The Recovery of Man's Lost Destiny
Hebrews 2:5-9
Tonight's message is going to be less like preaching perhaps and more like teaching. And it's going to demand your concentration as you're going to find out throughout our study of the book of Hebrews, it's a very, very deep and a very, very difficult book unless you're really concentrating and unless you're really putting yourself under the control of the Holy Spirit so that you might really understand. But I can promise you the blessing of God if you do understand and really grasp these tremendous and profound truths.
Now coming to Chapter 2 just to review a moment. Let me just say that the book of Hebrews is dedicated to the majesty and the absolute superiority of Jesus Christ over anybody and anything else. We've said that each time, but you must keep that in focus or you'll lose your perspective. The book of Hebrews is set aside for the very purpose of exalting Jesus Christ particularly above everything related to Judaism prior to the coming of Christ. Whether it's the angels who brought the law, whether it's Moses who brought it down from the mountain, whether it's Aaron who was the priest, whether it's the prophets, whether it's Melchizedek a very unique priest, whatever it is, whoever it is, Jesus Christ is superior. And the point is that He is writing that as the Holy Spirit. We do not know the human author, is writing to Hebrews showing them that they must recognize that Jesus Christ is superior to everything connected with the old covenant. And that it is totally incongruous, it is a contradiction in terms to accept the old covenant and reject Jesus Christ who fulfills entirely the old covenant. Doesn't make any sense.
Now in the book of Hebrews then, we find that the Holy Spirit presents Christ as the center of deity, the center of the universe, the center of humanity, the center of authority, the center of love, the center of service, and the center of worship. In the book of Hebrews all things converse on Christ and all things radiate from Christ. He is the key to every page and every chapter. He is seen as the holiest among the mighty and the mightiest among the holy. He is seen as the king crowned with many crowns, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.
He is the Lord of two worlds, one in accord and the other in revolt. But nonetheless, He is Lord. And Hebrews tells us that He will come and He will one day put all enemies under His feet and He will reign supreme because He is supreme. We get the message in the book of Hebrews that the whole universe exists by and for Jesus Christ. And the entire history of the universe is hastening to the coronation of Jesus Christ.
The day when the world with which...the world for which He shed His blood, the world for which He paid the purchase price shall belong to Him. So the message from beginning to end of Hebrews is the superiority of Jesus Christ. And you see, it is so important because when Christ came as the Messiah of Israel, the one who fulfilled all the Old Testament promises, the Jews had rejected Him. Consequently, they had made the unbelievable mistake of accepting all of the pictures and types and symbols and rituals of the Old Testament and the rejected the reality when it came. And so here the writer is attempting to show the folly, the total ridiculous nature of rejecting the reality while accepting and performing all of the ritual.
And so we see then that what his point is to see how the Old Testament points to Christ. Now if you're going to prove your point to the Jewish people, you're going to use the Old Testament. So all the way through the book of Hebrews the Holy Spirit takes Old Testament passages and uses them to prove the superiority of Jesus Christ. And it's a dynamic presentation. They must understand that Jesus Christ was the redeemer that God promised. He was the redeemer that all true saints hoped for. He was the redeemer and the only redeemer that men would ever know. And the Old Testament salvation how were you saved in the Old Testament? You were saved by believing the promise of God that was given.
How are you saved in the New Testament? You're saved by believing the promise of God received. That's the only difference, same promise just on both ends of it. People in the Old Testament weren't saved by keeping the law, they were saved by believing the promise of God. Now I want to spend a moment just to show you how redemptive history focuses itself in the Old Testament on Christ.
The whole Old Testament and the whole old covenant, and by that we simply mean God's dealings with men in the Old Testament, was a sort of a Kindergarten in which God's people were trained in basic divine things, but they were told to look for better things to come. And so all through the book of Hebrews you have the word better, better this and better that, and better this and better that all revolving around Christ. The better things finally have come in Jesus Christ.
It's as if God in the Old Testament was teaching His children the alphabet and then the New Testament, He taught them to put the letters together and when they put the letters together they spelled Christ, Christ, nobody else but Christ. And so that Christ fulfills all the significance of the Old Testament. Now let me illustrate.
We could take prophecy, for example. We could take the prophecy that talks about in Isaiah 53 about the death of Jesus Christ and we can show how Jesus in His death fulfilled to the absolute letter. Or we could take Psalm 22, which describes the crucifixion of Christ. It gives a detail. It even says what'll He say on the cross. It even gives His vocabulary as He spoke it thousands of years later. And that's a startling fact.
