Exegetical and Hermeneutical Commentary of Hebrews 2:8

Thou hast put all things in subjection under his feet. For in that he put all in subjection under him, he left nothing [that is] not put under him. But now we see not yet all things put under him.

8. thou hast put ] Rather, “Thou didst put ” by one eternal decree. This clause should be added to the last verse. The clause applies not to Christ (as in 1Co 15:25) but to man in his redeemed glory.

all things ] This is defined in the Psalm (Heb 8:8-9) to mean specially the animal world, but is here applied to the universe in accordance with its Messianic application (Mat 28:18).

For ] The “for” continues the reasoning of Heb 2:5. The writer with deep insight seizes upon the juxtaposition of “humiliation” and “dominion” as a paradox which only found in Christ its full solution.

he left nothing that is not put under him ] The inference intended to be drawn is not “and therefore even angels will be subject to man,” but “and therefore the control of angels will come to an end.” When however we read such a passage as 1Co 6:3 (“Know ye not that we shall judge angels?”) it is uncertain whether the author would not have admitted even the other inference.

But now ] i.e. but, in this present earthly condition of things man is not as yet supreme. We see as a fact ( ) man’s humiliation; we perceive by faith the glorification of Jesus, and of all humanity in Him.

under him ] i.e. under man.

Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges

Thou hast put all things in subjection … – Psa 8:6. That is, all things are put under the control of man, or thou hast given him dominion over all things.

For in that he put all in subjection – The meaning of this is, that the fair interpretation of the passage in the Psalm is, that the dominion of man, or of human nature over the earth, was to be absolute and total. Nothing was to be excepted. But this is not now the fact in regard to man in general, and can be true only of human nature in the person of the Lord Jesus. There the dominion is absolute and universal. The point of the argument of the apostle may be this. It was the original appointment Gen 1:26 that man should have dominion over this lower world, and be its absolute lord and sovereign. Had he continued in innocence, this dominion would have been entire and perpetual. But he fell, and we do not now see him exerting this dominion. What is said of the dominion of man can be true only of human nature in the person of the Lord Jesus, and there it is completely fulfilled.

But now we see not yet all things put under him – That is, It is not now true that all things are subject to the control of man. There is indeed a general dominion over the works of God, and over the inferior creation. But the control is not universal. A large part of the animal creation rebels, and is brought into subjection only with difficulty. The elements are not entirely under his control; the tempest and the ocean rage; the pestilence conveys death through city and hamlet; the dominion of man is a broken dominion. His government is an imperfect government. The world is not yet put wholly under his dominion, but enough has been done to constitute a pledge that it will yet be done. It will be fully accomplished only in him who sustains our nature, and to whom dominion is given over the worlds.

Fuente: Albert Barnes’ Notes on the Bible

Thou hast put all things in subjection under his feet; the impartial, righteous Jehovah the Father, is the relation in the Trinity, spoken of in the relative Thou, throughout these verses. He is Gods King; for his personal worth and excellencies, preferred before principalities and powers, and every name; before all persons, things, and places, the world to come as well as this: all angels, as well as men; all creatures wherever, in heaven, earth, sea, or hell; are under his sovereign dominion, they all lie at his feet, to dispose of as he pleaseth; they are all set in subjection to him by the ordination of his Father: see Psa 8:6-8; 1Co 15:24-29; Eph 1:20-22; Phi 2:9,10; Col 2:10. According to the Eastern custom, as subjects lie prostrate at the feet of their sovereign, so do all creatures to him who is Lord of lords, and King of kings, as Exo 11:8, see the margin; Isa 49:23. They bow down and worship him as their own Lord; but as being under his feet signifies the utmost subjection of them to him, and his triumph over them, it especially refers to his enemies, sin, devils, sinners, and death; as Joshua, a type of him, did, Jos 10:23,24; showing thereby what God would do with all the rest. Allusive to this is Isa 51:23, especially to all the enemies of his Son, as Psa 110:1; 1Co 15:25,27. As to his church, it is his body, and though distant from him as creatures, and so worshipping and honouring of him as elect angels, yet being his queen too, she loves and honoureth him as a wife, Psa 45:9,11; Eph 1:22,23; Eph 5:23,24; she hath her subjection as well as her dignity; she is not a peer to him before marriage: but as Eastern emperors marry slaves born or captivated, because they acknowledge no king greater than they, or equal to them; so Christ takes sinners and makes them his body, his church, his queen, who though for condition are under his feet, yet he so dearly loves them, that he takes them thence, and sets them at his right hand.

For in that he put all in subjection under him, he left nothing that is not put under him: if nothing is left unsubjected, then angels and the world to come are subjected to him; and it is evident they are so, by their ministering to him at his conception, birth, danger from Herod, temptations by the devil, at his entrance on his ministry, at his passion, at his resurrection, ascension, and since his session on his throne, obeying his commands, and performing his errands, Psa 8:8.

But now we see not yet all things put under him; it is evident to our sense and experience, that though he hath obtained this sovereign dominion over all on his ascension, yet he hath not exerted his power in utterly subjecting and triumphing over his enemies at present, nor in reducing all his own people to subjection to him; yet this shall be gradually done in every age, and completely when he shall come to be glorified in his saints, to punish his enemies with everlasting destruction, 1Co 15:24,26; 2Th 1:7-10; Rev 20:11-15.

Fuente: English Annotations on the Holy Bible by Matthew Poole

8. (1Co15:27.)

For in thatthat is,”For in that” God saith in the eighth Psalm, “Heput the all things (so the Greek, the all things justmentioned) in subjection under him (man), He left nothing . . . As nolimitation occurs in the sacred writing, the “all things”must include heavenly, as well as earthly things (compare 1Co 3:21;1Co 3:22).

But nowAs things noware, we see not yet the all things put under man.

