Hebrews 2:1-4

Welcome to the Truth in Love podcast. We are back. I'm Rob, and that's Dan. We're thankful that you're with us. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for your prayers and support. We are recording again, but it is going to be streamed live.

So if you have any comments, put your comments in there. We will see the notifications. We'll see the comments. If you have any questions, concerns, we'll see those too. We'll try to answer your questions.

If you'd like for us to pray for you, we'd love to be able to do that as well. We're going to continue in Hebrews, starting in Hebrews chapter two tonight. But before we jump into Hebrews, a little topic to get us started.

The Rise of Online Debates and Slower Conversations

I was thinking about this today, and I was sharing it with Dan just a few minutes ago, but a similar post that I see regularly, I share these type of posts. My friends share these type of posts, but it was a post of a video, a podcast, a debate.

I can't remember exactly what it was. I just, I quickly scrolled by it, but it was a couple of guys, two or three guys. Maybe there was a moderator, but the subject that they were talking about was justification by faith.

And I think their approach, their interpretation, and how they may see that doctrine differently. And I didn't specifically ponder on justification by faith, Dan. I was thinking about how this is a really common occurrence, that we are seeing, I mean, that's what you and I do a lot.

I mean, we were doing it, before we started recording, we were talking about our different views on the Sabbath.

Yep.

And this is happening over and over and over again, because this means of communication that God has given us. We've got internet, we've got computers, we've got smartphones, and we've got so much capability, and a lot of it's free.

We don't have to pay for this stuff. We have to pay for access to the internet, but these platforms, like YouTube and Facebook, we can get on there and we can record our own debates. We can listen to other debates.

But it seems like over and over and over again, I'm seeing people, and I was thinking about the word spar, but there's, maybe there's sparring going on, but it's debates, conversations about their different viewpoints.

And you know, you really didn't have that as much. Of course, you can go back in history, you look at books, and Martin Luther had to stand before the diocese and give an account of his beliefs. You had, well, they wrote each other letters.

Yeah, conversations were slower back then.

Conversations were slower. I'm thinking about Thomas Jefferson and Adams. They wrote each other letters about their differences in theology. And like you said, it was slower, but with the coming of the internet, it's immediate, and you can put together a debate, and you can talk about all the differences that you have.

And I think that there's good, there's bad, and of course the bad reveals things about who we are. And then in my opinion, I think ultimately it's gonna be a good thing. So based on our conversation before we got started and kind of my thoughts on the subject, what are your thoughts?

I think we have a really wonderful tool in front of us to talk to each other, talk to, get good information out there. At the same time, when we're talking with folks, there can be a tendency for someone to get tired with a conversation.

And instead of sticking with it over a longer period of time, like I said, the conversation we had before about the Sabbath observance, if we were to have that same conversation by letter, and it took two weeks for what I said to get to you, and maybe a week for you to think on it and write back, I see it in, I see a response in three weeks, and your response is, hey, what was that passage that you were talking about?

And so I write again. So we're like six months deep into the conversation before we even got started. You can think through things, you have to have a level of commitment to that conversation, that longevity of thought where you're thinking about it.

We know when the letter is gone and you get to think through things a lot more. Now, today you go onto a comment thread or you get involved in a video debate or something, and you get to talk with somebody and say you don't wanna do it anymore.

So you quit and you go somewhere else, but then you have to start over at the beginning and you only get so far before you quit and you go somewhere else. And so while it's a great tool to get information out there and a lot of people are doing some good stuff and you can find their recordings and you can find their videos and whatever, it does kind of breed a sort of shallowness where you only go so far.

I'm a member of this one Facebook group, I don't know. Whenever I talk to my wife about it, I'm like, I'm in that dumpster fire Facebook group because it just turns into a dumpster fire just about every post.

And people will say some of the worst, terrible, terrible theology going on. And so you just simply challenge them with scripture and all of a sudden 15 people jump in and everybody is saying something weird and say, guys, what are y 'all even talking about?

