King, Champion, Brother, and Priest

Today on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. You know the Bible says that we're all suffering because we rejected God. As a race we rejected God and that's what caused all the heartache on the earth. What is amazing in the Bible is not that good people suffer, it's that bad people have had a king come after them to suffer in their place. Welcome to Summit Life with Pastor J.D.

Greer. I'm your host, Molly Whitovitch. If you've been joining us for a while now, you've probably heard Pastor J.D. say that the difference between Christianity and every other religion is the gospel. And in our new teaching series called Christ is Better, we're discovering how the gospel flips the script of religion and frees us from every fear and every chain. After all, the gospel is not about what we can do to be accepted by God, but about what he has already done to save us.

A huge distinction that we celebrate every day here on Summit Life. Now here's Pastor J.D. with a new message that he titled King, Champion, Brother, and Priest.

Hebrews chapter two, the context of the writing of Hebrews is that the writer is concerned because the people that he's writing to are beginning to lag behind in their faith. They had a great start when they started. Everything was wonderful. It's, man, Jesus, and he loves me, and all this just kind of sweet rapturous moments, and you're kind of on cloud nine, and you're filled with the Holy Spirit. But then things got hard. Remember I told you that I know that many of you know exactly what that's like because you had the same thing happen. You start off with kind of a bang, and everything looks like, man, I got purpose now, and I just love my new life with Jesus. But then friends quit following Jesus with you, and you're kind of all by yourself there, or maybe somebody starts suffering. You start to have questions you don't know how to answer. That's happened to, I know, a number of you. Or maybe you get to a place where you're just really struggling with some temptation. The bottom line is you're having a hard time going all the way with Jesus.

It was supposed to be different, you thought. You're lonely. And like I told you last week, I don't care what anybody says. It is hard to feel close to God when you are lonely and in pain.

And so you are starting to feel yourself lag behind. The book of Hebrews is written for you because the writer basically has one theme that he goes back to over and over and over and over again, and it is this theme, keep your eyes on Jesus. You're going to see that phrase appear in a dozen ways, in a dozen different formats. It's going to say, look to Jesus. Fix your eyes on Jesus. Keep looking at Jesus.

Hold fast to Jesus. But now we see Jesus. That's what he's going to show you here in chapter 2 is he's going to give you four things about Jesus, four pictures of Jesus that if you get these will absolutely revolutionize your Christian life. You see, this is the difference, the fundamental difference, hear this, between religion and the gospel. Religion tries to tell you what is wrong with you and then how you should go fix that. That's how you would summarize a religious approach. What the gospel does is it doesn't tell you what's wrong with you and how to fix it. It tells you what's wrong with you and then tells you to look at what Jesus has done for you. And then in light of who Jesus is and what he has accomplished, then you change in response to that. Religion tries to change you by command. The gospel changes you by sight. And so what the writer of Hebrews does is not list a hundred things you ought to be doing better. He lists what Jesus has done for them. And he says, just look at it. Just look at it.

And when you look at him, when you see him for who he is, then your life will change. So whatever spiritual dysfunction you bring into this place, and I know in a room like this, even looking at some of you right now, they are many and they are huge. I know that.

Whatever it is, whatever your spiritual dysfunction, there is one cure, and that is look at Jesus. That's what he shows you here in Hebrews chapter two. We're going to begin in verse five because we left off in verse four last week. So let's begin there.

Verse five, for it was not to angels that God subjected the world to come of which we are speaking. It has been testified somewhere. By the way, I love that. Is the writer having a senior moment? It's been testified somewhere. I can't remember the reference.

No, no. He's not having a senior moment. The reason we know that is because he quotes Psalm eight perfectly word for word. So he hasn't forgotten where this is written. There's something that's lost in translation in that phrase.

What it really means is it's been testified everywhere. The whole Bible is about this, what he is about to say there. And then he goes on to quote Psalm eight.

What is man that you are mindful of him or the son of man that you care for him? You made him for a little while lower than the angels. You've crowned him with glory and honor and you put everything in subjection under his feet.

