We return again to the first few verses of Hebrews, this time to examine the honors given & due to Christ.
The message of the book of Hebrews is the supremacy of Christ, and that message begins immediately. We have gone through how God brings his full message through the Son, and how Christ is equivalent with His as the creator, upholder and master of all things.
Today, we are looking at what he did for us as incarnate deity – here is where we get to the Christmas story.
First, Christ as God-made-man made purification for sins. The term here is the word we get “catharsis” from – a purification or cleansing. As Hebrews says later, “by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.”
Christ delivers us from both our discrete sins and from the self-focused philosophy that is inevitable without a focus on something greater than and bigger than ourselves. As covered earlier in the chapter, there is nothing and no one greater than Christ.
We see again in this part as well, because after making purification, He sat down at the right hand of the Father. The imagery comes from Psalm 110, which is one of the most quoted pieces of the Old Testament in the New, everyone from Jesus himself through many epistles. It represents his nearness and intimacy with the Father, and his supremacy over all created things. In summary, “Jesus won.”
The author of Hebrews specifically calls out the superiority of Christ to the angels – there was a trend in this era to venerate angels, and so it was important to explicitly clarify the reality of where they stand in relation to Christ. In our day we have our own angels that we venerate, and must remember clearly where they stand in relationship to Jesus.
All this is why we celebrate Christmas. The baby born in Bethlehem became a man who died for our sins, rose again, ascended into heaven, reigns in heaven as the second person of the Trinity, and will return again. How do we live in light of that?
– Sermon Notes, Mahlon Friesen, Seed Church, Lynnwood, WA, December 15, 2019