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HOLY HELP FOR THE HOPELESSTHE DEATH OF DEATH IN THE DEATH OF CHRISTHebrews 2:14-18 INTRODUCTION What is your greatest fear? The thing that keeps you awake at night and that immobilizes you when you think about it for any length of time. There are a lot of options available, aren’t there? Over the course of my life I’ve felt afraid of a variety of things. I’ve feared flunking tests. I’ve feared not having enough money to pay the bills and thus not being able to care of my family. I've feared that I've lost a child in a store. I’ve feared losing the approval of people I admire or care about. I’ve feared getting beat up by the local bully. I’ve feared that by my own stupidity I’ll lose the love of my wife. I’ve feared being disgraced by my children. I’ve feared speaking to a hostile crowd about Christ. I’ve feared speaking up for Christ to friends and family and acquaintances. I’ve feared hurting someone else physically through my own carelessness. I've feared confronting someone in their sin. The reason I bring fear up is because the text today talks about the fear of death. Honestly, I don’t think I have ever feared dying. It is just not something that has ever really occupied my attention. I don’t think my lack of fear is due to my faith in Christ. I think it has more to do with the fact that I never think about it. It seems a long way away and not really relevant to me. It’s not that I don’t know that I’m going to die. It just doesn’t seem very likely to happen to me anytime soon and so I don’t think about it and so I’m not afraid of it. My sense is that my experience with death is pretty much the norm, at least in our culture. I know that some people think a lot about dying and thus live in dread of it, but I don’t think this is the experience of most, at least of people living in our circumstances. The difficulty this presents to us is this: if one of the main benefits that Jesus delivers is freedom from the fear of death and I’m not afraid of dying, then what reason is there for me to bother thinking about Jesus? The main point of this passage is that Jesus is the only one who can help you escape from what the fear of death does to us. If you right now are in fear of death, then it won't be hard for you to see how Christ is necessary for you. But I think that for most of us, what I need to do as we work our way through this text is first of all convince you and me that we really are in trouble. We need to understand the nature of the trouble we are in if Jesus' work is going to be of help to us. MAIN POINT Jesus Christ is the only one who can help you because…I. You are by nature a slave to Satan (vv. 14b-15) The author begins by talking about what Jesus has done. The Son of God became man so that he could die. The reason he died was to destroy the devil and free all his children who lived in slaver to him. That means that all of the children whom God the Father gives to God the Son are in the condition of being enslaved by the devil and need rescue. Notice the way in which the devil keeps the children of God in slavery to him is by their fear of death. The devil holds the power of death and he uses that power to keep human beings in slavery to him. William Lane in his commentary says it like this, death “is a henchman in the devil’s service and the threat of death is an instrument with which he bludgeons humanity into submission… It is ironical that human beings, destined to rule over the creation should find themselves in the posture of a slave, paralyzed through the fear of death...” The threat of death is an instrument that all tyrants have used throughout history to get oppressed people to do what they want. A few years ago, shortly after the U.S. had taken over Iraq from Saddam Hussein, I heard a report from a journalist who spent a lot of time in Iraq during the decade prior to the invasion. 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 death that hung over them at all times. When the threat was removed they became free to be who they wanted to be and to say what they truly felt. That’s the basic idea in vv. 14-15 right? Jesus became a man and died on a cross in order to destroy the devil’s hold over Jesus’ captive brothers and to set them free from their slavery to Satan. We’re going to talk in a moment about how Jesus’ humanity and his dying destroys Satan but I want us first to reflect on what it means to be held as slaves to Satan by the fear of death because I doubt that many of us naturally believe our biggest problem is that we are Satan’s slaves or that we do his bidding because we are afraid he will kill us. (There is another question here that I'm not going to answer because I've answered it before. The question is, "what does it mean to say the devil holds the power of death in light of the fact that the Bible says repeatedly that God is in charge of when & how people die? I answered that question in a sermon I preached on Good Friday in 2003 on vv. 14-15. You can read it on the web if you want.) First, What does it mean that we are slaves of Satan apart from Christ? I need you to think with me about the argument that the author has been making in this second chapter. These verses are the conclusion of the argument he began back in 2:5. Remember back in vv. 6-8 he reflects on the fact that in Psalm 8 God, through