Now that's a pretty amazing statement, is it not? Listen, God made the world for you. God made the world for you. It was all supposed to be under your control. You were supposed to be the vice regent next to him that was to oversee all of creation.

Everything you see, it was for you. You were the highest of all of God's created order. You were higher than the angels.

Now I know you hear that and you're like, well, what do you mean, right? I mean, we don't think of ourselves higher than the angels, right? I mean, we see like, oh, an angel, you know, why, you know. For a little while it says you were lower than the angels.

But when it says for a little while, that means it's just temporary. You know, whenever an angel shows up in Scripture, they are so glorious and they are so beautiful and they're so terrifying that the first words out of the angel's mouth whenever they appear in Scripture is always what? Fear not, right? They all show up, you know, naked and chubby with like a Nerf bow and arrow and a harp. You know, that's just stupid Christian art. When an angel shows up in Scripture, the first thing they say is like, no, no, no, wait a minute, don't die.

Don't die. You don't need to die because they are so beautiful and so glorified and so large and awesome. Everybody look right now to the person on your right and the person on your left, right? Look at them. That person one day, if they know Jesus, is going to be so unbelievable that even Michael the archangel and Gabriel will pale in comparison to them. Some of you are doing a double take right now. You're like, oh, there is no way.

Believe it, my friend. It's in the Bible, right? So God created all this to be under our feet and then he gives what is perhaps the greatest understatement of the Bible. At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him. Do we see all of creation subject to man? Are we in control of it all right now?

Hardly. We see death and disease and famine and tsunamis. And instead of being on top of the world, if anything, the world seems to be on top of us. And honestly, listen, honestly, that creates a problem for a lot of people because, see, instinctively we know, instinctively we know that we were to be on top of the world. That's just something God put in our image. He made that inside of us so that when evolution tells us, well, it's all just one big accident. I mean, you know, a couple degrees off this way, we'd all freeze.

A couple degrees off this way, we'd all burn up. But, you know, we're lucky. We got on the right planet at the right time and it's survival of the fittest and the fact that there's war and disease and famine. That's just all part of how creation is spun out. There's something inside of us that knows that is not true. That's why it's a problem. Evolution would say it's not a problem, all the suffering that's in the world.

That's not a problem. That's just part of, you know, the reality of the accidental nature of our universe. But we know instinctively that is not true. We know that we were created so that the world would be a service to us. We know that there is something unique about humanity and we know something is wrong.

And honestly, that creates the number one apologetic problem that people have for Christianity is because they say, well, you know, if God really did create men, how come the world seems to be so out of control? How come we have tsunamis? How come so many people suffer? How come?

Why? Why are there all these things? Why is this all happening to the world? The writer acknowledges the presence of that question. He says, you're right.

We don't yet see everything underneath our feet. But, verse 9, we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, himself, the one that created the angels, became lower than the angels, namely Jesus, who is crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death so that by the grace of God, he might taste death for everyone. I'm going to give you four pictures of Jesus.

Here is your first one. Number one, he is a king who got involved. He's a king who got involved, the writer says.

That's there in verse 9. He is crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering and death, so because of suffering and death. What the writer is showing you here is that there was a king, Jesus, who got involved.

It wasn't, by the way, just one citizen looking out for another. He was the creator, and yet he got involved. And then the writer switches metaphors. He goes from kings to sons. You'll see that here in another verse or two, because he feels about us not just like a king would feel about a subject.

He feels about us like a father does with a son. Now, I understand this now more as a parent. You know, sometimes when I see people suffering, if I feel like they brought the suffering on themselves, you have a tendency to be like, well, they're just getting what they deserve. I never feel like that about my kids. When my kids are suffering and it's because of something that they've done wrongly, I mean, my heart breaks for them.

And if I could get involved and if I could help them, I would. He was a king who saw our suffering, that he got involved. By the way, it wasn't even that we were innocent, like the girl in the story I told you, where we were just being mugged. We brought it upon ourselves. We deserved death. We had brought it onto ourselves, and Jesus saw it, and he got involved, and he took it.