Fuente: Jamieson, Fausset and Brown’s Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible

Thou hast put all things in subjection under his feet,…. Good angels, men and devils, all things in heaven, earth, and sea; see 1Pe 3:22

for in that he put all in subjection under him, he left nothing that is not put under him; there is no one person or thing that is not subject to Christ; the subjection is the most universal, either voluntary or involuntary; whether they will or not, they are, and must be subject; God has left nothing but what he has put under his power:

but now we see not yet all things put under him; this seems to be an objection, and even a contradiction to what is before said; which may be removed by observing, that though this general subjection is not seen by us, it does not follow that it is not; and though it is not as yet visible, yet it will be: and besides, the apostle’s sense may be, that no such general subjection to any mere man has ever been seen and known; as not to Solomon, nor Ahasuerus, nor Cyrus, nor Alexander the great, nor Julius, nor Augustus Caesar, nor any other; and this he may observe, to show the non-application of this passage to any but to Jesus Christ; and this sense is confirmed by what follows.

Fuente: John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible

In that he subjected ( ). First aorist active articular infinitive of in the locative case, “in the subjecting.”

He left (). First aorist active indicative (kappa aorist) of .

Nothing that is not subject to him ( ). Later verbal of with privative. Here in passive sense, active sense in 1Ti 1:9. Man’s sovereignty was meant to be all-inclusive including the administration of “the world to come.” “He is crowned king of nature, invested with a divine authority over creation” (Moffatt). But how far short of this destiny has man come!

But now we see not yet ( ). Not even today in the wonderful twentieth century with man’s triumphs over nature has he reached that goal, wonderful as are the researches by the help of telescope and microscope, the mechanism of the airplane, the submarine, steam, electricity, radio.

Fuente: Robertson’s Word Pictures in the New Testament

For [] . Explanatory. Thou hast put all things in subjection under his feet, that is to say, nothing is excepted. That is not put under him [ ] . Lit. “unsubjected to him.” The adjective only here and 1Ti 1:9; Tit 1:6. But this ideal is not yet a reality. We see not yet all things subjected to him, but we do see the germinal fulfillment of the prophecy in Jesus ‘ life, suffering, and death.

Fuente: Vincent’s Word Studies in the New Testament

1)“Thou hast put aII things in subjection under his feet,” (panta hupetaksas hupokato ton podon autou) “Thou subjectest all things under his feet,” under his dominion or jurisdiction, Gen 1:20-30; Gen 9:23. Man was created to govern the earth, which habitation Satan deserted and cast into chaos, Eze 18:11-18; Rom 8:20-23.

2) “For in that he put all in subjection under him,” (ento gar hupotaksai (auto) ta panta) “For in the subjecting to him all things; All the earth and its lakes, rivers, tributaries, forests, mountains and valleys, and every living creature for food or service was placed or given for man’s use or disposal, Gen 1:26-30; Gen 9:2-3; Psa 8:6.

3) “He left nothing that is not put under him,” (ouden apheken auto anupotakton) “He left not one thing unsubjected to him; negatively, the writer asserts that nothing in, on, or of the world was withheld from the honor and glory of man’s jurisdiction, dominion, or government of and over it, in the purpose and will of God.

4) “But now we see not yet all things put under him,” (nun de oupo horomen auto ta panta hupotetagmena) “But now (and hereafter) we (do) not yet observe all things having been subjected to him;” as they shall be one day after Jesus comes, 1Co 3:21-23; 1Co 15:23-28.

Fuente: Garner-Howes Baptist Commentary

8. For in that he put all in subjection under him; or, doubtless in subjecting all things to him, etc. One might think the argument to be this, — “To the man whom David speaks all things are subjected, but to mankind all things are not made subject; then he does not speak of any individual man.” But this reasoning cannot stand, for the minor proposition is true also of Christ; for all things are not as yet made subject to him, as Paul shows in 1Co 15:28. There is therefore another sentence; for after having laid down this truth, that Christ has universal dominion over all creatures, he adds, as an objection, “But all things do not as yet obey the authority of Christ.” To meet this objection he teaches us that yet now is seen completed in Christ what he immediately adds respecting glory and honor, as if he had said, “Though universal subjection does not as yet appear to us, let us be satisfied that he has passed through death, and has been exalted to the highest state of honor; for that which is as yet wanting, will in its time be completed.”

But first, this offends some, that the Apostle concludes with too much refinement, that there is nothing not made subject to Christ, as David includes all things generally; for the various kinds of things which he enumerates afterwards prove no such thing, such as beasts of the field, fishes of the sea, and birds of the air. To this I reply, that a general declaration ought not to be confined to these species, for David meant no other thing than to give some instances of his power over things the most conspicuous, or indeed to extend it to things even the lowest, that we may know that nothing is ours except through the bounty of God and our union with Christ. We may, therefore, explain the passage thus, — “Thou hast made subject to him all things, not only things needful for eternal blessedness, but also such inferior things as serve to supply the wants of the body.” However this may be, the inferior dominion over animals depends on the higher.

It is again asked, “Why does he say that we see not all things made subject to Christ?” The solution of this question you will find in that passage already quoted from Paul; and in the first chapter of this Epistle we said a few things on the subject. As Christ carries on war continually with various enemies, it is doubtless evident that he has no quiet possession of his kingdom. He is not, however, under the necessity of waging war; but it happens through his will that his enemies are not to be subdued till the last day, in order that we may be tried and proved by fresh exercises.

Fuente: Calvin’s Complete Commentary

(8) Thou hast put . . .There is in the Greek a studious repetition of the leading word, which should not be lost in translation: Thou didst subject all things under his feet. For in subjecting all things to him, He left nothing unsubjected to him. But now we see not yet all things subjected to him.

For in that . . .The assertion of Heb. 2:5 is established by this Scripture; for if God has thus declared all things subject to man, there is nothing that did not fall under his rule. Did not, in the divine purpose; but this purpose is not yet fulfilled in regard to the race of man.

Fuente: Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers (Old and New Testaments)

8. Left nothing The supremacy was complete, leaving no exception, and no rebellion such as sin afterwards produced, and as exists in the now of the following sentence.

But now Since the fall, and before the renovation.

Not yet As will be in the renewal.