David, says that it is his intention that all created things submit to human beings. However, at the end of v. 8 he makes the observation that at present not everything submits to human beings. Right now, the creation doesn’t submit to us. Why is that? If you’ll remember the Genesis account; God told Adam that if he would obey him and not eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that he and all his descendants would live in perfect fellowship with God, perfectly ruling over God's good creation; but that if he disobeyed God and ate from the tree, he and all his descendants would die, would be put out of God’s presence and not rule over God’s creation as his perfect image-bearer. The reason the creation does not submit to us is because Adam broke God’s agreement or covenant with him and thus God cursed the world so that nothing submits to us, we do not perfectly reveal the glory of God and we die. Thus death is the chief evidence that the creation does not submit to us. The created order does not submit to human beings. Rather, Satan uses creation to kill us, whether by disease or accident or act of violence or natural disaster. How did it happen that Adam did not obey God? If you will remember, Genesis 3 describes how the devil came to Eve and Adam in the garden and said to Eve, “Did God really say that you cannot eat any of the fruit from any tree in the whole garden?” Eve replied to the devil’s statement that God had not forbidden that they eat from all the trees, just from the one tree in the middle of the garden. She said that God told them not to eat it or touch it or they would die. Now listen to what the devil says, “You will not surely die! God knows that if you eat you will be like him, knowing good and evil.” In essence the devil tells Eve that God is holding out, that he cannot be trusted to provide the best. There is more to life than what God promises and you can have it if you disobey. Nothing bad will happen by disobeying God, rather you'll be really happy. So Eve is faced with a decision, will she believe God and what he says or will she believe the devil and what he says? We know the sad reality all too well. Eve, and Adam with her, believed the devil’s promise rather than the promise of God. Thus they were cast out of the Garden of Eden, out of God’s realm and into the world, the realm of Satan. They thus became subject to death and hell and all of their descendants after them also fell into the devil’s realm and under his control. The NT describes this relationship between fallen humanity and the devil in a variety of ways. 1 John 3:8, “He who does what is sinful is of the devil for the devil has been sinning from the beginning.” Ephesians 2:1-3, Human beings by nature are “following the ways… of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, of the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient.” 2 Timothy 2:26, Those who are in opposition to the gospel, who are not in Christ are in the “snare of the devil, being held captive by him to do his will.” John 8: 42-46, Jesus told the religious teachers who rejected him that the devil is their father and they are doing their father’s will in opposing him. He goes on to tell them that they believe lies and don’t believe the truth about who he is, because they have the devil, who is a liar, as their father. The evidence that we are slaves of the devil is that we don’t believe the truth about God but lies and we don’t obey God but do acts of sin. You and I by nature, without Christ, are slaves to sin and thus slaves to the devil. We are willing slaves. In other words, we are not held in slavery to Satan against our will. We like to sin and thus serve our master. We prefer lies to truth. How is it that the devil is using the fear of death to keep us in line? Most of us are not sinning because we are afraid if we don’t sin, if we don’t do the devil’s will, he will kill us. Yet, the text is quite clear that throughout our entire life we live in the fear of death and it is this fear the devil uses to keep us submissive to him. This is a very important question that could use long hours of contemplation and discussion. I want to give what I think are the two general ways this works and then encourage you in your homes and small groups and personal conversations to think some more about this. First some of us live in fear of our death or the death of those we love. Those who live in fear of physical death respond to this fear in several sinful ways. We want to keep on living and so out of fear of dying we come up with, under the tutelage of the devil, all manner of false religions and systems to make ourselves fit for what comes after death. Billions of people in the world have committed themselves to false gods and false religious systems out of their fear of death and are in this way being held captive by the devil. In addition to the worship of false gods, the devil uses the fear of death to inspire all manner of sinful behavior. How much of the violence in Iraq is motivated out of a fear of dying. It is kill or be killed in Iraq and in many places in the world. Hoarding of resources, obsession with physical health to the exclusion of concern for others or for God, demanding that all risk be eliminated from my world, unwillingness to love others if it exposes me to the possibility of physical harm, a lack of gratitude