What is amazing is that our king stepped in. We think it's amazing that we're all suffering. You realize the Bible doesn't really think that that's amazing. I mean, you know, the Bible says that we're all suffering because we rejected God. As a race, we rejected God, and that's what caused all the heartache on the earth.

What is amazing in the Bible is not that good people suffer. It's that bad people have had a king come after them to suffer in their place, who tasted the death that we deserved on our behalf. And so the writer says, you've got a king who tasted death for you, a king in who is all life, who came and took the death that you had brought upon yourself and absorbed the curse. He was a king. He was a king. He was a king who got involved. Here's the next one, verse 10. For it was fitting, for it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering. Number two, he is a champion who saves, a champion who saves. That word founder in Greek really could be translated, and I think ought to be translated champion. You see that in context. Some of your Bibles say captain.

It means somebody who represents somebody else. In the old days, a lot of times when two armies would fight, they would choose a representative. Think like Hector and Achilles in the movie Troy.

I think that was a book before it was a movie, was it not? The Iliad, that's right. You think of these two warriors that are fighting on behalf of these two gigantic armies, and whoever wins, the army shares in that victory. What you have is that he was a champion who came and fought death on our behalf, right? What was he fighting?

What was he fighting? The one thing that most terrified of us, at least in our sober moments, is down in verse 14. It says that he delivered us from the fear of death that had held us in slavery.

Death is the one thing that terrifies all of us, at least when you think about it. We'll return to our teaching here on Summit Life in just a moment, but I wanted to quickly share a little bit more about our brand new resource this month. The book of Hebrews takes us on a journey that compares and contrasts Jesus to key historical people and events from the Bible. Through these comparisons, we see his superiority. He is the hope for a new creation and the perfect sacrifice. This is why we named our newest Bible study, Christ is Better. It is a 10-session workbook that includes some helpful insights and deeper reflection questions meant to give you greater understanding and deepen your faith in Christ. Our goal is always for everyone within our listening audience to put Jesus first in their lives.

Give us a call at 866-335-5220 or go online to jdgrier.com and reserve your copy today. Now let's get back to today's message with Pastor J.D. Greer. Sigmund Freud, what he does, he gives you these kind of like nuggets of wisdom sandwiched between mountains of nonsense. So if you can get between all these mountains of nonsense and pull out these nuggets, there's a few of them in here like the one I'm about to give to you. He says, mankind's relationship to death is fascinating. He says, because on the one hand, we all seem to have something of a death wish. We're ashamed. We know that we're not what we should be, and so we kind of like we long for death because we know we're not what we should be.

We have guilt and shame and we're not living up to our standards. He said, that's the one side, but on the other hand, there's this enormous fear of death because it seems like the end of everything. It's the unknown. He says, so our response to this internal conflict is just to suppress the thought about it. We hate to think about it. He says, that's crazy because we know it's coming.

We know it's there. We know that really, you know, even if you don't believe in God, you realize that the 70 or 80 years you get on earth do not compare to what comes afterwards if there is an eternity. You got to think about it because it is only in the light of death that your life starts to make sense. Leo Tolstoy. Leo Tolstoy says, quote, something strange began to happen to me at age 50. I had a wife who loved me and whom I loved.

I had a large estate which, without much effort on my part, increased. My name was respected. I enjoyed physical strength, and yet I could not live because of the knowledge of my coming death. The question which brought me to the verge of suicide sought an answer without which one cannot really begin to live. Is there any meaning in life that my inevitable death does not destroy?

Today or tomorrow death will come to those I love and then to me. Soon not only I will not exist, but eventually no one will exist who will remember anything that I've written or done. Why then go on with the effort? What's it all for? What's it all lead to? What difference does it make whether or not I do this thing or that thing or nothing at all so I can give no rational meaning to any single action or even to my whole life?

But what was so surprising was how we can fail to see this. For a time it is possible to live intoxicated with life, but as soon as one is sober, it is impossible not to see that life in the face of death is a fraud and a stupid fraud at that. How often I have been told, oh, you cannot understand the meaning of life, so don't think about it. Just live.