Fuente: Whedon’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

‘For in that he subjected all things to him, he left nothing that is not subject to him. But now we see not yet all things subjected to him.’

Indeed God did not intend to withhold anything from man. He intended to give him all, He would have omitted nothing. His purpose was to subject ‘all things’ to him. Man on earth was to be ‘lord of all’. Nothing was to be left which was not subject to him.

And that was how it was in the beginning. Man was lord over all creation. But through his folly man had lost much of what he had. ‘All things’ became no longer subject to him. The snake became his enemy. The earth was apportioned to angels (see on Heb 2:5). Man’s rule over living creatures, and over the fruit of the world that God gave him, was partially lost. So now we no longer ‘continually see’ all things subjected to him, even though there are still traces of his one time rule in that animals still cannot look him in the eye, some animals are domesticated and part of the earth is still cultivated.

But the writer sees a deeper significance in the words, in the light of what he knows. He notes that here in the Psalm ‘all things’ is not qualified in any way. And ‘all things’ can include both heaven and earth (Heb 2:10). So he writes that while God did subject all things on earth to man (Gen 1:28-30), and left nothing that was not subject to him, He had not yet subjected ‘all things’ without exception to him, even when he was in innocence. For God’s purpose for man was greater than he knew. Man’s final triumph still awaits. There was not only to be a restoration, but an exaltation. His real destiny still lies before him. And this, he next points out, is to be through Jesus.

Fuente: Commentary Series on the Bible by Peter Pett

Heb 2:8 . ] All things didst Thou put in subjection under His feet . In the psalm these words refer to the dominion which God has conferred upon man over the earth, and indeed specially (comp. Psa 8:8-9 [7, 8]) over the whole animal world. The author of the epistle, on the other hand, taking in the absolute sense, understands them of the dominion over the universe which has been conferred upon Christ, the Son of man. Comp. Mat 28:18 .

With the author still dwells on the closing words of the citation: . . ., in order by way of elucidation to unfold its contents, and thus to place in clearer light the truth of the main thought expressed Heb 2:5-8 . consequently refers back to that which immediately precedes, and the supposition of Tholuck that . . ., as the clause which affords the proof, is parenthetically preposed to the . . ., as the clause which is to be proved, so that the connection would be: “but now we see not yet all things made subject to Him; for, according to the declaration of the psalm , all things without exception are subject to Him” is to be rejected as entirely unnecessary; quite apart from the fact that no instance of such parenthetical preposing of an elucidatory clause with is to be found anywhere in the N. T. (not in Joh 4:44-45 either), although not rare with classical writers (comp. Hartung, Partikell . I. p. 467; Khner, Gramm . II. p. 454). Nor does stand for (Heinrichs, Stengel), but is the explicative namely . The subject in , further, is not David , the singer of the psalm (Heinrichs), but God ; and the emphasis rests upon the opposition between and . The threefold , finally, relates not to man in general (Beza [Piscator: the believers ], Schlichting, Grotius, Owen, Whitby, Storr, Kuinoel, Ebrard, Delitzsch, Alford, Moll, Hofmann, Woerner, and others), but to the Son of man , and that not merely as regards its signification (Masch, Bleek, de Wette), but as is shown by the , only incidentally added, Heb 2:9 to the Son of man as He appeared in Christ as an historical person (Calvin, Gerhard, Calov, Seb. Schmidt, Wittich, Peirce, Schulz, Tholuck, Klee, Stuart, Conybeare, Riehm, Lehrbegr. des Hebrerbr . p. 364; Kurtz, Ewald, al .). The sense is accordingly: by the fact, namely, that God made all things subject to Christ, the Son of man, He left nothing that is not subjected unto Him; it is thus also this natural inference the author leaves to the readers themselves to make to Him, the Son of man, and not to the angels, that (Heb 2:5 ), which is only a part of that , is subjected; nay, the angels themselves, seeing that all things have been put in subjection under Him, are themselves subject to Him.

With the author limits the immediately preceding declaration by an admission, by which, however, as is then further shown, Heb 2:9 , the correctness of the former assertion as to the actual state of the matter suffers no infringement: now , however, that must be conceded, we see not yet all things subjected unto Him. For we are as yet in the condition of the earthly body; as yet the kingdom of God is only partially established; as yet it has to wage warfare with many enemies (comp. Heb 10:12-13 ; 1Co 15:24-27 ). We shall see that all things have been made subject to Christ by God the Father only when Christ shall have returned for the consummation of the kingdom of God.

Fuente: Heinrich August Wilhelm Meyer’s New Testament Commentary

8 Thou hast put all things in subjection under his feet. For in that he put all in subjection under him, he left nothing that is not put under him. But now we see not yet all things put under him.

Ver. 8. Under his feet ] It is not said, under his hands, but under his feet: 1. That he may trample upon them with his feet, and not dote upon them with his heart. 2. That by them, as by a step or stirrup, he may raise his heart to things above. A sanctified fancy can make every creature a ladder to heaven.

He left nothing ] No, not angels.

Not yet all things put under him ] The creature rebelleth against man, because he rebelleth against God. a If the master be set upon, the servants will draw, and fight for him.

a Rebellis facta est, quia homo numini, creatura homini. Aug.

Fuente: John Trapp’s Complete Commentary (Old and New Testaments)

8 .] thou didst put (the Heb. is perfect : on which Hupfeld remarks, “The imperf. is at first continued from the foregoing verses, but in the concluding sentence all is finished with the perfect , and treated as a standing arrangement and permanent ordering of things: ‘all things hast thou put under his feet.’ ” So that our E. V., though imperfectly representing the Greek, is true to the original Heb.) all things under his feet (these words form in the Heb. and LXX the second member of a parallelism, the first of which, , is found indeed in our rec. text, but (see var. readd.) must be omitted on critical principles. The probable cause why the Writer omitted it, has been discussed by Bleek. He thinks that it was unnecessary to the argumentation, the latter clause expressing more definitely the same thing. This he gathers, believing the whole to apply to our Saviour: but the same will hold good on our understanding of the passage also.