Like, have we ever read the Bible? It would be much better for us in some instances to go slower, to take time to think these things through, to have our feet held to the fire because here's the thing, when you're talking to people you don't know, you can be bolder than when you're talking to people that you do know.

That's right.

And if you're talking to people that you do know that you see on a regular basis, you're gonna temper your speech a little bit more. And not only that, you're gonna develop a relationship to where, say, I think you're wrong and it matters, like say, I think you're a heretic or something, I'm gonna hold your feet to the fire a lot more.

And since you already have a relationship with me, you're not gonna try to weasel out of it. You're gonna work to preserve that relationship. We may come to a point where we have to kick you to the curb or whatever, but for a point, we're gonna have some serious, deep, meaningful conversation, which you don't get in online interaction.

So in the meantime, I would suggest keep on going, learn, how do we screw this up? How can we do it better? But we should really focus on the bulk of our interaction with people that we're having interaction with on a regular basis, and that would be people in the local church.

Character, Heresy, and Accountability in the Church

Well, that really makes sense, everything that you're talking about, because I'm thinking about the qualifications of a pastor, and the qualifications more point towards their character.

Sure.

And so, to me, that speaks to something similar to what you were talking about. It's gonna be more important to how we handle ourselves in our relationship with other people online more than being right.

And so I think that speaks volumes. And people are so easily to call somebody else heretic, but you're talking about having a relationship with somebody and calling somebody that you refer to as a friend, a heretic, because of their beliefs, you're gonna hold their feet to the fire, but yet you're not gonna leave.

Right.

And when you do that online, which when you were bringing that up, I was thinking this needs to be a rule in these Facebook groups. Unless you personally know the other person, you shouldn't call them a heretic.

Well, here's the thing. You only know what they've revealed themselves to be through whatever medium that you're going through.

Right.

So you don't know the other conversations that someone's had. You don't know the things that they're, you don't know if they're working with their pastor on something and they're just working something out over here, or if they're, maybe they just had a bad day and they don't even believe what they're saying, but they're just spouting it off or whatever.

There could be a whole bunch of different stuff that you just don't know about. You know, that Facebook personality or that TikTok personality or whoever that you see online, that person, that social media presence may not be that person.

Sure.

Facebook. Dan might be a heretic, but real life Dan may not be. Maybe he says some stupid stuff online. It's been known to happen. People say stupid stuff online all the time.

Oh yeah. That's right. Well, and another way to put it or think about the stipulations or the rules, if you don't have the capability of walking with that person refrain from calling them a heretic. You know, if you're not close enough with them to walk through this with them, to continue to talk through this with them personally, I think it would alleviate so much stuff that's happening right now on Facebook where everybody's going after each other.

And it's been so interesting, these movements that happen. You see them at a distance. And I could start naming the different movements that I've seen over my lifetime because of the internet, because of these means of communication that we have.

And everybody will jump on board and jump on the bandwagon with this movement. But then the leaders of that movement will begin to show some of their true colors of what they believe, all their heretics.

Let's jump over here to this bandwagon. And the same thing happens there. Then they'll jump on this bandwagon.

And that's why having those slower conversations is oftentimes a better thing. Because you get to take your time. You get to figure stuff out. Because people want you to jump in and respond now.

Hey, I don't know now.

I need to think this through. I haven't researched everything. I haven't looked in, I haven't talked to this person. I haven't seen what they've said here. I haven't called them up and asked them questions, wrote them an email.

I don't know. I mean, to force each other to say, well, you need to respond and you need to respond now and you need to respond in the way that I want you to is not being quick to listen and slow to speak.

That's forcing someone to be quick to speak. Now, you may be right about that person, but chill out. Quit calling people buffoons and we got better stuff to do with our time.

Exactly.

You may be right. Say, hey, you know, watch out. This may be dangerous, but.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, and a lot of these folks will be calling you and I hair tics right now just because we're talking about taking our time.

Oh, well.

Yeah.

Who are we?

I grew up in the South. We go slower down there.

That's right.

We think slower and talk slower.

Oh, yeah.

