12.26.21 Hebrews 2:14–16
14 Therefore, since the children share flesh and blood, he also shared the same flesh and blood, so that through death he could destroy the one who had the power of death (that is, the Devil) 15 and free those who were held in slavery all their lives by the fear of death. 16 For surely he was not concerned with helping angels but with helping Abraham’s offspring.
Christmas Brings Freedom, As God Aims For a Low Salvation
In the Disney movie Mulan, Mulan is being chased by the enemy, and she aims a rocket at him. But at the last minute, she aims up at the mountain instead. Mushu bursts out, “You missed! How could you miss?!? He was right in front of you!” But she had a bigger purpose. By aiming high and hitting the snow at the top of the mountain, she was able to cause an avalanche to drown almost the entire army in snow.
Now let’s think about Christmas. In aiming to destroy the Devil, it would appear that God aimed TOO LOW. He came down to humanity. Why would you become WEAKER in order to destroy that which is stronger? If you were going to save a prisoner, why not at least become a prison guard instead of a prisoner. Or if you’re the warden, why not just set them free?
Well, there’s different ways to conquer strength. In Proverbs chapter 30, the third thing that Solomon couldn’t figure out was “the way of a man with a maiden.” It’s an amazing thing how a small and tiny woman can change and sometimes even control a strong and powerful man. How does she do it? She becomes attractive to him. She uses words and emotions. She makes him want to change his ways and mellow him out, calm him down. Why? Because of his love and attraction to her.
Now, Christmas is different. God isn’t trying to attract Satan. He’s attempting to conquer him, and re-capture humanity from his grips. But in order to do that, He has to win us and woo us within the realms of justice and love which are according to His nature of right and wrong. Just setting us free by divine decree would not meet those standards. Pure power would not do the trick.
Now, you might wonder, “Why doesn’t God just destroy the devil?” It seems that God respects the nature with which He makes stuff. He made angels to be eternal. He doesn’t just annihilate them from nature because they stop doing what He designed them to do. He finds a different way to deal with them, a just and fair way. He lets them live. He lets them keep being evil. But He still makes them pay for their evil in the process, and He still works their evil out for good, proving that He is an amazing God indeed.
And before we go ANY further, let’s take a step back and think about this too: don’t forget about the fight that Christmas is about. Christmas is to fight against evil. Evil isn’t just in unjust wars and immorality within humanity. Evil, pure evil, exists behind the scenes, in the devil, tempting people to do terrible things, and performing evil acts on us as well. There is a real devil with real demons in our world. Jesus came to save us from sin and hell. In order to do this, He also had to conquer Satan. This is what Christmas is about. A baby comes to conquer the devil. How embarrassing for the devil, to be conquered by a man who enters this world as a helpless baby, and the devil still can’t defeat Him. Awesome stuff!
How does the baby come to destroy the Devil? Let’s look at how he is described. The writer to the Hebrews describes the Devil as “the one who had the power of death.” That’s kind of a head scratcher. When comparing Himself with the false gods, God said in Deuteronomy 32, “See now that I myself am He! There is no god besides me. I put to death and I bring to life, I have wounded and I will heal, and no one can deliver out of my hand.” Here God seems to be saying that only HE can put to death. Yet God also acknowledges that we can put people to death when He forbids us from MURDERING people. We also think of the story of Job where the devil caused a wind to come up and make a structure fall on Job’s children and kill them. When God says only HE can put to death, we recognize that God could stop murder and death if He wanted to step into the nature of things here. Jesus did it many times through His ministry when He healed sick and dying people. He also kept the Devil from putting a hand on Job in the same story where he allowed Job’s children to die. In the big picture, the devil doesn’t ultimately have the power of death. God does.
Why doesn’t Jesus just get rid of death? What a nightmare that would be! Imagine a world of pain and suffering but NO death. Imagine sitting in a room with your 432 year old great great great great grandfather. He’s miserable. He can’t walk. He can’t eat. Yet he can’t die either. You would just get more and more miserable with life. God said “the wages of sin is death.” He doesn’t go back on that. “The soul who sins is the one who will die.” The death ratio of humanity is 1 to 1. Everyone in here is going to die. This is what God told Adam and Eve would happen. God didn’t decide to keep that consequence from happening. That’s not how He decided to conquer death.