The words themselves are plain. Universal dominion is bestowed on man by his constitution as he came from God. That that bestowal has never yet been realized, is the next step of the argument: the Redeemer being at present kept out of sight, but by and by to be introduced as the real fulfiller of this high destiny of man, and on that account, incarnate in man’s nature. It is, as Ebrard remarks, astonishing that a thorough Commentator like Bleek should have so entirely misread and misunderstood the logical connexion of so clear a passage: while he himself confesses, that it looks as if the Person were first introduced in Heb 2:9 , to whom Heb 2:6-7 , have been pointing: and yet denies that in Heb 2:6 f. can mean ‘mankind.’ Besides all other objections, on Bleek’s view, the question . . . loses all appropriate meaning. The connexion was first laid out by Hofmann, Weissag. u. Erfll. ii. 23 ff.: Schriftbeweis i. 185 188; ii. 1. 38 ff., and is adopted by Ebrard and Delitzsch).

For (Bleek thinks that the rather repeats the former , Heb 2:5 , than has any logical force of its own here. This peculiar use of , he says, is characteristic of our Epistle: see ch. Heb 4:2-3 ; Heb 4:15 ; Heb 5:1 ; Heb 7:12-13 ; see his vol. i. p. 330. Hofmann however protests strongly against this view (Weissag. ii. 26, &c. as above), holding the to be ratiocinative, and justificative of the Psalm, as referring back to Gen 1:28 to substantiate the . But, as Delitzsch remarks, this would be but to prove idem per idem ; for the itself necessarily refers back to Gen 1:28 . He therefore prefers Bleek’s view, which is also that of Tholuck, De Wette, and Winer, that grounds, or rather begins to ground, that already asserted in Heb 2:5 ) in that he (viz. God: not the writer of the Psalm, as Heinrichs: unless indeed we are to understand to mean , as St. Paul expresses it 1Co 15:27 ; but the other is much simpler, more analogous to usage, and more in the sense of the Psalm, which is a direct address to God) put all things ( the universe : not , as before, merely, but ) under him (Man, again: not, Christ: see above, and remarks at the end of the verse) He left (aor. as in E. V.; not perfect, which would be ) nothing (“Nec clestia videtur excepisse nec terrestria,” Primasius: and so Estius, al. Possibly: and in the application itself, certainly: but we can hardly say that such was his thought here . The idea that angels are especially here intended, has arisen from that misconception of the connexion, which I have been throughout endeavouring to meet) unsubjected (see reff. where, as in , Symm. 1Ki 2:12 , it is in the sense of rebellious . The word belongs to later Greek: we have, Arrian, Epictet. ii. 10, (to the will of man) , . : Porphyr. Oneirocrit. 196, : Philo, Quis Rer. Div. Hr. 1, vol. i. p. 473. : and in Polyb. several times, , “narratio qu non habet notitiam antecedentem in animo discentis cui ceu fundamento et basi innitatur.” Casaubon) to him: but (contrast bringing out the exception) now (‘ut nunc est:’ in the present condition of things: not strictly temporal, but as the , ch. Heb 11:16 , and the , ch. Heb 9:26 ) we see not yet (cf. on the whole, 1Co 15:24-27 ) all things ( ., again) put under him (the in all three places referring to MAN: man has not yet attained his sovereignty. That the summing up of manhood in Christ is in the Writer’s mind, is evident throughout, and that he wishes it to be before his readers’ minds also; but the gradual introduction of the humiliation and exaltation of Christ in His humanity is marred by making all this apply personally to Him. Manhood, as such, is exalted to glory and honour, and waiting for its primval prerogative to be fully assured, but it is IN CHRIST, and in Him alone, that this is true: and in Him it is true, inasmuch as He, being of our flesh and blood, and having been Himself made perfect by sufferings, and calling us His brethren, can lead us up through sufferings into glory, freed from guilt by His sacrifice for our sins).

9 ] We do not see man, &c.: but ( , strong contrast again: ‘ but rather ’ see on Heb 2:6 ) him who is made (better than ‘ was ,’ or ‘ hath been, made ;’ His humanity in its abstract position being in view) a little (not necessarily, here either, of time (as Delitzsch here, though not above): nor are we at liberty to assume such a rendering: though of course it is difficult to say, when the same phrase has two analogous meanings both applicable, as this, how far the one may have accompanied the other in the Writer’s mind) lower than (the) angels, we behold (notice the difference between the half-involuntary above, the impression which our eyes receive from things around us, and the direction and intention of the contemplating eye (here, of faith: cf. ch. Heb 3:19 ; Heb 10:25 ) in ), ( namely ) Jesus (Lnemann is quite right against Ebrard here. The latter would take the words thus: “ But we behold Jesus (object) . . . (adjectival attribute to ), (predicate).” But this would be to throw into a position of emphasis: and would have been expressed . . ., or, . . . . . . As it is, , standing as it does behind the verb, is, as Lnem. well remarks, altogether unemphasized, and is merely an explicative addition, to make it clear who is intended by . . . So that this latter clause is the object, to . (see below) the predicate, and an appositional elucidation of the object. So Hofmann now , Schriftb. i. 187. Formerly he took it as Ebrard; Weissag. u. Erfll. ii. 28. Delitzsch takes as the object and . . . . as the appositional clause. But I prefer as above: see more below), on account of his suffering of death (it has been much doubted whether these words belong, 1. to the foregoing clause, . . ., or, 2. to the following, . . The former connexion is assumed without remark by the ancient Commentators: so Origen in Joann. tom. ii. 6 (vol. iv. p. 62), : Augustine, contra Maximin. ii. 25, vol. viii. (misquoted in Bleek), “Eum autem modico minus quam angelos minoratum vidimus Jesum propter passionem mortis. Non ergo propter naturam hominis, sed propter passionem mortis:” Chrys., Thdrt. (see below), (not Thl. as Bleek: see below), Beza, Schlichting, Justiniani, a-Lapide, Cameron (but interpreting it “per illud tempus quo passus est mortem”), Calov., Limborch, Owen, Michaelis, Baumgarten, Semler, Dindorf, Wakefield. And these interpret the words two ways: . on account of the suffering of death , i. e. because He has suffered death ( , , Thdrt.), thus making refer to the time of His sufferings and death, or as Chrys. ( ), al., to the three days of His being in the grave: . for the sake of the suffering of death , = . . So Aug [17] above, and most of the foregoing list.