Well, just to wrap up the conversation, the good part and of course, we're not prophets. We don't claim to be, but just looking at the picture, looking at the overall events that are taking place and we look at the good and the bad, which of course the good is that these, we're able to have these discussions.

We're able to sharpen iron. We're able to learn from other people. So there's a lot of good that comes out of this, but I think ultimately there's gonna be an ultimate good that comes out of what's happening now with all the bad that's happening and how we're showing our true characters and how we treat one another.

We're gonna look back, especially those of us holding the post-millennial perspective and we think, we believe that God is moving in a certain direction. He's going somewhere. And so when we look back and we'll look back at, or our great-great-grandchildren, whoever, they look back at our time period and they see what all went on at the beginning of the internet era and they see all the debacles.

They're gonna laugh at us.

They're gonna laugh at us. They'll see all the true character of some people and whatnot, but they'll be able to say, look at the growing pains. Look at where it brought us. God made this communication, these means of communication.

He made it. He allowed this to happen. He let them fight it out. He let them struggle through it. And it was a means of bringing them together in theology. I know that one gentleman in that podcast, we shall not name, he's talking about, he wishes there was another, I think he's called it another church council that will help nail down an overarching view from the church on eschatology.

More than just, I believe in panmillennialism, it'll all pan out in the end. He wants us to leave that mindset and say, let's get together and work on this. But I think that's going to happen with this process that God is working in and through us in the end.

I think that's what's going on.

Eschatology, Denominational Vagueness, and the Need for Doctrine

Well, just so everybody knows where I stand on this, the panmillennial position, we need to talk to our Southern Baptist friends because that Baptist faith and message, it's official position on eschatology is the panmillennial position.

Says God in his own time and his own way is going to come back and raise the dead, judge people. I mean, he basically said, it'll all pan out in the end. So looking at you Southern Baptists, let's tighten it up a little bit.

That's right. Hey, that's right. A lot of times that's purposeful.

I don't think so.

I mean, the Baptist, especially the Southern Baptist, they want to be as vague. They want to be known as people of the book. But as far as nailing down doctrine, they want to be as vague as possible so that their camp can be as wide as possible.

Well, the book says stuff.

We need to repeat it.

That's right. That's right.

Hebrews 2.

Well, and we're suffering from that as Southern Baptists because we want our camp to be as wide as possible so that we can have as much money coming in for the cooperative program. But then where does that money go?

And look who we've had in leadership. I mean, because we've not been faithful and firm on doctrine, we've got ourselves into a lot of trouble, I think.

Not gonna happen to any denomination.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, let's jump into these first four verses of Hebrews 2. Let me read them really quickly. For this reason, we must pay attention or we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard so that we do not drift away from it.

For if the word spoken through angels proved unalterable and every transgression and disobedience received a just penalty, how will we escape if we neglect so great a salvation? After it was at the first spoken through the Lord, it was confirmed to us of those who heard.

God also testifying with them, both by signs and wonders and by various miracles and by gifts of the Holy Spirit according to his own will. Now we know in chapter one, the author of Hebrews here is showing us how Jesus is much greater, much better than the angels.

And from my understanding, as he transitions to this next section, and it sounds like, of course, he has his audience in mind. He's writing to a specific audience here in chapter one, but how he speaks to them changes in chapter two, in this next section.

So he's coming across to me as, this is like an appeal to them.

Sure.

Yeah, he's appealing to them because he looks at the people that he cares for deeply and says, you're about to throw away everything. You may think that you're just missing a piece or maybe this doesn't fit, so I'll keep the rest and lose this aspect.

And he's like, no, if you don't listen to what Jesus has says, you're neglecting the prophet of Deuteronomy. Basically, the prophet that was foretold, this is the prophet, he's gonna come, he's gonna be one of your brothers.

Listen to him and the world will say, don't listen to him, you'll die. It's rough, but he's sitting there saying, hey, pay attention, pay close attention. And he says so, so they don't drift away.

Yeah.

He understands that it can be easy to slip back into what they're familiar with, which, man, let's face it, that's anybody. The Jews could do it, pagans could do it, you and me in America could do it.