I can no longer do that. You have to think about it. You have to start thinking about eternity because your life, the Bible says, is like a wisp of smoke that appears for just a moment, then it disappears. The most important thing that you give to your children is not a good college education.

It's not a lot of extracurricular stuff. It's preparing them and their children and their children's children for eternity. If you as a parent are not preparing your kids for eternity, if you care more about where they go to college than where they spend eternity, then you are committing a crime against your child.

Here's what happens. That fear of death as you get older eventually starts to creep out, even if you just don't think about it a lot. It starts to creep out because you start to, here's what you see in verse 15.

You see it? He delivers those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery. Death is terrifying because you feel like it's the end, and if you feel like it's the end, there's this enormous pressure to experience everything you can right now. You start to feel like if you miss out on anything, then you're never going to get a chance to do it since you become desperate or you become bitter. If you go past an age where you wanted to be married and you're still single, you start to get angry because you're like, this is my one chance to be young and beautiful and married and it's passing me by.

Or you're not happily married. You start to think, I get one shot at this. I've got to find happiness and romantic love.

This marriage that I got into didn't do it, so I'm going to have to go outside of this marriage to find it because I got one shot to be happy. That is the captivity that death brings because it is making you hostage to this idea that unless you get things here on earth, you are never going to experience them at all. Or you start to panic when you see yourself aging. This is a little depressing, I'm sorry. But when you look in the mirror and you notice your body getting older and you're not as nearly as beautiful as you used to be, whether you're a guy or a girl, what you're looking at is the process of dying.

I know, depressing. As you watch yourself age, you are watching yourself die. And that makes you start to panic because you're not what you used to be. And so if you're a woman, you inject your face full of Botox and start to wear clothes that are completely inappropriate for a woman your age.

For different reasons than they were inappropriate when you were younger, right? If you're a guy, you go out and buy a red sports car and unbutton your shirt down to your navel and start to hit on cocktail waitresses and make everybody want to vomit, right? What that is is panic. It's panic because you are sensing inside of you this process of death. Or when you get older, you start to obsess about building a legacy and being remembered. Or you start to try to control your children because you see in them your future.

And if they don't regard you rightly and if they don't treat you properly, then what good is your life? Sometimes you're terrified of death because you fear the judgment of God. And so you start obsessing about appeasing God. You start wondering if you've done enough to get to heaven.

People, as they get older, a lot of times get desperately religious because they're trying to get prepared for the next phase. What he is saying is our champion took on that greatest fear, death, and he put it away forever. He did it all by himself. Verse 14, you see this? Since therefore the children share in the flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death. That is the devil.

First of all, what you see is he did it all by himself. You think here of David and Goliath. That's why that story's in the Bible, David and Goliath.

Here you've got the armies of Israel and the armies of the Philistines. They choose their champion, which is Goliath. He's nine feet tall.

He's twice as big as anybody else. That's a smart guy to choose as your champion. The Israelites are a bunch of cowards.

They don't have anything. So a little 14-year-old shepherd boy with some rocks and a leather strap heads out there to be their champion. Of course, you know the story with that slingshot. He brings the giant down while all of Israel stands on the sidelines as cowards do not lift a finger to help him. He wins on their behalf. What it's giving you a picture of is our ultimate giant that we face, death, the one everybody is terrified of, the one nobody can overcome. There was a figure who showed up who was very unlike what we thought he would be because he was born as a carpenter's son.

He grew up poor, and he ended up dying as a criminal. He would face death, and through death, he would destroy death while we all stood on the sidelines and didn't do a thing to help him. He is our champion. He is our champion because he conquered death through death. See, it wasn't even, by the way, it was terrifying for him.

He was terrifying for us. It was terrifying for him. One of the most illuminating scenes in Jesus' life is that Garden of Gethsemane.

