Hebrews 2:1-18 The grace of God's dis comfort

Hebrews 2:1-18

     Psalm 2

“The grace of discomfort”

C.S Lewis who authored the book called the screw tape letters, wrote about a conversation from one demon to another, in which one demon said this to the other:

“The safest road to Hell is the gradual one- the gentle slope, soft underfoot without sudden turnings, without milestones, without sign posts”

In other words CS Lewis was getting across in his own brilliant way, what the second chapter of Hebrews tells us.

It tells us this:

That no-one ever just suddenly stops believing in Jesus as their Lord and Saviour, from one day to the next. It is not an instant decision. No-one ever just suddenly wakes up one morning and decides to reject Jesus.  No-one goes from blessing the name of Jesus one day to cursing it the next………but often, as Lewis describes for us in this quote, those who may have at one time confessed Jesus as Lord and saviour, gradually, over time, bit by bit, just stop believing in Jesus.

It often happens slowly, it happens discretely, it often happens without people realising it: it is like people just gradually drift away from Jesus.

People get in the boat with every intention of following Jeus, they have their eyes fixed on Him, who is on the other side of the lake, but gradually and slowly over time, instead of drifting to Jesus, they have drifted to the shore of power, or they have drifted to the shore of wealth, or perhaps more prominently, they have just drifted to the shore of comfort.  

Sadly, we all probably know someone who claimed to follow Jesus at one time, but gradually over time they have drifted away- often it is subtle degrees of drift …….

Like the person who may believe Jesus as their saviour, but not as their Lord- they somehow justify that Jesus is their saviour but not their Lord, and so they make a one off decision in the heat of the moment to accept Christ as saviour, but never submit to his authority, never live a life which shows that Christ has saved them and they belong to Him. They never actually work out their salvation with fear and trembling.

Or perhaps like the person who may believe Jesus as Lord and Saviour but don’t want to belong to a local church. They stop meeting other believers, they just hang out with non- believers and try to justify it by their mission, and yet the reality is, when you stop going to a local church, it becomes so much easier to drift away from Jesus.

These are the ones which say, yes I will take Jesus, but not his church, his bride, the one whom he can to make spotless.

Jesus saved us to be part of His family, he didn’t save you to be a spare limb.

Or perhaps the person who never prays, never reads their bible, because they just don’t have the time, or whatever. They stop communicating with God, and so eventually they just drift away from Him. Now, I am no marriage expert, but I reckon it would be a good guess to assume that if the husband and wife never communicated, then eventually they would just drift apart.

And perhaps the greatest danger we face today from drifting from Jesus, as C.S Lewis so brilliantly pointed out, is our justification for comfort.

We just start to drift from Jesus because we just want an easy and comfortable life above all else.

I fall into this trap all the time.

I think I am entitled to be comfortable.

I have been suckered into this culture of self- entitlement, where I think I can get what I want, at any time I want……..and if I don’t then someone else must pay.

Unfortunately this consumer culture of where we put our comfort above everything else has drifted into the church.

Instead of meeting together as servants of the living God, we may come together with a “it must be comfortable for me” mentality.

Instead of joining a church family with the desire to serve and ask how I can serve the church, I come to church and ask, how can the church serve me.

Is the time of the service comfortable for me?

Does the time of the service work for me and all that I have to do?

I am comfortable with the style of music played?

I am comfortable with the seating arrangements, are the seats to hard or too soft me?

Just like we want Jesus on our terms, we also want church on our terms.

Friends, the worst thing that God can do to us, is just leave us in our comfort, leave us on this soft pillow, drifting slowly to Hell.

Sometimes, God in his mercy sends signposts, sends warnings, sends suffering, sends jolts into our lives which takes us off the slow comfortable escalator to Hell and brings us back on the narrow road to heaven.

Friends, if God is jolted you today by His Holy Spirit, I urge you not to be offended, I urge you not to be proud, I urge you not to dismiss his voice, but instead I urge you to see it for what it is, an act of grace and mercy to you, which brings you back on the road to life.

God’s discomfort for you may just be his act of grace towards you.

Friends, God in his mercy continues to give us signs and warnings and jolts, which tell us to turn around, repent, turn from your own way of comfort and turn back to God.

Look at Hebrews 2:1-4 with me:

Therefore we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it. ² For since the message declared by angels proved to be reliable, and every transgression or disobedience received a just retribution, ³ how shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation? It was declared at first by the Lord, and it was attested to us by those who heard, ⁴ while God also bore witness by signs and wonders and various miracles and by gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his will.

First of all the writer of Hebrews tells us that God has been sending us clear messages throughout History. These messages where clear and they were consistent.

