and fame, and fortune, and health, and happiness. And in their lust for that, they commit every manner of sin against God and their fellow man. Man knows he must die, so he lives in a kind of denial of it, by acting as if he has no life beyond that. Or he accepts that he will live on, but acts in defiance of what God has revealed in His Word. This comes back to fear of death. And through it, Satan has ruled this world, and directed men into unbelief and pride, whether or not they realised it.

To break the chains of the fear of death, we needed someone to go into that grave from which no one returns, and return. That’s exactly what Jesus did. The God-Man died and survived. How did he do that? Because He was the God-Man; sinless and holy. He could die, but unlike the fallen race of Adam, he didn’t have to die. He was able to die, but He was not in debt to the grave. The wages of His life was not death. The wages of His life was life. So when the only human being in history who does not have to die, chooses to voluntarily die, do you know what happens? Death spits Him back out. He rises again. He goes into the grave with the sin of others, pays the debt, and then because of His own perfection, comes back out.

The grave has had only one permanent survivor – Jesus Christ. But because of him, millions, billions will follow.

That means our Saviour is alive to save us. If Jesus had gone down into death, and stayed dead, He would not have destroyed the Devil’s power or released us. But now the world has a message, Good News. Yes, you will die. But on the evidence of the One who died and survived, so you also will die and survive, if you place your trust in Him. If you believe, embrace, trust Christ as your Saviour from sin, you will die and survive.

So you don’t have to live like those whose only hope is in this life. You don’t have to try to gather up as many possessions as possible. You don’t have to fear that you won’t see all the beautiful sights in the world before you die. You don’t have to fight to gain money and power so as to get your way in this world. Fear of losing out, missing out, being hurt, harmed, fading, weakening, no longer has to trouble you. Why? Because in Christ, you will live forever.

But without Him being both God and Man, He could not have delivered us from the fear of death. Without the Incarnation, there would be no resurrection, and so no salvation.

III. Our Saviour Needed to Sympathise

For indeed He does not give aid to angels, but He does give aid to the seed of Abraham.

Therefore, in all things He had to be made like His brethren, that He might be a merciful and faithful High Priest in things pertaining to God,

For in that He Himself has suffered, being tempted, He is able to aid those who are tempted.

The Saviour needed to be able to suffer and die, to die and survive, but in order to be a High Priest, He needed to be able to sympathise. A true biblical priest was someone who placed his hands on two parties: on the people, and on God. He had to be loyal to both sides.

On the one hand, as the Scripture says, the priest needed to be merciful to the people. He needed to want to see the people forgiven. On the other hand, he needed to be faithful to God, concerned with holiness and purity. There is no doubt that God the Son had full and complete faithfulness to the Father from eternity past. They shared the same essence, being perfectly holy, perfectly loving.

But for us to have a Saviour, we needed someone who could not just pity us, but actually side with us. Not side with us in our sin, or condone our sin, because then He would not be faithful to God. But to truly be in sympathy with us, a truly merciful high priest needed to know our experience.

So, He was made like us in all things. He did not share in our sin nature, or else He would not have been faithful to God, nor could He have defeated death. But in every other point, He truly experienced humanity. He experienced our limitations. He experienced our frustrations. He experienced our weaknesses. He experienced our pain. He experienced our temptations. The difference with Jesus is that He was never tempted from within, as we are. We are tempted both from within and from without, but Jesus was tempted only from without. And in doing so, He experienced humanity from the inside.

In 1961, a journalist named John Howard Griffith wanted to experience what it would be like to be a black man in the south of the U.S.A. He visited a dermatologist, had his skin darkened, shaved his head, and lived as a black man would in the South of the U.S. He experienced all kinds of things, hatred from some, kindness from others. He wrote his experiences in a book Black Like Me.

Even though he could have interviewed black people and probably gained the same information, it wasn’t the same as actually living that way. He gained a different kind of knowledge by doing so.

When God became man, and experienced suffering, and experienced death, and experienced weakness, and experienced pain, and experienced temptation, it was a different kind of knowledge. Now perhaps someone says, why was that needed? Since God knows all things, why would he need to experience an Incarnation to know our weaknesses? Surely His omniscience could have given Him that knowledge.

First, if Scripture says the Incarnation gave Him deeper sympathy with us, then we will take that and believe it. Perhaps there is a kind of knowledge that could only be gained by the Incarnation. Second, this sympathy with man was not once-off. It is not a memory to Jesus. Even though He is glorified and without the limits He had in Nazareth, He is forever the God-Man. He has chosen to add to Himself a perfect human nature which God the Son shall always have. And because of His eternal union with humanity, He is eternally sympathetic with us. We are part of him. We now share the same family. He belongs to the family of Adam, and through Him, we belong to the family of God the Father.

Isaac Watts said

Touched with sympathy within,
He knows our feeble frame;
He knows what sore temptations mean,
For He hath felt the same.

IV. Our Saviour Needed to Satisfy God

To be a merciful and faithful High Priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people.

In order to be a Saviour, Jesus had to satisfy God’s demands for justice. That is exactly what the word propitiation means. It means to satisfy, to meet the requirements, to answer the demand of a holy God for justice.

To put it crudely, if our sin had called for forty lashes of the whip, only if those forty lashes are administered, would God’s justice be satisfied. If our sin had called for an amputation of the hand, nothing less than an amputation of the hand would have propitiated God.

God’s justice on sin requires his infinite wrath be poured out on it. Sin offends the infinite holiness of God infinitely, so the punishment is infinite anger. Now ask yourself, who could withstand the infinite anger of God? Which human being could bear perfect anger? No one. That’s why Hell extends over an eternity, because only one Person could endure the fullness of God’s anger in a concentrated period of time, and that was God Himself, God the Son. God the Son could bear the anger of God the Father.

But God could not satisfy the demands of God in heaven. God the Son had to become a man to act in the place of men who deserved judgement. He could do that for three dark hours, because He was a man substituting for men who had sinned, but also because he was God and could bear it. He had to be a God-Man to satisfy God.

Or to put it positively, if eternal life required an unbroken keeping of the 613 laws of Moses, 612 would not satisfy. If eternal life required a perfect keeping of the Ten Commandments, then an 80% success rate would not satisfy. If eternal life required a perfect keeping of the Greatest Commandment and the Second Greatest Commandment, even one lapse from that would not satisfy.

God was satisfied with the offering of Jesus because Jesus had perfectly kept God’s requirements. He had not failed in one point, by omission, or by commission. And the only way that could be done is He became a man, lived a true human life, faced our temptations, lived in a family, lived in a community, lived under a government, earned a living, and through that all, He never sinned and obeyed perfectly.

Why did God become a man? Why does Christmas exist? Not to spread good cheer, and sentimental feelings towards one another. God became a man because we needed a Saviour. A saviour who would suffer and die for our sins. A saviour who would die and survive to save us. A saviour who would sympathise with us and be merciful to us eternally. A saviour whose life and death would satisfy the justice of God and pay for our sins.

The message of Christmas is the Gospel. Have you embraced it?