[17] Augustine, Bp. of Hippo , 395 430

But, 2 . the latter connexion, with the following clause, is adopted by Theophylact (as Thl. has been said by Bleek to maintain the other connexion, I give his note entire: , , . , . , , , . , . , . , . . , , . , , . ; ; Here, although he partially adopts the notion of referring to the three days, it is evident both from the words which I have noted by different type, and by the application which he makes to ourselves, that he joins . . . with . , not with the preceding clause), Luther, Calvin, Estius, Grot., Seb.-Schmidt, Bengel, Wetst., Schulz, Bhme, Kuinoel, Bleek, Tholuck, Ebrard, Lnemann, Delitzsch, al.

The question must be determined by the arrangement of the words, and by the requirements of the context. And both these seem to require the latter, not the former connexion. The words . . . are emphatic; they are taken up again in the next sentence by (which words themselves are a witness that suffering and exaltation, not suffering and degradation, are here connected). But emphatic they could not be in the former connexion, coming as they would only as an explicatory clause, after . . Again, the former connexion hardly satisfies the with an accusative; certainly not if the sense ., because He has suffered death , be taken; and if the other, ., we should have expected rather ., or . Whereas the latter connexion entirely satisfies the context, the sufferings of Christ being treated of as necessary to His being our perfect Redeemer: entirely also fulfils the requirements of with an accusative; wherein, which is no small consideration in its favour, it is in strict analogy with the construction in ref. Phil., , . . . . And this connexion will be made even clearer by what will be said on the next clause, . . .), crowned with glory and honour (viz. at His exaltation, when God exalted Him to His right Hand: not, as some (e. g. Hofmann, ubi supra; see also Schriftbeweis i. 271, um des Todes willen ist Iesus mit der Berufsherrlichkeit und Berufsehre gekront ), at His incarnation, or His establishment as Saviour of the world: see above, Heb 2:7 ): in order that (how is this logically constructed? In answering the question, we may at once dismiss all impossible senses of , invented to escape the difficulty: such as the supposed ecbatic sense, “ so that ” (Erasm. (paraphr.), Valck., Kuinoel, &c.), “ postquam mortem gustavit,” Schleusner; &c. &c. has no such ecbatic sense any where: and its temporal sense is altogether unexampled with the subjunctive mood. It can have here none but its constant telic sense: ‘ in order that .’ And as to its dependence we must have recourse to no inversions of construction, but take it simply as we find it, however difficult. It depends then on the last clause, which clause it will be best to take in its entirety, . The full connexion we cannot enter into, till the three other questions arising out of our clause are disposed of: and ) by the grace of God (here comes into question the very important various reading , the authorities for which see in the digest. That it does not owe its origin to the Nestorians, whatever use they may have made of it, is evident from Origen reading and expounding it. In his time it was the prevalent reading, the present being found only . Theodoret here, and on Eph 1:10 (see below), knew of no other reading: nor did Ambrose, nor Fulgentius. Jerome on Gal 3:10 says, “Quia Christus gratia Dei , sive ut in quibusdam exemplaribus legitur, absque Deo , pro omnibus mortuus est.” In the Greek Church, the Nestorians mostly held fast to the old reading, as favouring their views. It may be well to cite Theophylact on this point: “ ,” , , . , , , , , . And similarly cumenius. In our copies of the Peschito this reading is not now found, but the passage runs “Nam ipse Deus per gratiam suam pro omni homine gustavit mortem” (“For He Aloha in his grace for every man hath tasted death,” Etheridge’s version): but (see digest) in certain mss., we have a combination of the readings, “Ipse enim excepto Deo per gratiam suam pro omni homine gustavit mortem,” [but this combination appears to be due to Editors only, and not to mss.] Bleek adduces, from the 8th century, Anastatius Abbas, a writer of Palestine: “Absque Deo: sola enim divina natura non egebat.” In modern times, the reading has been defended by Camerarius, Colomesius, Bengel, Ch. Fr. Schmid, Paulus, and more recently Ebrard and Baumgarten. Hofmann once defended it, Weissag. u. Erfll. i. 92; but has now given it up; Entstehungsgeschichte, u.s.w. p. 338. By those who have adopted it, it has been interpreted three different ways: 1. as Origen ( ), Thdrt. ( , . , ), Thl. and c. (hypothetically, see above), and Ebrard; and in a modification, Bengel and Schmid (“Omne, prter Deum, Christo subjectum est,’ Beng.: in accordance with 1Co 15:27 ). 2. as Ambrose, Fulgentius, and the Nestorians, and Colomesius (“Ut divinitate tantisper deposita, ut homo mortem subiret pro omnibus”). 3. as Paulus and Baumgarten, “forsaken of God,” as witnessed by the cry on the cross. In considering the probability of this reading, as to, . external evidence, and, . internal probability, it must, . be confessed, that such instances as this, where an important reading, prevalent in the early ages, is found only in two or three of our present mss., tend considerably to shake the trustworthiness of mere manuscript evidence as to the original text of the N. T., and to enhance the testimony of those sources which are anterior to any of our present MSS., viz. the earlier Fathers. In treating of ( ), we must deal with each of the assigned meanings separately. Of (1) it may be said, that however true in fact, the thought that Jesus died for every rational being ( as Origen), or for every thing (neut.), except God, is quite alien from the present context, where the sovereignty of MAN in the new world is the subject of man, in and through the Son of man, Jesus Christ: cf. the Heb 2:10 , Heb 2:12 ; &c. &c. And as to (2), it is even more alien from the context, as it also is from the N. T. Christology. We have no analogical expression whereby to justify it, nor any safeguard against such a view being carried out at once into the bi-personality of the Nestorians. It is hardly to be imagined that the Writer here, with no end in view at all requiring such a severance of the two natures in Christ, should thus gratuitously have introduced a sentiment of the most novel and startling character. And with regard to (3) it may well be said, that we have no right to press the exclamation of our Redeemer in His agony to so bare and strong a dogmatic fact as that He really was on the cross. We no where find Himself so speaking, nor His Apostles: nay the Writer of our Epistle would be the first to testify against such an understanding of his words: cf. ch. Heb 5:7 , and indeed our next verse here. So that it does not seem possible to assign to the words a meaning in accordance with the demands of the context, and the analogy of Scripture. This indeed would be no argument against a reading universally and unobjectionably attested by external authorities; but where no such attestation exists, may well be brought in to guide us to a decision. If so then, and we reject , how are we to understand the rec. reading, ? At all events we have strong Scripture analogy for such an expression. In Gal 2:21 , the Apostle’s confession of faith in the Son of God, he says, , . And in Rom 5:8 , we read, ( ), . And in Tit 2:11 , . So that, in point of meaning, no difficulty need be found in the words. It was by the love and grace, the and of the Father, that all Redemption was effected, and above all that one sacrifice which was the crowning act of Redemption. Bleek’s account of the origin of the reading in a mistake of a scribe, copying an illegible , and Origen’s possessing this copy or one made from it, and the further progress of the reading being due to his mention of it, is perhaps a shade more probable than that mentioned in the digest, but at the same time far from satisfactory.