for life, bitterness and anger at the loss of loved ones, all these and more are the result of the devil’s intimidating us with the fear of death. However, it seems to me that for most people, most of the time it is not fear of death itself that the devil uses. Think with me again about what happened to Adam and Eve after they ate the fruit. God told Adam that the day he ate of it, he would die. However, Adam and Eve did not die at that moment. Rather, God cursed them and the world they live in. He cast them out of his presence, excluding them from fellowship with him. Then later they died physically. Physical death is the culmination, the final result of sin. It is the ultimate loss; so that the fear of death that the devil uses in our lives is the fear of loss. I've been talking with Jane about how the devil uses the fear of death in our lives over past couple of days. She shared with me a passage from a book she is reading. The book is titled, "A Grace Disguised." It is written by a pastor whose mother, wife and young daughter were killed in a car accident caused by a drunk driver. He was left alone with three older children. Let me read a couple paragraphs for you that I think captures the point of what this text is saying. "After the funeral I tried to resume a normal routine in our home as quickly as possible. One aspect of that routine was evening Bible reading. About six weeks after the accident, the four of us sat down together on the sofa to read from the book of Acts--the story of Peter raising Dorcas from the dead. Immediately after the story Catherine blurted out, 'Why didn't God do that for us? Why did God allow Mommy, Diana Jane and Grandma to die? Why doesn't God care for us?' Her questions ignited all of them. They expressed rage at God for destroying our family, and they cried bitter tears… That experience… marked the first occasion when I realized that the real enemy we faced, the last great enemy, was death. When I looked at them that night, I saw that they too would someday die, as their mother, sister, and grandmother had died. Of course I knew this truth before that night, but I came to know it on a deeper level. I felt the pall of death hanging over us. We do not happily and willingly accept life's mortality, which is an affront to everything we cherish. We want to control how life will turn out and claim the good life for ourselves: successful careers, happy marriages, perfect children, close friends, beautiful homes, and peaceful communities. Loss reminds us that we do not have the final word. Death does, whether it be the death of a spouse, a friendship, a marriage, a job or our health. In the end death conquers all." To say that the devil uses the fear of death to enslave us is to say that he uses the fear of loss to motivate us to sin and to believe lies about God and the nature of the world we live in. Every loss in this world is a reminder of and a pointer to the ultimate loss that faces us all. It is the threat of loss that Satan uses to intimidate us. How much of our lives can be explained as a response to the fear of losing something or someone? How many sinful attitudes and actions are motivated out of our fear that if we don’t act as we do we will lose something significant? How much sexual activity between unmarried people is due to a fear of being alone or a fear of losing someone you want to love you? How much thievery is rooted in a fear of not living the good life? How much anger is due to our fear that others will take or have taken important things away from us? How much unforgiveness is the result of fear that we will be taken advantage of again, we will lose more than we already have lost? How much unwillingness to care for others with our time and money is rooted in fear that we will not have what we need if we give away our resources in the service of others? The devil regularly impresses upon us these potential losses in order to keep us in line, to keep us serving him and his rebellious world system. I have a friend who has been a faithful Christian for quite some time. She is getting older and really wants to be married. Her younger sister is getting married this winter. Just recently I found out that she is in a relationship with a non-Christian man, has quit going to church and is paying no attention to Christ anymore. It is not hard to understand how her fear of being alone is behind her sin. For her, marriage is life and the threat of not living is motivating her to sin. The bottom line is this; the devil has you under his thumb if you are not yet one of the children for whom Christ died. All of us, by birth into the human family, are slaves to the devil and held in our captivity with no way out by the fear of death, by the fear of losing what we consider to be necessary to life. We willingly serve Satan by sin and by belief in false religions because we believe the loss of life here is the worst thing that can happen. Jesus Christ is the only one who can help you because…
