GREATER THAN (A STUDY IN THE BOOK OF HEBREWS) WEEK 05 - THE PERFECT MAN FOR THE PERFECT PLAN

Before we get to our text today (and I geek out again), I want to lay some groundwork as we proceed with our study of an ancient Hebraic document - the New Testament Letter to the Hebrews.

Hebrews, remember, is a different kind of animal. It’s rabbinical in nature - with concepts taking the forefront, rather than systematic logic.

It’s challenging - especially for modern thinkers. We like to figure things out nice and easy. This means this, that means that, etc.

But the ancient Middle Eastern mind just processed things differently.   For example...

Rabbis would look at the phrase God’s Son found in the Old Testament and they’d see the meaning of that in a number of different ways.

BUT ALSO they would interpret the phrase to refer to the KING. (Makes sense, because the King did sort of embody the nation…read the history and you’ll see that, truly, as the King went, so often went the nation; good king - the nation followed God, bad king - the nation…not so righteous.)

And, by the way, this wasn’t confusing to the ancient Hebraic mindset! You could have a variety of things referred to as “the Son of God.” In their worldview you could have someone representing a larger group of people.

It’s like mountains and buttes and such

You could look at the Butte to the South of the church and if you catch it at dawn, or on an overcast day, and it looks like one big formation, right? But on a clear day, it always amazes me to look at the Butte and see the dimensions of it. It’s not just one thing - it’s a few formations close together. But there are layers, dimensions.

Mountains are like that. They look like one formation, but in reality there might be a couple of lower peaks sitting in front of a taller peak. 

So in rabbinical thought, you could have a prophecy that had an immediate fulfillment… but also, at the same time, it could have a future fulfillment as well. Like the dimensions of the Butte.

That might seem confusing to our modern mind - but not to the First Century Jews! They knew EXACTLY why Jesus was quoting that Psalm…The Son of God could be Israel, the King, AND (at least in the Author’s mind) the Messiah – ALL of them - without it being strange at all.

With that in mind, in Hebrews 2:5-18 (the rest of the chapter we didn’t get to last week), we are going to see a passage that refers to another Psalm that can be seen in more than one way. It confused me the first several times I read through the passage in Hebrews 2 - and yet, I hope you can see this morning why I got so excited when I finally figured out what the Author was doing! So ready? Here we go…