I may mention, as a curious instance of the helplessness of those who read Scripture in a version only, that (see Bleek) Primasius and Thom. Aquinas, in the sentence “Ut gratia dei pro omnibus gustaret mortem,” take “gratia dei” as nominative, and interpret it as a title of Christ) He might for ( , ‘on behalf of,’ ‘for the benefit of:’ where this ordinary meaning of suffices, that of vicariousness must not be introduced. Sometimes, as e. g. 2Co 5:15 , it is necessary. But here clearly not, the whole argument proceeding not on the vicariousness of Christ’s sacrifice, but on the benefits which we derive from His personal suffering for us in humanity; not on His substitution for us, but on His community with us) every man (is neuter or masculine? and if the latter, to what to be referred? Origen (apparently, see above), Thdrt., c., Thl. (above), take it as neuter, and apply it either to all nature, or to all reasonable beings. The latter see discussed below. The former can hardly be here meant: for of such a doctrine, however true, there is no hint (see above on the reading , . 1). Then taking masculine, are we to understand it “ for every one, angels included? ” So Ebrard: but where do we find any such usage of , absolutely put as here? And where in this chapter again is any room for the position, that Christ suffered death for angels? In the logical course of the argument, we have done with them, and are now treating of man, and of Him who was made man to be our High Priest and advocate. And therefore of none other than man can this word be here meant, in accordance indeed with its universal usage elsewhere. If it be asked, why rather than , we may safely say, that the singular brings out, far more strongly than the plural would, the applicability of Christ’s death to each individual man : and we may say that this again testifies to the sense ‘every man,’ as there would be no such reason for individualizing other rational beings, as there is for shewing that the whole nature of man, to which this promise of sovereignty is given, is penetrated by the efficacy of Christ’s death) taste of death (reff. and so frequently in the classics with other substantives, e. g. Soph. Trach. 1103, Pind. Nem. v. 596, Eurip. Alcest. 1069, Hecub. 379, , Homer, , Herod. iv. 147; vi. 5, but never with . So that Bleek infers it has come into the N. T. diction from the Heb. phrase, which is not uncommonly found in the Rabbinical writings. Some have seen in the phrase an allusion to the shortness and transitoriness of the Lord’s death: so Chrys., , , , . , , : then, comparing Christ to a physician who first tastes his medicines to encourage the sick man to take them, adds, , , , , . And so Thl. and c., , . And so many other Commentators, among whom Beza and Bengel find also the verity of His Death indicated in the words. But it is well answered (not by Calvin, as Bleek; for he says, “Quod Chrysostomus gustare mortem exponit, quasi summis labris delibare, eo quod Christus victor e morte emerserit, non refello neque improbo, quanquam nescio an adeo subtiliter loqui voluerit apostolus”), that in none of the places where the phrase appears, either in the N. T. or in the Rabbinical writings, does any such meaning appear to be conveyed. Nor again can we, as Bleek himself, understand the implication to be that Christ underwent all the bitterness of death. But, as has been just before mentioned, I cannot help regarding its position here behind the verb as throwing that verb into some little prominence, as itself is this second time in a place of insignificance. Thus viewed, the phrase falls into exact accord with the general argument of the passage, that it became Christ, in order to be the great and merciful High Priest of humanity, to be perfected through human sufferings: and it forms in fact the first mention of this idea, and prepares the way for which follows. I would say then, that must be regarded as slightly emphatic, and as implying the personal undergoing of death and entering into its suffering. And I doubt much, whether it will not be found that in the other passages where the phrase occurs, this personal suffering of death, though not boldly prominent, is yet within view, and agreeable to the context.

And now, having considered the three points, and , we return again to the question of the connexion of the , with which this clause begins. We before stated that, avoiding all tortuous and artificial arrangements, we find it dependent on the former clause . . This exaltation, being the (see Heb 2:10 ) of Christ, was arrived at , and both by means of and on account of, His suffering of death. And this exaltation has made Him the divine Head of our humanity the channel of grace, and the . Without His exaltation, his death would not have been effectual. Unless he had been crowned with glory and honour, received to the right hand of the Father, and set in expectation of all things being put under his feet, His death could not have been, for every man, the expiation to him of his own individual sin. On the triumphant issue of His sufferings, their efficacy depends. And this I believe is what the sacred Writer meant to express. His glory was the consequence of His suffering of death; arrived at through His suffering: but the applicability of His death to every man is the consequence of His constitution in Heaven as the great High Priest, in virtue of his blood carried into the holy place, and the triumphant Head of our common humanity: which common humanity of Him and ourselves now becomes the subject of further elucidation).

