THE DEATH OF DEATH
Hebrews 2: 14-15

INTRODUCTION

Last week I heard a report from a journalist who spent a lot of time in Iraq during the past decade. He was in Baghdad after US forces took over the city and went out on the streets to interview Iraqi citizens. He explained that this was the first time he had ever interviewed Iraqi people without one of Saddam Hussein’s “handlers” with him. It was just he and the people. He could not believe what people were saying to him, now that they knew that Saddam could no longer harm them. In the past, the people lived in fear of what the brutal tyrant could do to them and so they did not say what they really thought, they did not do what they really wanted to do. In short, the fear of torture and death enslaved the people of Iraq. They were not free because of the threat of harm that hung over them at all times. When the threat of harm was removed they became free to be who they truly are and say what they truly felt.

The book of Hebrews was written to Christians who were living under the threat of torture and death for their faith. Their neighbors, family, friends and government didn’t want them to be Christians and were putting pressure on them to abandon Christ and to conform to the standard religious practices and beliefs of the majority population. In short, if they tried to be who they truly were, they were risking harm coming to them and their families. The author of this letter is seeking to help these Christians to hold fast to Christ and live like Christians while they are in the midst of this hostile environment. He is seeking to help them be Christians and live like Christians in spite of the fact they may experience physical harm for doing so. Notice just two of the places where they are exhorted to hold fast to Christ. 2: 1-3 says, “We must pay more careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away. For if the message spoken by angels was binding, and every violation and disobedience received its just punishment, how shall we escape if we ignore such a great salvation?” Then in 3: 1 we are told, “Therefore, holy brothers, who share in the heavenly calling, fix your thoughts on Jesus, the apostle and high priest whom we confess.” Throughout the book they are being given reasons as to why they should continue to trust and love Jesus, why they should act like Christians in spite of the danger. Tonight I want us to examine one of those reasons in 2: 14-15. While the pressures we face to abandon Christ are not the same, we do face pressure and threats to our well being that are designed to get us to lose heart. This passage can be a great help for us to be faithful followers of Christ even though doing so may bring harm upon us.

Jesus Christ should be loved and trusted because he became one of us

The first thing we should note is that the people to whom this is addressed are Christians. All that Jesus has done and is doing is for “the children”. Who are the children? If you will look back just one verse (v. 13) you will see they are the children that God the Father gave to God the Son. If you look at v. 16 they are the “descendants of Abraham”. Now according to Paul in Romans 4, the descendants of Abraham are not those who are physically descended from him, i.e. the Jewish people. Rather, “the descendants of Abraham” are those who have faith in Jesus. Notice in v. 17 that the children are his “brothers”, that is all those who are the children of God through faith in Jesus. What we are examining in these two verses is what Jesus has done for all those who belong to him. While what I say has direct application only to Christians, yet if you are not a Christian, then this can be used by you as a motivation to become a Christian. As I describe the benefits that Christ has gained for his people you need to know that these benefits can be yours if you will join God’s people by trusting in Jesus Christ.

The first thing that Jesus did for his people is to become fully human, just like us. He left the glory of heaven, where angels and stars and microbes obeyed his every command, where he was known as the eternal Son of God and accorded the entire honor due to him. He set aside his rights to be treated as God and to act like God and submitted to living in an unwed teenagers womb for nine months. He endured birth and all the indignities of being a baby and growing up in a family. He took on a human body with all of its weaknesses. He was tired and sick and hungry. He lived within the limits of human strength and knowledge and ability. The one who made food, relied on his Father to give him everything he needed in order to live. He endured being treated with indifference and then with hostility. He knew loneliness and sorrow and the pain of misunderstanding. The Creator clothed himself with creation.

Jesus didn’t do his work at a distance. He didn’t sit in heaven and launch cruise missiles at our enemies. He came right into the heart of enemy territory and engaged in difficult and dangerous urban warfare. He fought the tyrant, hand to hand, as it were. He didn’t send angels to do the dirty work. He came himself. There was no other way to deliver us from tyranny other than becoming flesh and blood and so he did what had to be done to rescue us from our enemy.

Jesus Christ should be loved and trusted because he became one of us in order to die

Now notice that the primary weapon he employed to defeat our enemy, the dictator who held us captive, is his own death. Do you see that in v. 14? He took on human flesh “so that by his death he might destroy…” He was born as a man and lived as a human being so that he could die and in dying destroy our enemy. Here is the thing that sets Christianity apart from every other religious system. Our Savior didn’t come to tell us how to overcome our enemy. He didn’t come to earth simply to tell us what to do or how to live. He didn’t come to recruit us to help him save the world. He came to give his life for us. We’re going to talk in a moment how it is that his death destroys our enemy. Right now I just want us to think about the fact that the reason the eternal Son of God came was to die and how that fact ought to help us to trust him.

You and I regularly have people tell us they want to help us. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t get a phone call from someone who acts like my friend and tells me they have a great deal for me. Every time I walk into a store that has commissioned sales people I am asked if I can be served or if they can help me in any way. When we have these encounters with sales people, immediately our defenses go up because we know that regardless of what they are saying to us, they really do not want to help us. What they want is our money and they are being friendly so we will give it to them. The people we trust are the people who have shown they have our best interests at heart. The way we know they care is that they do us good at great cost to themselves. Those we trust the most are those whose only reward is the pleasure they get out of helping us. The more it costs someone to help us, the more we know they are only motivated by the pleasure they get out of assisting us.

