Hey guys! Welcome back to our cruise (crawl?) through Hebrews.

Today we reach a mile marker. We come to the end of chapter two, and to the statement of why we have been pushing this line of reasoning. All this time making a distinction between Jesus and the angels, followed by his herculean effort to demonstrate how Jesus so completely identifies with us.

For assuredly He does not give help to angels, but He gives help to the descendant of Abraham.

Therefore, He had to be made like His brethren in all things, so that He might become a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people.

For since He Himself was tempted in that which He has suffered, He is able to come to the aid of those who are tempted. – Hebrews 2:16-18 

I didn’t want to break this in pieces, but it clearly holds way too much for one blog post.

These three verses summarize the writer’s argument thus far and set us up for the next big thing. (So exciting…)

The little bit I want to bring onto the light table for examination today is “He had to be made like His brethren in all things.”

The writer keeps coming back to this. Jesus did not come to earth and walk about as God in a man costume. He took on flesh and blood. He took on the weakness and frailty of the flesh. He not only took on these clumsy bodies and their gravity bound surounds. He took on a man-sized soul, able to be tempted, able to exercise a will that was out of synch the His Father’s, frankly able to sin.

Ben!!! (Shocked looks abound.) You can’t say Jesus could sin! He is God. How could God sin?

And there’s the rub. God could not sin, and so could not be tempted. How could God do something that was not the will of God? It’s an oxymoron.

But wait…

What if God stepped away from all that diety and became a man, a man IN ALL THINGS What if He had a sex drive and raging hormones. What if He lived with peer pressure. What if someone did something completely stupid right in front of Him, and He so wanted to tell all his friends, to gossip about the goofball. What if people took advantage of Him? What if one of His mates was stealing from Him. What if one of His best friends denied that he even knew Him. What would He do with all that indignation, anger, frustration, fear, desire?

You see, He was made like us IN ALL THINGS. The writer brings to light the fact that He was tempted like us so that He could with full confidence represent us before the Father. He took on the role of High Priest, not as one who grew up in an ivory tower, unaware of the struggles we face, but as one who slogged through the same stuff.

Man, I love Jesus!

Thanks for stopping by today. There are more implications to this IN ALL THINGS thing, and we’ll talk about some of them next time.

See you then.

Walk in the light of the Word.

Ben