II. He destroyed Satan’s power over you (vv. 14-15) The main point of vv. 14-15, as we’ve seen is that the eternal Son of God by becoming fully human and by dying on the cross destroyed the devil and abolished his power to keep us captive. His power is in the fear of loss and ultimately death. Everyone of the children whom God the Father gave to God the Son has been rescued from their slavery to the devil and are now free to live as the children of God. The way that this happened is by the death of Jesus on the cross. How does Christ’s death destroy Satan and eliminate his power over us? If you can get what I am about to say right now you will be the freest person alive. I cannot tell you anything more helpful than that Christ has destroyed him who holds the power of death, that is the devil, in order to set you free from your slavery to him due to your fear of death. Jesus became what we are so that by his death he might destroy death. The worst thing that can happen to you is to die without having your sins forgiven. If you die and stand before God’s judgment seat by yourself you are lost. God one day is going to call you to account for everything you have ever done or thought or felt or believed. How will you defend yourself? When God asks whether or not you are guilty of the sins you have committed what will you be able to say other than “guilty as charged”? God’s standard for living with him forever is perfection, no disobedience, perfect love for him and others 24/7 through your whole life. You haven’t done that. There will be no reason you can give to God that he should not condemn you to an eternal hell for your flagrant disregard of and rebellion to him and his laws. But, if you stand before God with Jesus Christ, the righteous one at your side, acting as your defense attorney, as the one who died for you, then when God asks how you plead you will be able to say, “not guilty,” because Jesus will have suffered the death you owe and he will have given you his righteousness. So now, if you know that death is not the entry into eternal death but rather the entry into eternal life, then Satan has no way to harm you. If you are one of the brothers for whom Christ tasted death and who therefore are being led to glory by God the father, who are part of the congregation among whom Jesus declares the name of God and whom Jesus leads in worship, then you have nothing to fear. You cannot be harmed. There is nothing that Satan can take from you that can do you harm. The worst thing that can happen to a human being cannot happen to you if you are one of the children that the Father gave to the Son. The best thing that can happen to a human being has happened and will happen to you. You are loved by God forever and nothing can separate you from that love. Therefore, the devil’s power over you is broken. When he says to you, “if you forgive that person they are simply going to hurt you again.” You can say to him, “So what? I’m loved by God and if that person harms me again, that won’t change the fact that I am loved by God.” When the devil tells you, "If you don't have sex with that boy he will leave you and you'll be alone forever." You can say, "No I won't. The God of the universe loves me and has promised to never leave me. I don't need that boy to live." I can lose everything, even my life and not have lost anything. Satan cannot intimidate me anymore. I’m free to love God and people no matter what it costs me because I cannot be harmed. I’m free to love God and others even when I’ve experienced great loss because losing things and people cannot change the fact that I am loved by God because Christ died for me. The sting of death and all loss is gone and so I’m free to love and to rejoice and to be at peace because I’m not going to hell but I am going to reign with Christ in the new heavens and the new earth. If you do not know that your sins are forgiven and God loves you because Jesus died on the cross for you, then you will never be able to stand when the devil takes stuff and people away from you. You will never stand up to his threats but will serve him by sinning and believing error. If living in that new world, where all things submit to you because of what Christ did is not your chief obsession, then you will cave when the things of this world are taken from you or threatened. The only reason I am still a Christian and your pastor and am able to keep going in spite of what has happened to my oldest son is because I know that nothing can separate me or him from the love of Christ. From the first day when Jared was brought into the emergency room with a shattered skull I have known on the authority of God’s promises gained by the death of Jesus that neither he, nor our family, can be harmed by what has happened. I do not need to curse God or withdraw from life or seek relief in drugs and alcohol because Jesus died for my sins and for the sins of Jared. While he is physically injured and while there is sorrow now, yet I know that Jared has lost nothing that matters eternally and neither have I. This world is not my home and it is not Jared’s home and no matter what the devil does to us we cannot be harmed. One day, because Jesus obeyed God and suffered the death I deserve and that Jared deserves, we will reign with Christ over all of creation. Therefore, there is nothing to fear. I don’t need to serve the devil out of fear but can rejoice in and serve Christ. Jesus Christ is the only one who can help you because…