Before Jesus came to this earth, God communicated his messages to us through angels. Even when Moses was receiving the ten commandments angels were used to for Moses to communicate this message. Even though God spoke directly to Moses it tells us in Deuteronomy 33 that angels were there at his side, as in intermediaries.

And so the ten commandments is the pinnacle example of how God’s message to his people was clear and consistent.

It was written down on stone none the less, no losing those tablets in the i-cloud, no loosing sheets of paper, it was there, it was written, it was consistent.

And because we can trust God and know that he never lies, we can also read that when God’s people broke those laws, which were clear and consistent, there was as it says in verse 2, “just retribution”

God laid out clear messages for his people of how to live and when his people drifted from those ways, either intentionally or unintentionally, there was just retribution.

When God spoke through his prophets, the prophets often just gave the same clear and consistent message,- follow God and live, go your own way and die.

Now if we are grateful that we no longer live in those days of long ago, just listen to what the writer of Hebrews writes about us now living in these last days.

Look at verse 3 again with me

how shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation? It was declared at first by the Lord, and it was attested to us by those who heard,

He says this…..

If the Israelites, God’s people didn’t escape just retribution because they failed to pay close attention to God, his law, his prophets, then we definitely won’t escape judgement, because we have not only been given the signs of the Old Testament, but we have been given the greatest sign of all- the Lord Jesus Himself.

This is like the big sign you see on the highway, which says “Turn around, Go back, you are going the wrong way” – In big red letters. (Like this one)

I wonder how many of those people who drift on to the wrong side of the highway-and it must happen right?, since they have the sign in the first place, have just not paid any attention to any previous signs, have not paid any attention to the traffic around them, but instead have been distracted by their phone or conversation in the car.

It would imagine that most people don’t deliberately drive into traffic which is hurtling at 110km/ h towards them but surely most people accidently get on the wrong side.

Friends, we must ask God to daily help us pay close attention to him, otherwise we are going to end up on the wrong side of the highway.

And when we pay close attention to whom Jesus is and what he has done and what he will do, we will actually get a clear picture of who we are.

And why?- and this is crucial.

If you want to know what a perfect human being looks like, we look at Jesus.

If we want to know what all human beings should strive to be like, we would all want to be like Jesus.

Jesus shows us not only who we are now, but whom we will become like.

And who are we now, in these last days?

Look at verses 6-8 with me:

It has been testified somewhere,

“What is man, that you are mindful of him,    or the son of man, that you care for him?⁷ You made him for a little while lower than the angels;    you have crowned him with glory and honor, ⁸     putting everything in subjection under his feet.”

The author of Hebrews quotes directly from Psalm 8.

And as we heard earlier, the Psalm starts by describing the vastness, the beauty, and the awe of God’s universe and then marvels at the fact that God cares for us humans. Humans who in the grand scheme of the universe are just a speck of dust.

And that is one aspect of being human we need to constantly emphasise in our “me, me” me culture”- we are small creatures in the grand scheme of the universe, we are created beings, we are not mini gods as the Mormons would have us believe, but we are created beings formed from the dust of the earth.

But praise God, this is not all humanity is, yes we may be small in the grand scheme of God’s universe, but we have been crowned with Glory and honour- and God cares for us deeply.

Unlike the animals, unlike the angels, humans have been created in the image of God, to reflect His Glory. In other words we humans have been created to be like God: not to be God, but to be like Him.

We humans have been created to be like God, but not to be God ourselves.

And one particular way in which we are to be like God, is to be rulers.

Just as God is ruler over all His creation, He created us humans to be rulers over His creation under His sovereign rule. God gave us a clear mandate in the creation account, to rule over the fish of the sea and ruleover the birds of the earth, rule over the livestock and rule over every living thing that moves on the earth.

God gave us a clear blue print of how we manage this rule- he commanded us male and female to produce more image bearers of God, multiply and have children. He told us to fill the earth with humans, so that we could rule his world as his image bearers.

The Roman empire took on God’s mandate in their own way.

Every time the Roman Empire would expand, they would place a statue of their Caesar in the new conquered city as a reminder that Caesar now ruled that part of the world and all the people of that city where subjects to Him.

As image bearers of God, we should be constant reminders to the world that this world belongs to God, Jesus reigns, Jesus is king, Jesus sits on his throne and rules.

But, but, but……..yes you are right to question at this point……

It really doesn’t look like this world belongs to God and why is that so?

And the simple and profound answer is SIN.

As we know from even way back to creation, we humans didn’t want to rule God’s world – God’s way….We wanted to rule God’s world our way.