Jesus told his disciples, “greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” The supreme evidence of love for another is when someone puts his or her life on the line for no other reason than the pleasure of working for his or her friend. Jesus got nothing for his trouble except the joy of loving us for the glory of his Father. He can be trusted because he, more than anyone else in the entire universe, has proven his love by his dying in our place. It is this humility of Jesus that commends him to us as the most trustworthy of all persons. Why you would trust anyone else to tell you how to be happy is beyond me. No one has ever done what Jesus did for you and no has ever given you what Jesus gave you by his death.

Jesus Christ should be loved and trusted because he became one of us in order to die so that he might destroy Satan

I want you to consider with me how it is that Jesus by dying has destroyed the devil, the one who holds the power of death. First we need to consider what does it mean to say that the devil is the one who has the power of death? In Deuteronomy 32:39 God says, “See now that I myself am He! There is no god besides me. I put to death and I bring to life, I have wounded and I will heal, and no one can deliver out of my hand.” In 1 Samuel 2: 6 Hannah, the mother of Samuel, says, “The Lord brings death and makes alive; he brings down to the greave and raises up.” The Bible says from the beginning to the end that God is the one who is in charge of the time and manner of every human’s death. At the very beginning, after he made Adam he told him that if he ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that he would surely die. Death came into the world as God’s just response to human sin. Repeatedly God threatens to send death upon all those who refuse to repent and obey him. Death is the just judgment of God against sinners. It is what we deserve. If God is the one who kills as an expression of his justice, then what does it mean to say that the devil has the power of death?

While God is the one who ordains the death of every individual in the world as an expression of his justice, the secondary agent or cause of every human’s death is the devil, along with men, disease, accidents and all the other ways that humans die. Think with me for a moment about Jesus’ death and the relationship between God’s will, Satan’s will and human will in the death of Jesus. Who killed Jesus? Jesus said that Satan was a murderer from the beginning and that when the Jewish leaders were plotting to kill him they were simply carrying out Satan’s will. On numerous other occasions Jesus himself alluded to the fact that his death was orchestrated by the devil. At the same time we know that the Roman governor and soldiers and the Jewish leaders all killed Jesus. Then according to Acts 4: 27-28 and Romans 4:25 and numerous other passages, God the Father killed Jesus.

God wills with a good will what men and Satan will with an evil will so that God’s will is always done and yet God can never be blamed for evil, while men and the devil are justly punished for the evil they do. The devil uses the power of death that God has put into his hands for evil purposes. He kills people to destroy faith in the goodness of God. He kills people to stop the gospel from going forward. He kills people so they will experience the wrath of God in hell forever. He is full of spite and hatred of all that is related to God and human beings are made in his image and so he delights to murder and deface the image of God in man. But he is especially full of malice towards those who are the children of God and the brothers of Christ. He uses the power of death to intimidate and bully us into submission. But the Son of God has destroyed the Devil, the one who has the power of death. How has he done that?

In 1 Corinthians 15:54-55 Paul quotes the prophets Isaiah and Hosea and says, “Death has been swallowed up in victory. Where, O Death, is your victory? Where, O Death, is your sting?” In others words he is reflecting the same thing that we see here. Jesus, by his death, has destroyed the power of death that the devil holds. What is the power of death? The power that death has over us is that it is the door into eternal condemnation, to hell. Death for the sinner is the beginning of an eternal experience of God’s fierce anger in hell. However, Jesus, when he died “made atonement for the sins of the people” as v. 17 says. In other words he endured hell for all those who will trust in him. Therefore he destroyed the power of death to usher us into hell and so destroyed the only weapon that Satan possesses that can harm us. In other words, the devil’s chief weapon, death, has been robbed of its power because it has now become the gate to eternal life rather than eternal death. That leads then to the liberation that Christ’s destroying Satan’s power has effected for us.

Jesus Christ should be loved and trusted because he became one of us in order to die so that he might destroy Satan and free us to live as God’s children.

The worst thing that can happen to you as a human being is to die without having your sins forgiven. Anything less than death while still guilty before God is not the worse thing that can happen to you. Therefore, death ought to be the greatest fear of every human. Many do not fear death as they ought because of the masterful deception of Satan and our own sinful, self-deception. While Satan has duped many into not fearing death, yet he uses all kinds of other fears to control and manipulate humans. All fear is related to this greatest of all dangers because all fear is merely the reflection of our mortality and vulnerability as humans. We know we are not God and so we know that we can be harmed. This is the power that the devil uses to bludgeon human beings into submission to his will. He uses death and the threat of death and other fears related to our finitude, to inspire all manner of disobedience and hatred and unbelief toward God. However, when a person becomes a child of God, when he enters into Christ by faith, then the power of death and thus of the devil over him is broken. Sin is atoned for and so there is nothing to fear from the worst thing that can happen to a human being, dying without having sins forgiven. If the worst thing that can happen holds no terror any longer then all lesser things hold no terror for the child of God.

Just like Iraqi citizens who can now live and talk as they please without any fear of being harmed by Saddam Hussein, so Christians can now live freely, without fear. We can be the children of God no matter how much Satan seeks to intimidate us because he no longer has any power over us. His only power was the power to kill me while yet in my sins. My sins are forgiven because of Christ’s death and so all of his threats are like the Iraqi Director of Information’s threats that the Iraqi army was going to destroy the Allied forces. It is all bluster and hot air. I can freely love God and love people and declare the greatness of God because I cannot be harmed in any way. We are free to risk our lives, our money, our reputation, our time, everything because we cannot be harmed because Jesus, “by his death destroyed him holds the power of death, that is the devil and freed those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.”

Jesus Christ should be loved and trusted because he became one of us in order to die so that he might destroy Satan and free us to live as God’s children.