We can slip back into what is comfortable to us. And the thing is, if we slip back into what is comfortable to us and we start living our lives the way that we want to, what we do is we neglect God. When we neglect God, we neglect Christ, we neglect the salvation that is provided by Christ because we're no longer treating him as God.

We're treating him as a genie, a self-help guide, a get-rich-quick scheme, little emotional comfort for the soul, but we're not treating him as God. We're not treating him as the one who has created the universe and has paid for the sins of sinners like us.

Right. So you might be able to say something more profound here than me.

Oh, goodness.

Paying Much Closer Attention to Christ

Well, I was just looking at the first few words there in verse one, for this reason, we must pay much closer attention. So he's appealing to them, he's pleading with them that they must pay much closer attention.

Why?

For this reason. What's that reason? And I'm looking at the previous verse and it says, are they not all, I guess, speaking of angels, are they not all ministry spirits sent out to render service for the sake of those who will inherit salvation?

And I'm thinking, as big, there's no way for us to grasp how large the universe is. And on top of that, all the gazillion things that are happening, that are going on in this vast universe that God's created.

And yet the one thing that God has his angels doing is being ministering spirits to those who are inheriting salvation. This, of all the gazillion things that are happening in this universe, this is the one thing that he has them focused on.

So this one thing must be important. So we need to pay much closer attention.

Right, we need to pay attention. Well, if you remember all of the different verses that you run through, it's saying this one is son, this one is God, this one is powerful, he sits on the throne. These are not, these angels are not, these angels are small and puny in comparison to our God.

It goes on talking about him being king, the Lord of the foundation of the earth. The earth will fall away, he will not fall away. Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a fistful for your feet.

He didn't say that about the angels. The angels are pathetic and puny in comparison to God. And yet those same angels that are in comparison to God, pathetic and puny, are there to minister for the salvation of those who are going to be saved.

And then it says this in verse two, for if the word spoken through angels, think Old Testament as those messengers brought the message to the prophets, to the fathers, proved unalterable or unchangeable in every transgression and disobedience received a just penalty.

What does that mean? Well, it brings up the whole of the Old Testament. And you think, what happened at Pentecost? The Holy Spirit came. Now, as great as the messages that came through the prophets were, they now have heard through the Holy Spirit.

You think of the great messages that came to the Old Testament prophets of Jonah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, all the minor prophets. They're giving the words of God. The angels came and ministered and spoke and made sure that the message of God got to them.

And that was great and wonderful. And that was absolutely what they needed at the time. And now here is Christ himself. God come in the flesh and spoken to us. It's something greater. It's something more.

It's something higher. It's something that if you, since you were shaking in your boots when the angels showed up, when the angels were there saying, he's not here, he has risen. Every time an angel showed up, don't be afraid.

Here's God. Why are you gonna treat that like it's nothing? Like, how are you gonna just let that slip by? You can't just let it drift on through because everything that those angels said happened. The nation of Israel went off into Assyria, went off into Babylon.

The nations of the world that were said to be about to fall fell.

Why?

Because God told these angels what to say. And now the one who gave the angels the message has come and spoken himself. How, verse three, will we escape? Escape what? Escape judgment, the wrath of God, the penalty for our sins.

How can we be rid and free of our sins if we neglect so great a salvation as God himself has come and explained and given to us, as he has secured it for himself and given it to mankind? I mean, it's incredible.

It's not a third party thing anymore. It is God has come and spoken. His Holy Spirit is working in the world. His ministers, pastors, still, I believe, angels are still doing the work today. All of them doing the work of bringing the message of the gospel of Jesus Christ to the world.

If we neglect that message, it's gonna be worse for us than those who had neglected the message of the angels. What was it said? When Jesus was there talking to the Pharisees, he said, it'd be worse for you, or maybe it was somebody else, but anyway, he was saying, it's gonna be worse for you on the day of judgment than Sodom and Gomorrah.

Right. Let me ask you this question about verse two. So verse two, part A and part B, are both sections, because it's in the past tense. So are both sections pointing to Christ? So the word spoken through angels proved unalterable.