Adam and Eve didn’t want to just be like God but they wanted to be God’s themselves.

And so God created us in His image, he created a world for us to rule under his rule and yet instead of joyfully submitting to his rule, we rebelled and ruled our own way, and as a result this world is messed up, it is broken, it is been saturated with sin ever since, which brings death and destruction.

But again, praise be to God, at just the right time, God in his mercy sent Jesus- the perfect human, not only to show us to how live perfectly under God’s rule in this world, but He made a way through the cross, through suffering, through His resurrection, through the Holy Spirit, where we can now live under God’s rule, God’s way, now.

Look at verse 9 with me

But we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and Honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.

Adam and Eve failed to live under God’s rule

Abraham failed

Isaac failed

The Israelites failed

We fail

And so eventually God sent Jesus, who not only didn’t fail to live God’s way perfectly on this earth- he never sinned, never told a lie, but get this, He lived a prefect live which has been accredited to us as our perfect life before God. And so when God looks upon us, he sees that we have been clothed with the righteousness of Christ, He sees Christ’s perfect live covering our failures and even more than that, Christ not only lived a perfect live on our behalf which has been credited to us, but Christ also took the penalty for our sin when we fail and continue to fail Him. Christ on the cross received the just retribution from His father that should have been given to us, when we fail to live his way.

And what does this mean for us now.

It means this…. Our lives are marked by repentance and belief.

If we want to show the world that Jesus rules this world, we live a life of repentance and belief.

We show the world that we are not following our own path, but we are following the path of Jesus and that means we show them repentance, we show them that we are constantly re-aligning ourselves to the course of Jesus.

And when we are tempted to turn from Jesus, just remember we follow a God who knows what it is like to be tempted, although He never sinned, we have a God who knows what it is to be betrayed by a close friend, we have a God who knows what it is like to suffer, we have a God who knows what it is like to grieve.

We have a God who knows what it is like to be tempted to put comfort above God Himself.

When Jesus was in the desert for 40 days and was tempted by the devil.

He passed the test that the Israelites failed in the desert for 40 years.

God saved the Israelites so they could worship him on the mountain. He didn’t save them to make them comfortable, which is why they often yearned and cried for the old life in Egypt. Even though that was a life of slavery, they thought it was comfort compared to the desert.

When Jesus was in the desert for 40 days and was tempted by the devil he passed the test that Adam and Eve failed.

Adam and Eve didn’t trust the word of God, that God had made clear and consistent to them, Adam and Eve didn’t really believe God would really kill them if they ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

Jesus believed that God’s word was even more precious than food.

Instead of having the luxury, the comfort, some would say basic right of bread after he hadn’t eaten for 40 days, instead of Jesus bowing the knee to satan, he just kept entrusting himself to the father.

Jesus knows what it is like to be hungry and tempted and yet in his hunger and temptation, he never sinned.

Jesus knows what it is like to be tempted to display your own Glory rather than God’s. When satan tempted Jesus to throw himself off the building to prove who he was, Jesus never gave into that temptation, he knew he didn’t need to test God, he just rested in whom He was- the son of the living God.

Jesus knows what it is like to be tempted to prove yourself to others, and yet he never sinned.

Jesus knows what it is like to be tempted to do anything in order to gain power and wealth. And yet ne never sinned.

And perhaps the greatest temptation that Jesus faced was a temptation to choose a life of comfort rather than doing his father’s will.

The night that Jesus was arrested he was praying to his father in heaven in the garden of Gethsemane.

Jesus was so stressed, that as he prayed, he sweated drops of blood, his soul was sorrowful, he knew what it was like to be stressed, he knew what it was like to be sorrowful and that night in the garden. Jesus not only knew what it was like to face death, but he knew what it was like to have the wrath of His father poured out on Him.

That night in the garden, Jesus prayed to his father “My father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me, never the less, not as I will, but as you will”

It is clear from this prayer of Jesus, that he was tempted to take comfort over doing his father’s will.

Jesus, for a split second may have been tempted to take the easy road rather than the road which His father had chosen for him. A road which his friend Peter had also at one point encouraged him to take.

And yet Jesus didn’t yield to the temptation of comfort, he yielded to his father’s will, and because he yielded to his father’s will and he died on the cross, he destroyed the one who has the power of death- the devil- he destroyed the power of the devil, the one who lies and tempts us to sin, because he took that death for us, he paid the price in full.

Friends, if you are looking for a comfortable life in this life, then Jesus is not the way for you.

If you are looking for life and life to the full- then Jesus is the way for you.

If you are looking for life and life to the full- Jesus is the only way.