What is it that makes death so scary? It’s not just death. It’s the suffering that comes with it. The thing is, we’ve found ways to make it more palatable in some ways. Load people up with morphine. They can’t feel a thing. Make it more comfortable. But now people are TOO comfortable with it because they don’t hear about sin or judgment. And you see the devil in this too. People are playing God and ending their lives with murder, as if this wouldn’t matter one bit to God. Look at what’s happening in Switzerland. The New York Times recently reported about a new invention called the Suicide Pod,
A coffin-like capsule that allows people to end their life could be used in Switzerland from next year, its creators say. The Sarco suicide pod allows a user to lie down and activate the process themselves within a matter of minutes. Individuals are asked a series of questions before they can press a button, which brings oxygen down to a critical level. Nitrogen fills the 3D-printed device, quickly bringing oxygen down from 21 percent to only 1 percent in about 30 seconds. A “disorientated” and “euphoric” feeling then follows, before they eventually lose consciousness. Death takes place due to hypoxia and hypocapnia.
https://nypost.com/2021/12/07/controversial-suicide-pod-that-kills-peacefully-gets-go-ahead-in-switzerland/
All this being said, in the book of Hebrews the devil’s tool with death was the FEAR that he used with it, and we’d have to assume that it is the fear of eternal judgment. Back in the disciples' day people associated death with sin. People died at an early age because they did something WRONG. So if they died, the God who put them to death would now be angry with them. Now, God uses this fear as well. But God uses it in order to turn us to HIM and look for hope in HIM. The devil would rather terrorize you with death and convince you that death happens because God hates you, and that there is only a lifetime of torture to face: no hope for those who die. The devil turns God into a devil of sorts, one who only delights in making people suffer. One who is impossible to face. This is the God that Luther was brought up with even under the guises of Christianity.
Yes, hell is a scary thing. An eternity of God’s wrath, with weeping and gnashing of teeth in a lake of fire? Yes, that is scary. Look at Jesus face this death in the Garden of Gethsemane. He knows how painful it will be to be damned for humanity. He is greatly troubled, almost to the point of begging. He sweats drops of blood. He asks for another way to save humanity. But when the Father’s answer is clear, He faces it head on, with humanity on His back. Look at our brave warrior! Here is the one human who would not be intimidated by death or hell. Here is the one human who would not only face it, but conquer it, by going through it and living to tell about it.
Nobody could have faced a worse death, for Jesus went through it not only as man, but also as God in the flesh. He would feel everything in an eternal way, a divine way, as our substitute way. When you have a perfect sense of smell, you can smell the good but also the bad. For those who had covid, they may have appreciated not smelling the sugar beets, but what about eating? It makes food much less tasty when you can’t smell it. When you have a perfect sense of sight, you can see the beautiful detail that others can’t, but you can also see the ugliness that nobody else can. Imagine then, God in the flesh, experiencing all of the wrath of man and God with a perfect body, a divine body, on the cross. Yes, Jesus would face it all boldly, willingly, with every dimension of His divine senses, and He would come forth from the grave, with the payment made IN FULL for all of humanity. With the payment made, the devil can no longer claim that we owe God anything, that God has any reason to punish us, because He already punished Jesus. He has shut the devil’s accusing mouth for those who die in Christ, with Jesus as their defense. For those who trust in Christ, the devil’s accusations fall on deaf ears. We learn to shut him out from our guilt because of what the baby in the manger has come to do. He defeats the devil from beneath the devil’s own nose. Oh the beauty of His humanity, for us!