So that word, like you were talking about, and I agree with what you were saying, everything come to pass that come from God that was spoken through the messengers, through the angels, like this nation was gonna fall, but also every prophecy of Christ came to fruition.

So it proved itself unalterable, unchangeable, unfailing. And then the last part there, every transgression and disobedience received a just penalty. So is this speaking of the payment that was made on the cross?

I don't think so.

Okay.

Potentially, but I don't think so because he's giving them a warning, message from the angels, if we neglect salvation, every transgression and disobedience received a just penalty. It seems to me like that saying that, no, well, I guess you could make a case for it.

He really is saying that all sin deserves to be punished. So if you neglect Christ, that is what is awaiting you.

Yeah. Yeah.

That's kind of how I was looking at it. You know, here's this payment that has been made. You neglect that payment.

Right.

Then you've neglected a great thing.

If you neglect Jesus Christ, what is sheep's blood gonna do for you? Not a thing.

Right.

Exactly.

The Holy Spirit, Signs and Wonders, and Miraculous Confirmation

The coffee go cold.

It's not as good as hot. I just, I drank out of the wrong cup. Give a shout out to my wife real quick. I requested it. So it was a gift that I asked for, but she did get it for me for Christmas. This coffee mug here.

It has a little disc tray that it sits in. The bottom of it has electronic connector to it. So the tray is like a warmer.

I got you.

And so it keeps the coffee at a certain temperature.

And it'll keep it at a certain temperature till a little bit of the moisture goes away and it's extra strong too.

That's right.

I've done that before.

So for that very reason, or this very reason is why I requested it. So later on in the podcast, I could have a coffee.

There you go.

And it is, it's still hot.

There it is.

So let's see, after it was first spoken to the Lord, it was confirmed to us by those who heard.

So he's making a contrast between the word spoken by angels that was unalterable and sure, a real true word. And now Christ has shown up and the people who were there walking with him told us to.

So the Lord comes on the scene, Jesus comes on the scene and he's revealing that he is the fulfillment of all these things. And then he has his witnesses who observe it and then pass that along.

Right, right.

But it don't stop there.

Right. We have God who testifies with them.

And how do you do that?

Both by signs and wonders. And I was thinking there, of course, I don't know that Greek. So I'm just trying to make an educated guess. So when it says signs and wonders, it's basically combining those two things together.

So this event would be a sign and wonder and this event will be a sign and wonder. Is that how we should understand it?

There is something in Greek and I cannot pronounce it for the life of me, but it starts with an H and it has a Y and A and M and a D in there and the L, I think. I really don't know how to pronounce it.

Helmandia, I don't know. Like I said, I'd hurt myself for I said that thing correctly. However, what it does is this, it's two nouns that are put together by the word and and it's meant to be a single thing.

So it's one thing that is listed as two things with the word and in between. I think that's what you have here. So exactly what you just said, only a fancy word that I can't pronounce.

Gotcha, gotcha.

So they're not too fancy on my part.

So that was God's means.

Yeah.

And I really find the last portion of that verse very interesting. We'll get to that in just a second, but just think about it. This is God's means. And I think we need to struggle in the today, today's modern American church.

Everybody needs to struggle with this. God also testified them both according to his means. First of all, he says signs and wonders and then by various miracles and by gifts. So these are two different things.

Miracles and gifts of the Holy Spirit.

How'd those come?

So I can see the signs and wonders.

Specifically the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

The gifts of the Holy Spirit are gonna come from the Holy Spirit.

But they come according to his own will.

Yeah, yeah. That's what I was getting at.

Yeah.

Because we wanna make up our own, if a church doesn't have a vision, it will perish. We put that Old Testament passage. Without a vision, we'll perish. But we need to think about God's means will accomplish his ends.

Sure.

Now, I will say this. I think we, both sides of the coin, I think fall off the coin a little bit too hard. You've got those who will go out there seeking signs and wonders and miracles and to the point of fabricating them.