Fuente: Henry Alford’s Greek Testament

Heb 2:8 . . “Thou didst put all things under his feet.” In the psalm “all things” are defined as “all sheep and oxen, yea and the beasts of the field, the fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passes through the paths of the sea”. But to our author the scope of the “all” has been enlarged by the event. His argument requires an absolutely universal subjection, so that everything obstructive of man’s “glory” may be subdued. And having seen this achieved by Christ, he is emboldened to give to “all” this fullest content. The one point he seeks to make good is that “in subjecting all things to him, he has left nothing, and therefore not the , unsubjected to him”. The “world to come” is under human dominion and administration. The angels are left behind; there is no room for angelic government. But this very sovereignty of man is precisely that which we do not see visibly fulfilled: “for the present ( ) we do not yet see all things subjected to him”. True, says the author, but we do see Jesus who for the suffering of death (or that He might suffer death) has been made a little lower than angels, crowned with glory and honour that by God’s grace He might taste death for every man. In other words, we see the first two items of man’s supremacy, as given in the psalm, fulfilled, and the third guaranteed. Jesus was (1) made a little lower than angels; (2) was crowned with glory and honour; and (3) by dying for every man has removed that last obstacle, the fear of death which kept men in and hindered them from supreme dominion over all things. The construction of the sentence is much debated. But it must be admitted that any construction which makes the coronation subsequent to the tasting death for every man, is unnatural; the depends upon . And the difficulty which has been felt in giving its natural sense to this clause has been introduced by supposing that . refers to the heavenly state of Jesus. On this understanding it is of course difficult to see how it could be said that Jesus was crowned in order to taste death. But as undoubtedly the first clause, , refers to the earthly life of Jesus, it is natural to suppose that the second clause, which speaks of his being crowned, also refers to that life. The tenses are the same. But if so, what was the crowning here referred to? It was His recognition as Messiah, as the true Head and King of men. He was thus recognised by God at His baptism and at the Transfiguration [in connection with which the same words . are used, 2Pe 1:16-18 ] as well as by His disciples at Caesarea Philippi. It was this crowning alone which enabled Him to die a representative death, the King or Head for His people; it was this which fitted Him to taste death for every man. He was made a little lower than the angels that He might suffer death; but He was crowned with glory and honour that this very death might bring all men to the glory of supremacy which was theirs when the fear of death was removed; see Heb 2:14-15 . For a fuller exposition of this view of the verse, see Expository Times , April, 1896. , “by God’s grace,” to men, not directly to Jesus. It is remarkable that Weiss, an expert in textual criticism, should adopt the reading “apart from God” finding in these words a reference to the cry on the cross “My God, My God, etc.”. The other meaning put upon the words, “except God,” needs no comment. The Nestorians used the reading to prove that Christ suffered apart from His Divinity (“divinitate tantisper deposita ”) but such a meaning can hardly be found in the words. , these are the emphatic words, bringing out the writer’s point that Christ’s victory and supremacy were not for Himself alone, but for men. [Chrysostom strikingly says: , , ; .] “he might taste death,” i.e. , actually experience death’s bitterness. The Greek commentators suppose the word is chosen to bring out the shortness of our Lord’s experience of death, . This seems incorrect. [The rule, sometimes laid down., that followed by an accusative means to partake freely, and by a genitive sparingly, cannot be universally applied. The ordinary distinction observed in the use of verbs of sense that they take the accusative of the nearer, the genitive of the remoter source of the sensation is much safer.] The expression does not occur in the classics, although we find . in Soph., Trachin. , 1103, where the Scholiast renders by , in Antig. , 1005, where Jebb renders “proceeded to make trial of,” in Eurip., Hecuba , 375, with and in Plato, Rep. , 475 with .