Now see the positive result of this! He’s not only taken the devil’s accusations away. He’s also giving us a great gift to live with here and now. What is this beautiful Christmas gift? So that through death he could destroy the one who had the power of death (that is, the Devil) and free those who were held in slavery all their lives by the fear of death. There was an elderly lady who hadn't been visited for over a year by her pastor. She’d been offered a pre-wrapped communion kit to be given to her and then come back to give her communion, even speaking the words from outside. But she wouldn’t let anyone into her house for over a year. She was too afraid to die. Is this how God designed us to live? Is this what Jesus died for? For us to shut ourselves in our homes and fear her pastor, to fear the very meal that God died for us to have?
Think of what the believers had to go through in the history of the Bible. Hebrews 11:37–38 says, “They were stoned; they were sawed in two; they were put to death by the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated— the world was not worthy of them.” I’m sure they had fear. But they also displayed great courage in the midst of fear. Just prior to this text Hebrews also says that they, “shut the mouths of lions, quenched the fury of the flames, and escaped the edge of the sword; whose weakness was turned to strength; and who became powerful in battle and routed foreign armies. 35 Women received back their dead, raised to life again. Others were tortured and refused to be released, so that they might gain a better resurrection. And what was it that fed their courage and gave them courage to face death? It was the RESURRECTION! Jesus had conquered death, and He promised them that through faith in Jesus they too would rise to ETERNAL LIFE! How would those who lived before us look at us who are being driven by fear?
There’s a classic line in the movie Nemo. Marlin the father is looking for Nemo and says, “I promised I'd never let anything happen to him.” Dory says, “Hmm. That's a funny thing to promise.” Marlin is surprised and says, “What?” Dory says, “Well you can't never let anything happen to him. Then nothing would ever happen to him. Not much fun.” If you live your life in fear then you never end up living at all. You just start dying on the inside. Your life closes in more and more on you and your health and your safety. You don’t have much purpose at all. And then the devil wins, because of fear.
If this God really came down here and conquered Satan, conquered death, suffered hell, and came out alive: if He is really ruling over all things for our good, and if He really is all powerful, and He really has the hairs of your head numbered, and He really has an army of angels at his beck and call, then wouldn’t that call for us to live without fear?
Think about the change that occurred on the disciples when they actually saw the resurrected Christ, when all of it became real! They went from cowering in an upper room to boldly proclaiming Christ crucified and risen before crowds and crowds of people. Why? Because they realized that Jesus was alive and well! Heaven was their home!
Jesus did all of this in His fully human body, in humility, without using His divine power. So He understands how scary it can be. He gets it. Don’t forget what the last verse of our epistle says, “Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.” (2:18) If you’re afraid, He KNOWS what you’re feeling, AND, He is able to HELP you through it. Confess your fears to Him. Let Him know how you’re feeling. Ask Him for strength. Ask Him for help. Go back to His miracles in the Bible. See how powerful and gracious He is. He says to you, “Look at what I did to the devil. Look at what I did with death. Look at what I did with sin. See. I’m alive! Don’t give up. Don’t be afraid. I’ve got you.”
Year ago, in the Rambo movie series, Rambo was sent into Vietnam to go and save the prisoners of war who had been languishing in the worst of conditions for years. This ripped and violent war veteran goes into the jungle with full camo, undercover, but finishes the movie with guns blazing. This is how we would expect a rescue mission to happen, with power and muscle. But when God spoke from the top of Mt. Sinai the Ten Commandments, we see what happened. The people cowered in fear at His power. They didn’t want to go up the mountain. They wanted to run away.
Christmas shows us a different way that God draws us to Him and saves us from this world. God doesn’t beckon us to heaven with a powerful voice shouting to us from the skies saying, “COME UP HERE NOW!” He knows how weak and fearful we are. What a gentle thing and beautiful thing, how God comes down to our level, feels our sickness, suffers our death, grabs us by the heart as our brother and our friend, puts us over His shoulders and says, “Come with me.” He leads us through the valley of the shadow of death, and it is a scary place. Satan tells us to run in fear! But we need not fear, because Jesus came way down here to be with us and to save us. When we keep clinging to Jesus, we come out on the other side of death, forgiven, welcomed, and alive. We have a beautiful Christmas gift from Jesus. It’s called freedom from fear. Enjoy it and live with it. Amen.
