02/14/2021 – Day 273 – Hebrews 1-4 / 2 of ?/ “To Jesus belongs the mediatorial exaltation”
Here again , I using Barclay direct quotes:
1: 1-3 section: “The writer says that Jesus was the apaugasma of God’s glory, which taking the more likely of the two meanings in the Greek means the effulgence , the light which shines forth. Jesus is the shining of God’s glory among men…
1: 4-14 section: “…Every nation had its guardian angel who had the prostasia, the presidency over it. Every individual had his guardian angel. Even little children had their angels. (Matthew 18:10)…
It was necessary to show that the Son was greater far than they and that he knew the Son needed no angel to be his intermediary with God. The writer to the texts in which the Son is given a higher place than was ever given to any angel: The texts he quotes are: Psalm 2: 7; 2 Samuel 7:14; Psalm 97:7 or Deuteronomy 32:43: Psalm 104:4; Psalm 45:7, 8 ; Psalm 102: 26,27; Psalm 110,1. Some of these texts differ from the versions we know because the writer to the Hebrews was quoting from the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Old Testament, which is not always the same the original Hebrrew from which our versions are translated.
2: 5-9 section (Jimmy: Barclay makes a case this passage speaks of us when referring to the “son of man”. I agree with John Gill and Matthew Henry, both of whom say it is Yeshua (Jesus). Recall I completed a post this weekend that has a link to a complete verse by verse commentary by John Gill. Just go to the post with the tagline: ‘John Gill” in the upper right. Then down to the 2nd link as I recall: You enter the book you are interested in and drill down from there….)
I gave an amen to this G.K. Chesterton quote: “whatever else is or is not true, this one thing is certain — man is not what he was meant to be.” And noted in the commentary: “Christ died to recreate man until he became what he was originally created to be.”
2: 10-18 section: “The basis of the Greek idea of God was detachment; the basis of the Christian idea is identity. Through his sufferings Jesus Christ identified himself with man.”
3: 1-6 section: “(ii) Jesus is the great High Priest. What does that mean? This is an idea which the writer to the Hebrews returns again and again. Just now we only set down the fundamental basis of what he means. The Latin for the priest is pontifex, which means a bridge-builder. The priest is the person who builds a bridge between man and God. To do that he must know both man and God. He must be able to speak to God for men and to speak to men for God. Jesus is the perfect High Priest because he is perfectly man and perfectly God; He can represent man to God and God to man. He is the one person through whom man comes to God and God comes to man.”
3: 7-19 section: “Now the writer to the Hebrews uses another picture. True , the whole world is God’s house; but in a special sense the Church is God’s House, for in a special sense God brought it into being, That is the picture the New Testament lvoes (cp. 1 Peter 4:17; 1 Timothy 3:15, and especially 1 Peter 2:5). The building of the Church will stand indestructible only when every stone is firm; that is to say, when its every member is strong in the proud and confident hope he has in Jesus Christ. Each one of us is like a stone in the Church; if one stone is weak the whole edifice is endangered. The Church stands firm only when each living stone in it is rooted and grounded in faith in Jesus Christ.”
4: 11-13 section: “(ii) In the first verse the writer to the Hebrews bids his people beware lest they miss the promise. The word we have translated beware literally means to fear (phobeisthai). This Christian fear is not the fear which makes man run away from a task; nor the fear which reduces him to paralysed inaction; it is the fear which makes him put out every ounce of strength he possesses in a great effort not to miss the one thing that is worth while.“…
“When people take God seriously they immediately realize that His word is not only something to be studied, not only something to be read, not only something to be written about; it is something to be done.
Check this out!:
4: 14-16: “Then he turns to the other side. No one was ever surer of Jesus’ complete identity with men. He went through everything that a man has to go through and is like us in all things — except that he emerged from it all completely sinless. Before we turn to examine more closely the meaning of this, there is one thing we must note. The fact that Jesus was without sin means that he know depths and tensions and assaults of tempation which we never can know. So far from his battle being easier it was immeasurably harder. Why? For this reason – – we fall to temptation long before the tempter has put the whole of his power. We never know temptation at its fiercest because we fail beyong what we are; for in his case the tempter put everything he possessed into the assault. Think of this in terms of pain. There is a degree of pain which the human frame can stand – and when that degree is passed a person loses consciousness so that there are agonies of pain he can not know. It is so with temptation. We collapse in face of temptation ; but Jesus went to our limit of temptation and far beyond it and still did not collapse. It is true to say that he was tempted in all things as we are: but it is also true to say that no was tempted as he was.”
We need to do a short study of the movie “XL – The Temptation of Christ” when we finish our year study in May. (It never does finish really…..)
Soli Deo Gloria!