A Merciful and Faithful High Priest

What this episode covers

Before knowing God, Jonathan Edwards had a fear of thunderstorms. “I used to be a person uncommonly terrified with thunder: and it used to strike me with terror, when I saw a thunderstorm rising.” But after his conversion, Edwards writes: “Now, on the contrary, [thunderstorms] rejoiced me. I felt God at the first appearance of a thunderstorm. And used to take the opportunity at such times, to fix myself to view the clouds, and see the lightnings play, and hear the majestic and awful voice of God’s thunder: which often times was exceeding entertaining, leading me to sweet contemplations of my great and glorious God.” Charles Spurgeon reflected upon a similar kind of fear of God as Creator: “Standing in a thunderstorm, watching, as best you can, the flashes of lightning, and listening to the thunder of Jehovah’s voice, have you not often shrunk into yourself, and said, “Great God, how terrible art thou!”—not afraid, but full of delight, like a child who rejoices to see his father’s wealth, his father’s wisdom, his father’s power,—happy, and at home, but feeling oh, so little.” One of the themes of Michael Reeve’s book, Rejoice and Tremble, is that there is a fear of God that causes unbelievers to flee from him, and a fear of God that causes believers to fall before him in worship. Scripture uses the same word, but the reaction makes all the difference. Either way, fear is a controlling emotion. We’re compelled to react according to some deeply held concern. If the original audience feared temporal persecution for their faith, they likely feared eternal consequences to an even greater degree. If they were tempted to return to the Jewish synagogue for relief, did they understand that meant forfeiting everything Christ had accomplished? In other words, they would be choosing to alleviate a lesser fear by elevating a greater fear. Reeves notes, “When your culture is hedonistic, your religion therapeutic, and your goal a feeling of personal well-being, fear will be the ever-present headache.” In our fallen nature we fear all sorts of things, but the primary fear for most people seems to be dying. The antidote to the fear of death is to mediate upon the death of death. Read Hebrews 2:14-18. Delivered from the Wages of Sin (14-16) Jesus became man, taking upon himself “flesh and blood”, so that he “partook of the same things” that united all of humanity. What they shared by creation, he participated in by choice. “Flesh and blood” implies more than merely a physical body; it entails all that it means to be human. Jesus had a soul and a spirit like every other human. He was “made like his brothers in every respect” (v.17), yet without sin (Heb 4:15). The only way Jesus could destroy death—which is the wages of sin—was by becoming fully human and experiencing a real death. He didn’t seem to be human; he was human. Nor did he appear to die; he actually died. He was truly human and he genuinely died upon the cross. Jesus became human, not because he had to, but “that (ἵνα = purpose) through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil.” Jesus was born in order to die. Delitzsch points out that the word translated “destroy”: “…here implies not only passive endurance and suffering, but at the same time an active fight and struggle: the death by which Death was overcome was a mortal combat with him that had the power of death, with life and death for its issues, a decisive termination of the war declared against Satan at the Lord’s first entrance into the world.” The crucifixion of Jesus ended the war that began at his birth. Through his own death he finally defeated the devil. However, before moving on, we should recognize the significant power the devil is acknowledged to possess by the author of Hebrews. Of course, the emphasis is upon the superiority of Christ’s power—in that he destroyed the devil—but the devil’s power is superior to humans. In what sense

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