I've preached on it before and walked you through it, but let me just make sure you get this. It uses some images in the Garden of Gethsemane that if you don't read them with your eyes open, they go right past you. It says that, first of all, when he went into the Garden of Gethsemane, it says, suddenly, immediately, Mark 14, he was overcome with a sense of horror. What was he seeing? He was looking into hell. He was looking into death.

Death is separation from God. He was looking into the sting of death. Then it says that he was overcome with sorrow, sorrowful to the point of death, which means it so broke his heart that it just about killed him.

He then went through where he began to sweat great drops of blood, a medical condition that doctors called hematridosis, which is when you're under so much stress, so much anxiety that the capillaries in your body begin to burst and you begin to literally sweat drops of blood. Our champion went in and he faced death in all of its bitterness and all of its struggle so that we could, through his death, escape the power of death, so that now we look at death and we say, death, where is your sting? Grave, where is your victory? What that means is that when I now stand beside the grave of a newborn baby, as I have done several times as pastor of this church, with a family whose heart is broken, it means that what I say is, yes, this is a moment of great grief, but there is a time coming when you will see that child again, not as they were, but as God intended for them to be. What is it like to walk into heaven after having lost a miscarried child? What's it like after having lost a child in infancy when you walk into heaven and one of the first people you're greeted by is not that child as they were, but as God intended them to be and you see them and everything you'd hoped about them, you see them and you finally face them?

What is that like? That is something that you can only have when you understand that there's somebody who took the sting out of death. Some of you suffer, you do, and it's not fair, right? I mean, some of you are past the age where you should have gotten married and you wanted to get married, and you're like, God, why did this happen? I mean, it's not like there was something wrong with you. It was not like you were a lesser person and nobody wanted to be around you. This is just not what God's plan was for you, and you're like, God, why?

Or maybe some of you men, your business fell apart at a point in your life where it shouldn't have. Some dream was shattered. What I can say to you is, all those things were just dim shadows. That's all they were, preparing you for something much greater, something that in the light of what you experience in eternity makes this look like a light and momentary thing. I do not want to ever gloss over your pain because I know that it is real, but I will tell you with the apostle Paul, it is light and it is momentary.

Christ is the only religious leader to have gone into the grave and come back to life. What comfort that can bring us as we consider our struggles, even today. You're listening to an encouraging message from Pastor JD Greer on Summit Life. JD, we're really just getting started as we spend this month studying the book of Hebrews, but it's already begun to help me remain faithful in my walk with the Lord. Yeah, I appreciate you saying that, Molly. You know, Hebrews was written to people who needed a boost in their faith.

They really had the same struggles that we have today. How do I trust Christ when everything around me seems so challenging and difficult? It's hard to make Christ first in our lives in a world of so much distraction. The book of Hebrews gives us a very clear message and that is don't give up trying. You know, one of the things we like to do here at Summit Life is to provide you with a practical resource that will take you deeper into the passages that we're studying. And so this newest Bible study that we've produced will do that with the book of Hebrews. Hebrews is one of the most rewarding books that you can study. Some of the things that look challenging when you first read them with just a little bit of explanation, you'll see not only why it makes sense, but why what the writer is communicating will change your entire life. This book of the Bible, Hebrews, shows us over and over again that Jesus and Jesus alone is worthy of our trust and our devotion.

He is the only true hero of our faith. This is a fun study that's going to include some interesting insights into the scripture, questions that'll make you dig deep, not only into the scriptures, but also your own heart, and then some easy homework that you can do between sessions that'll help you hear and understand the word so much better. Take a look at it today and reserve your copy at jdgrier.com. Thank you, JD. We'd love to get you this exclusive Summit Life Bible study right away.

It's our way of saying thanks when you donate today to support Summit Life at the suggested level of $35 or more. Join that mission when you donate today and remember to ask for your copy of Christ is Better, 10 Sessions in Hebrews. Call 866-335-5220. That's 866-335-5220. Or give and request this new resource online at jdgrier.com. I'm Molly Vitovich inviting you to join us next time when Pastor JD describes how you can get free from the fears that enslave you. That's a powerful message Wednesday right here on Summit Life with JD Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by JD Greer Ministries.