III. He alone represents you before God (vv. 16-17) Verse 16 literally says: "For surely he does not take hold of angels but he takes hold of the seed of Abraham." This verse is simply reiterating in a different way what was said in v. 5. In v. 5 the author tells us that this great salvation is not for angels. In other words, God did not promise in Psalm 8 to put the entire world in subjection to angels but to an obedient man and all his descendants. Adam failed to obey and so all his descendants fell into sin and lost the right to have creation submit to us. Now however, Jesus on behalf of God has taken hold of all the descendants of Abraham in order to give to them this great salvation. The author calls the children God gave to Jesus, that is, Christians, the descendants of Abraham. Why does he do this? He does this because of the promise God made to Abraham. He told Abraham that he was going to make him into a great nation, that he would be the father of many nations, that all the nations of the earth would be blessed through him. In short, he told Abraham that it would be through him that the original promise that men would be perfect and would perfectly rule over his creation would be fulfilled. It is through Jesus, the seed of Abraham that all the nations of the world are blessed. Thus, all who have faith in Christ are the descendants of Abraham. We are those to whom God promised to give the land and to bless and protect forever. What that means is that every promise made to Israel in the OT is really made to all who are in Christ. We are Israel, we are those who are the recipients of all the promises because what Adam and Israel failed to do, obey God, Jesus did and thus gained for all of us the blessings promised to the obedient sons of Adam, who are the sons of Abraham. Verse 17 now introduces why it is that Christ has obtained all the promises made to Abraham. Why is it that all the children God gave to Jesus are now the seed of Abraham? Why has God taken hold of us in order to make all creation submit to us? The reason is because Jesus became like us in every way so that he could be a merciful and faithful high priest and thus make propitiation or atonement for our sins. This verse explicitly introduces the topic about which the author is going to spend over five chapters explaining. He uses OT categories to show that Jesus is what the entire OT was pointing forward to. He is the high priest who enters into the Most Holy Place once each year with the blood of an unblemished, year old, male lamb to sprinkle it on the top of the Ark of the Covenant as atonement for the sins of the seed of Abraham. In the OT God accepted the death of the lamb in place of the death of every Israelite. Rather than killing the Israelites for their many sins, he accepted the death of the lamb offered by the high priest. Thus the Son of God became a human being so he could be our priest and enter into God's presence, not with the blood of an animal, but with his own blood. God says he is willing to accept the blood, the death of his Son who became a man in place of the death of every true descendant of Abraham, who is a member of those children God gave to Jesus, whom Jesus is not ashamed to call his brothers, that is, everyone who trusts in Jesus. Jesus Christ is the only one who can help you because…
IV. He faced temptation and conquered it (v. 18) This verse tells us that the entire life that Jesus lived from birth to death was a test, a temptation. He was throughout the course of his entire life tested as to whether or not he would believe God and thus obey him. This test, this life of temptation, resulted in a life of suffering that ended in the supreme suffering of being rejected by God and dying that horrible, hell embracing death upon the cross. Now notice that the author tells us that the life we are now living as the seed of Abraham, the children of God, as Christians is also a life of temptation, a life of testing whether or not we will remain faithful to Christ. We are being tested and tempted every day as to whether we will believe that being a child of God through Christ is a better salvation than having children who don't disappoint or sex whenever we want it or a new car or friends that don't disappoint us or houses that don't need work or whatever. Jesus became like us so that we could become like him forever which means right now that we are living the life he lived. We now live in a world where the devil continually threatens us with loss and brings loss into our lives. Will we believe his lies that we can prevent the loss by doing things our way or will we believe that we have all we need in Christ and so faithfully obey God and take risks to love others? Now the good news in v. 17 is that Jesus is able to help us in this world of temptation because he suffered. What is the help that Jesus gives us? The help he gives us by his suffering is twofold. First he forgives us for our failures to be faithful. He died so that all of our sins are forgiven. Second, he offers us his power to resist the temptation. He delights to give his help to us so that we faithfully stand up in the temptation and do not sin. The help that Jesus gives is not a life here with no losses but the ability to believe his promises and live as if heaven is our home, not earth. The goal of life is to be faithful to Christ to the end, not have life go well here. Jesus is delighted to help you keep trusting him. He suffered and died for this reason. Jesus Christ is the only one who can help you because…
© Copyright 2006 John Swanson.
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