Or we could perhaps go to Isaiah and we could see how that Jesus Christ was to be born of a virgin and we know that He fulfilled that. We could go Micah and we could find out that it was predicted that He would be born in Bethlehem and we could see that He fulfilled that. We could take every basic character of the...characteristic of the Old Testament and show that how it all resolves itself in Jesus Christ. And that's why Jesus made the statement in Matthew that "I am not come to destroy the law, but to," do what, "to fulfill the law." That's the whole point.
But let me just take one little area of the Old Testament that finds itself resolved in Christ and that's the area of types. Now most people don't understand what types are. Types are merely Old Testament pictures of Christ. And an Old Testament type be their pictures Christ person or Christ work. It's a man, an event, an animal, a situation, whatever it may be that pictures Christ. For example, in the Old Testament you have sacrifices. And a sacrifice was taken and the blood of the sacrifice was sprinkled on the ark of the covenant which symbolized the presence of God. And by that men were acknowledging that God would be appeased in His dealing with sin by the sprinkling of blood. And what were they doing? They were only prefiguring or picturing a more noble and perfect blood which should be shed at some future time and shed only once for all. And the very picture of sacrifice and the picture of the sprinkling of blood was nothing but a type of what Jesus would do and He was the anti-type, the fulfillment.
Another Old Testament type, for example, the dwelling in tabernacles or booths. The children of Israel wandered and they dwelled in tents or booths. And it typically prophesied the appearance of one great person whose residence in human flesh was but a temporary humbled dwelling below his dignity. And Jesus Himself made the statement that He had come to tabernacle among men. So the children of Israel dwelling in tents were types of Jesus who had come in human flesh for a temporary time.
Another one, for example, the Passover Lamb speaks of another Lamb who would come and shed His blood and bring eternal deliverance. And we could go on and on and on about types. But there are so many types in the Old Testament of the death of Christ, that the apostle Paul says in 1 Corinthians Chapter 15, "That Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures." Now when Paul says that, has the New Testament been completed? No, so what scripture is He referring to? The Old Testament. Paul says Christ died for our sins according to the Old Testament.
All throughout the Old Testament there are numerous pictures of Jesus' death for us. In prophecy, both verbal and prophecy in type. Now that's just one small area. So you to accept the Old Testament and this is the Jewish dilemma and to accept the old covenant and to reject Christ becomes an absurdity, you see. It becomes a ridiculous position. Because you are rejecting everything that the New Testament pointed to.
Jesus said to the Jews, you've studied the Old Testament, and He says don't you realize that those things are spoken of me? Later on on the road to Emmaus, He said, "If you'd really known the scriptures you would have known all about this." What was He referring to? The Old Testament. And then it tells us that He began, Moses and all the prophets and went through the Old Testament and taught them things concerning whom? Himself.
And so to reject Jesus Christ is the most unbelievable absurdity in the world if you accept the Old Testament. And this is historically since the time of Christ the unbelievable dilemma of the Jew who is totally unable to resolve all of the conflicts left by an unfulfilled old covenant. And so you know what you have? You have born out of that problem liberal Judaism and "conservative Judaism" and a moving away from Orthodoxy because Orthodox Judaism makes no sense. It's totally unfulfilled.
It's a ritual that never finds it's reality. It's a symbol that never finds its fact. And so consequently you find Jews just wandering away from the character of scripture altogether and it turns really into a social club. And most Jewish synagogues are nothing but that. And this is the tragedy of it, that if there is no fulfillment then all of those things mean nothing.
So the Holy Spirit then in the book of Hebrews is attempting to show the Jew that Jesus does fulfill all the old covenant. That He is of necessity the fulfillment and must be received as such or everything is meaningless. Now to begin with in the book of Hebrews, if he's going to present that Jesus is superior, he just does it step by step. And he begins by showing that Jesus is superior to what? To angels, and we saw that in the 1st Chapter. And we'll see it again as we continue in the 2nd Chapter for he deals with it here as well.
He must show that Jesus is superior to angels because the old covenant was brought angels wasn't it? And if the new covenant is better and if Jesus is the final and the fullest meaning and significance of what God is doing, He must be superior to angels. And so he is very careful to prove that Jesus is, in fact, superior to angels. And that we saw as began Chapter 1. And then as we came into Chapter 2 last time we saw in the first four verses that if Jesus is superior to angels, we ought to do something about it, right?
If Jesus is, in fact, God as the writer has said He is, then people ought to react. And so in the four verses that begin Chapter 2, he gives a little exhortation and a little warning and an invitation. And he says, "I've shown you that Jesus is greater than angels. In fact, that He's God now you need to act on that." Or how shall you escape if you neglect so great salvation.
Now in Chapter 2, verse 5 where we start tonight, he returns to superiority of Christ over angels. And he presents a fantastic point to prove that Jesus is superior to angels. He's still in the same argument and here is a tremendous point. And the point that he makes is in verse 5. And then he elucidates in verses 6-9.
