Hebrews 2:14-15

This is another broad area: faith in relation to time and faith relation to fear. The fear of death here represents all of the fears that constrict a person's life. We bear with them but they nonetheless have very powerful effects on what we do. Maybe if I change this word to "insecurities" rather than fear, we would understand it a little bit better. Our insecurities force us to feel certain ways and unfortunately these feelings of fear, these feelings of insecurity very rarely induce noble conduct in any of us. Yet despite all of the energy expended in bearing our insecurities, they only serve to help us bring about our death, all the while making us miserable along the way.

Moses was not afraid, but he was a man of faith. They were not. So what did they do? When they saw the problem, fear quickly came to mind and it determined their action! Was that the act of someone filled with faith? Moses was the one who was filled with faith and his reaction was not one of fear. He said to "stand still and see the salvation of the Lord."

What I am talking about here—the principle here is that this frequently happens in our lives: We get a fear, an insecurity, and it is what determines what our action is going to be in relation to God and to other people. We do not act out of faith; we act out of our insecurity.

There is an interesting example that my wife mentioned to me. It shows God telling Israel what they are going to do when the crunch is on. In Isaiah 30:1-4 is a political situation. We are talking about something here that happened five hundred years at least, maybe close to seven hundred years after the Exodus. What does Israel do when they are in political, military, and economic trouble? Where do they turn?

Seven hundred years later they are doing the same thing as Israel did in the wilderness. There is instruction there for us, you and me, because if we would follow the story of the children of Israel all the way through the book of Exodus on into Numbers and into Leviticus and Deuteronomy, we would find a theme repeated over and over, numerous times. What is that theme? We find that Israel is being pressured by a combination of what they feel is time closing in on them and their fear that God is not going to take care of them and provide for them. So what do they do? They turn back to their own counsel, which had been trained in Egypt.

The lesson is there for you and me, that when push comes to shove so frequently in areas regarding faith, we are going to turn back to carnal thinking. We turn to things that we have learned in this world.

Are there times when you fear that you are not going to make it, that you are unworthy of your calling, that God did not give you His spirit, that He does not hear your prayers, that He is gone way off somewhere or that He is not aware of what church leadership is doing? Do you know what He shows repeatedly? He shows that the fearful quail before problems and they flee, as God says, when nobody is chasing them. It is something that we need to learn.

Why did these people do it? They did what they did because they did not even have God's spirit. We do these things because we have not reached the level of growth that is needed to be able to face the problem in the right way, a way that involves using the faith of God. So we turn to what Paul calls in Hebrews 3, disbelief.

In Deuteronomy 32:28, we are right in the song of Moses. Now look at God's indictment here about Israel.

What is he telling us? They always reacted, not according to the counsel of God, not according to right understanding. They fell back on their Egyptian trained hearts. They did not consider the outworking of faith. So Israel was a nation driven by bondage to time, driven by their fears but deceived in to thinking that they knew better than God and His servant Moses. Their whole thinking process had to undergo a conversion. They had to learn to be free!

All their lifetime, up to that point, they … . . .

Hebrews 2:14-18

The angel said at the very beginning, "Unto you a Savior is born." Yes, but also, a Man was born and nothing in man's milieu [domain] is now alien to Him, because He came and He shared life on our terms. He was born a Brother to us that through God's grace we might be linked to Him.

He enables us, by His experience and through His office of, not just the Apostle preaching the message, but the High Priest who shared our experience, is now resurrected, and at the Father's right hand. Because He has done these things He can now succor us. He is able to understand in a way He could not understand before. He learned things by obedience, by the things that He suffered, and that is what the book of Luke is trying to get across to us—that He is fully capable of doing what God has assigned Him to do as our High Priest. Our salvation is thus assured because of what He did.

Hebrews 2:14-18

Now before we can show sympathy, we must experience the same things the other person has gone through, and that is exactly what Jesus Christ did and why He is, as in all things, the greatest in understanding of these things. Because Jesus sympathizes with us, He can help. He has experienced our sorrows and faced our temptations. As a result, He knows precisely what we need when He helps us and provides it.

So Jesus was not only ready to suffer, He did suffer, and having come as a man and in the likeness of sinful flesh, He was Himself subject to temptations, and the reason for this is given: "For in that He Himself has suffered, being tempted, He can aid those who are tempted."

Hebrews 2:14-18

When we see this figure applied to Christ, expect to see Him portrayed in terms of having human feelings, mostly in terms of characteristics that animals simply are not capable of. They may have types of them—how about empathy? Can a dog really feel with you? Or a cat, or a cow? Can they really share your feelings? But another human being can. In order to be High Priest, Jesus Christ had to become one with us.