They run off and all sorts of weird stuff trying to suck the power out of A .W. Tozer's grave and stuff in California somewhere. Then on the other hand, you have those people who are so dead set on God's, God doing things his way that they don't allow for God to do things his way.

They so completely dry up anything that the spirit could be doing that they just get cynical. No, that wasn't of God. That's always emotionalism. That wasn't of God. These people are faking it. That wasn't about, hey man, you don't know.

Right.

Maybe it was. Now, here's the thing. We have ways of knowing it. Usually, it goes back to what you said earlier as we started off, it with a slower conversation, it'd probably be better because God does do things in his time.

We know things by their fruit and fruit doesn't just pop off as soon as a sprout hits. Sometimes have to wait for the tree to grow, wait a year or two, even after the tree grows before you get an apple.

So what is actually coming from something? What we need to do is recognize that God does work sometimes in miracles. And every single believer I know should believe in miracles, at least that Christ raises the dead in the fact that they were raised spiritually from the dead in order to believe in the first place.

And that leads us to our belief of a physical resurrection of the dead later on. That and Bible verses, like lots of them. But we shouldn't be so closed off to what God is doing that he can't still do something miraculous.

And at the same time, we can't go the other way and just expect something to happen because we're feeling it or we're wanting it real bad. So we should recognize that God being in control and being the almighty powerful spirit that he is can do what he wants to.

We just need to kind of take a backseat, preach the gospel and recognize stuff for what it is. And people don't always wanna do that. But think about day of Pentecost. Day of Pentecost, people were speaking in tons.

I ain't hear a single Baptist person over there talking bad or Presbyterian talking bad about it on the day of Pentecost. On the day of Pentecost, they're all Pentecostal.

Why?

Because God was there working in his people. He was calling people to repentance. He was proving the message of Jesus Christ through the message of Peter and the miraculous speaking in languages that Peter didn't know.

You think about the Peter as he walks by and he looks at the guy laying on the ground and says, from faith, I don't even know if he knew what he was doing at the time, but he went by and he told this guy, gold and silver have I none, but what I have I give to you, get up and walk.

And this is Peter, he's a fisherman. Like who is Peter? Peter that denied Jesus three times said to this dude, get up and walk. And the dude got up and walked. A miracle. The dude fell out of the, the little boy fell out of the window.

Paul went down there, brought him back. Paul got bit on the hand with a snake, venomous snake. Nothing happened to him. You think of Peter who got let out of prison by the angels, all of these things proving that God, the God that they were talking about is who he says he is.

So as we preach the gospel, it may not be anything like that, but we should expect weird stuff to start happening around us. I don't know what that's gonna look like. We may not ever even know what it is, but we should expect some weird stuff to happen around us.

If nothing else, we should expect to see dead men come to life as they hear the word of God and they come to believe.

Yeah, exactly.

Now, I don't know, that sounds weird for a Presbyterian to say, but I'm not under care of the Presbytery yet. They can get me next week. And who knows, they may, so.

Well, I mean, from my perspective, you know, looking at this text, I'm thinking about he's speaking to his audience. So these things that he's saying to his audience are things that they should have the ability to be reflecting on.

So these signs and wonders, these various miracles, these gifts of the Holy Spirit are things that they would have witnessed.

Right, or at least had a friend who saw it.

Yeah, and so these are from God. You've witnessed them, you've seen them. So the question is, and it's a good conversation to have, as a 21st century reader of this text, we're not the original audience who he was speaking to, who saw these things happen, these things fulfilled from the Old Testament.

How do we, what do we take from this? It goes back to a lot of things that you were talking about.

I think the main thing that we take from it is this. The main thing we take from it is not even in verse four. The main thing we take from it is in verse three. How will we escape if we neglect so great a salvation?

And that's really it. I mean, if we're so wrapped up in, will God do this or will God do that? Who cares? Let God be God and let you recognize your sin, turn from it, trust in Christ and be saved. I mean, really, that's where we ought to go with it.

I mean, because we, I mean, we know we're in one of two camps. We're either blinded by our sin, blinded by our flesh, blinded by the fall. We're either there in that position or we have, the veil has been lifted.