"For unto the angels hath He not put in subjection the world to come of which we speak." Now there's a tremendous point there. What is he saying? He is saying God did not give subjection of the world to come to angels. Who is the sovereign of the world to come? Jesus Christ. Don't you see the point? He is again saying that Jesus is superior to angels. Now if angels are next to God and Jesus is superior to angels, what does make Him? God, that's the point.
And so the whole thing is a keyed in verse 5, which says He didn't give angels the subjection of the world to come. Not angels. Now let me just give you a little thought here and then we're going to get into this. This passage accomplishes several things and it'll probably accomplish these in your mind without me saying it, but let me say it anyway so you'll kind of follow along.
Number one, it shows another tremendous proof that Jesus is better than angels. That's initial. That's really the key to the argument. But number two, it answers an objection. For the objection could be this, well, if Jesus was only a man who could He be superior to angels? I mean, if He was a man and He died, how could He possibly be superior to angels. Well, He answers that in this passage and you're going to see how He answers that objection. That potential objection.
Thirdly, and this is kind of what we want to major on although it maybe isn't as key a major point as would be the first point, the fact that He's another...this is another proof for His superiority. But lying close to that truth is the fact that these verses revealed the only hope for man's recovery of his lost destiny. You see man has lost his destiny. Man today is a lost man. Man today has lost the meaning of his existence. Totally lost it. And this passage is going to teach us how it is that man can recover his destiny and, in fact, what his destiny is.
We'll look at it just in three simple points. Man's destiny revealed by God. Man's destiny restricted by sin. Man's destiny recovered by Christ. Pretty simple. All right now first of all, we see man's destiny revealed by God. That begins in verse 5. "For unto the angels hath He not put in subjection the world to come of which we speak." Now what we're saying here is this, God never promised to subject the world to come to angels. In fact, if you go back to 1:14, you'll find that angels are sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation. Now in the world to come angels will be ministers, not rulers. Do you see? So that God has not designed that they are sovereign in the world to come.
Now it's an interesting use of the term put in subjection. That's hoopatasa which is a military term and it's the term used for arranging your soldiers in order under a commanding General. The word speaks of a system of administration. And God has not turned over the system of administration of the world to come to angels. No. God is the one who gives out the administrations. God ordains every power that is, doesn't He? The powers that be are what? Ordained of God, Romans 13.
God is the one who dishes out rule rights and administrations. He chooses the various sovereigns. And in the world to come angels will not be the sovereigns. And may I hasten to add that the world to come is the world of perfection. The world to come is the greatest that's been. The world to come is the great and glorious world and whoever reigns in that world must be glorious beyond glory, and it isn't angels. It isn't angels.
Now this indicates some interesting things to us and I want you to hang on for a minute. It indicates, first of all, that angels rule or angels superiority over men is only temporary. And I say that because you're going to find in the next two verses who it is that's going to rule in the age to come. Do you know who it is? Men. Men. Very important. Men. So that what we're saying is that even the authority or the superiority of angels over men now is only temporary.
Now I want you to just stick with me for a minute because I want to carefully give you this. This is going to be a tremendous help to you in understanding the flow of God's history and I want you to get it. Now you'll notice in verse 5 the term world. This is not the common Greek word kosmos which means the system. It is not just a general term. For example, sometimes the word ion is translated world and it means the ages. It is a very specific word. It is the word oikumena. Oikos means house. It means inhabitance. The word means the inhabited earth.
Did you know that that says there there is an inhabited to earth to come? Did you know that? Whoa, whoa, that's a heavy thought. That will blow the minds of the aumillennialists. You say what are they? Don't worry about it. The aumillenialists are the ones who say there is no kingdom. They say there is no inhabited world, inhabited earth to come. That's funny. It says right there there is.
There is an inhabited, an oikumena, an inhabited earth to come. Now that can't be this earth, because this inhabited earth isn't to come. It's to what? It's to go. I mean, let's face it, it's almost over now isn't it? There's got to be another inhabited earth to come. You say what is it? I'll tell you what it is. It's the great millennial kingdom. It's going to be fantastic. A new inhabited earth and all the creatures that go into that new inhabited earth are going to be totally different. The animals will be different and even the people will all be redeemed people that go in at the beginning of that new inhabited earth.
So the point he's making here is that there is a coming another inhabited earth. And that there's going to be sovereignty in that inhabited earth, but it won't belong to angels. Now that's all he's said yet. Let me hang on to this thought. The world to come will not be put into subjection of angels. Now listen to this, the world to go, which is this one, is right now in subjection to angels. Did you get that? It's a very important distinction. Did you know that angels really have the rule over this world?