Fuente: The Expositors Greek Testament by Robertson

Hebrews

MANHOOD CROWNED IN JESUS

Heb 2:8-9

ONE of our celebrated astronomers is said to have taught himself the rudiments of his starry science when lying on the hill-side, keeping his father’s sheep. Perhaps the grand psalm to which these words refer had a similar origin, and may have come from the early days of the shepherd king, when, like those others of a later day, he abode in the field of Bethlehem, keeping watch over his flock by night. The magnificence of the Eastern heavens, with their ‘larger constellations burning,’ filled his soul with two opposite thoughts – man’s smallness and man’s greatness. I suppose that in a mind apt to pensive reflections, alive to moral truths, and responsive to the impressions of God’s great universe, the unscientific contemplation of any of the grander forms of nature produces that double effect. And certainly the grandest of them all, which is spread over our heads, little as we dwellers in cities can see the heavens for daily smoke and nightly lamps, forces both these thoughts upon us. They seem so far above us, they swim into their stations night after night, and look down with cold, unchanging beauty on sorrow, and hot strife, and shrieks, and groans, and death. They are so calm, so pure, so remote, so eternal. Thus David felt man’s littleness. And yet – and yet, bigness is not greatness, and duration is not life, and the creature that knows God is highest. So the consciousness of man’s separation from, and superiority to these silent stars, springs up strong and victorious over the other thought. Remember that, in David’s time, the nations near, who were believed to be the very centre of wisdom, had not got beyond the power of these impressions, but on Chaldean plains worshipped the host of heaven. The psalm then is a protest against the most fascinating, and to David’s age the most familiar form of idolatry. These great lights are not rulers, but servants; we are more than they, because we have spirits which link us with God. Then, kindling as he contemplates man as God meant him to be, the poet bursts into rapturous celebration of man’s greatness in these respects – that he is visited by God, capable of divine communion, and a special object of divine care; that he is only lower than the loftiest. and that but in small degree and in one specific respect. because they, in their immortal strength, are not entangled in flesh as we; that over all others of God’s creatures on earth he is king.‘Very fine words,’ may be fairly said; ‘but do they correspond to facts? What manhood are you talking about? Where is this being, so close to God, so lowly before Him, so firmly lord of all besides?’ That is the question which the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews deals with in our text. He has quoted the psalm as an illustration of his thesis that Christ, and we in Christ, are exalted above angels, and then he proceeds to admit that, as a matter of fact, men are not what David describes them as being. But the psalm is not, therefore, an exaggeration, nor a dream, nor a mere ideal of the imagination. True, as a matter of fact, men are not all this. But as a matter of fact Jesus Christ is, and in His possession of all that the psalm painted our possession is commenced and certified. It is an ideal picture, but it is realised in Jesus, and having been so in Him, we have ground to believe that it will be so in us. We see not yet all things put under man – alas no, but-we see Jesus crowned with glory and honour; and as He tasted death for every man, so in His exaltation He is prophecy and pledge that the grand old words shall one day be fulfilled in all their height and depth. The text, then, brings before us a threefold sight. It bids us look around, and if that sadden us, it bids us look up, and thence it bids us draw confidence to look forward. There is an estimate of present facts, there is a perception by faith of the unseen fact of Christ’s glory, and there follows from that the calm prospect for the future for ourselves and for our brethren. Let us deal with these considerations in order. I. Look at the sight around us. ‘We see not yet all things put under man.’ Where are the men of whom any portion of the psalmist’s words is true? Look at them – are these the men of whom he sings? Visited by God I crowned with glory and honour! having dominion over the works of His hands! Is this irony or fact? Let consciousness speak. Look at ourselves. If that psalm be God’s thought of man, the plan that He hangs up for us His workmen to build by, what a wretched thing my copy of it has turned out to be! Is this a picture of me? How seldom I am conscious of the visits of God; how full I am of weaknesses and imperfections – the solemn voice within me tells me at intervals when I listen to its tones. On my brow there gleams no diadem; from my life, alas! there shines at the best but a fitful splendour of purity, all striped with solid masses of blackness. And as for dominion over creatures, how superficial my rule over them, how real their rule over me! I can tame animals or slay them; I can use the forces of nature for my purposes; I can make machinery, and bid the lightning do my errands and carry messages, the burden of which is mostly money, or power, or sorrow. But all these, and the whole set of things like them, are not ruling over God’s creation. That consists in using all for God, and for our own growth in wisdom, strength, and goodness; and he only is master of all things who is servant of God. ‘All are yours, and ye are Christ’s.’ If so, what are most of us but servants, not lords, of earth and its goods? We fasten our very lives on them, we tremble at the bare thought of losing them, we give our best efforts to get them – we say to the fine gold, ‘Thou art my confidence.’ We do not possess them, they possess us: and so, though materially we may have conquered the earth and wonderfully proud of it we are now, spiritually, which is the same as to say really, the earth has conquered us. The same impression of human incompleteness is made by all the records of human lives which we possess. Go into a library, and take down volume after volume-the biographies and autobiographies of the foremost men, the saints and sages whom we all reverence. Is there one on whose monument the old psalm could truthfully be written? Are not the honest autobiographies what one of the noblest of them is called, ‘Confessions’? Are not the memoirs the stories of flawed excellence, stained purity, limited wisdom? There are no perfect men in them – no men after the pattern of David’s words. Or if some enthusiastic admirer has drawn a picture without shadows, we feel that it is without life or likeness; and we look for faults and limitations that we may be sure of brotherhood. And if we take a wider range, and listen to the sad voice of history chronicling the past, where in all her tragic story of bright hopes brought to nothing, of powers built up by force and rotted down by pride and selfishness, of war and wrong, of good painfully sought, and partially possessed, and churlishly treasured, and quickly lost – where on all her blotted pages, stained with tears, and sweat, and blood, do we find a record that verifies the singer’s rapture, and shows us men like this of the Psalm?

Or let observation speak. Bring Before your minds, by an exercise of imagination vivifying and uniting into one impression, the facts which we all know of the social and moral condition – to say nothing now of the religious state – of any country upon earth. Think of the men in all lands who are helpless, hopeless, full of animal sins and lusts, full of stupid ignorance. Take our psalm and read it in some gaol, or in a lunatic asylum, or at the door of some gin-palace, or at the mouth of a court in the back streets of any city in England, and ask yourselves, ‘Are these people, with narrow foreheads and villainous scowls, with sodden cheeks and foul hands, the fulfilment or the contradiction of its rapturous words?’ Or think of naked savages, who look up to bears and lions as their masters, who are stunted by cold or enervated by heat, out of whose souls have died all memories beyond yesterday’s hunger, and all hopes greater than a full meal to-morrow – and say if these are God’s men. So little are they like it that some of us are ready to say that they are not men at all.

What then? Are we to abandon in despair our hopes for our fellows, and to smile with quiet incredulity at the rhapsodies of sanguine theorists like David? If we are to confine our view to earth – yes. But there is more to see than the sad sights around us. All these men – these imperfect, degraded, half-brutified men – have their share in our psalm. They have gone out and wasted their substance in riotous living; but from the swine- trough and the rags they may come to the best robe and the feast in the father’s house. The veriest barbarian, with scarcely a spark of reason or a flickering beam of conscience, sunken in animal delights, and vibrating between animal hopes and animal fears rote him may belong the wondrous attributes: to be visited by God, crowned with glory and honour, higher than all stars, and lord of all creatures. It sounds like a wild contradiction, I know: and I do not in the least wonder that people pressed by a sense of all the misery that is done under the sun, and faintly realising for themselves Christ’s power to heal their own misery and cleanse their own sins, should fling away their Bibles, and refuse to believe that ‘God hath made of one blood all nations of men,’ and that Christ has a message for the world. I venture to believe both the one and the other. I believe that though angels weep, and we should be smitten with shame, at the sight of what man has made of man, and we of ourselves, yet that God will be true though every man fail Him, and will fulfil unto the children the mercy which He has promised to the fathers.

‘All the promises of God in Christ are yea,’ And so against all the theories of the desperate school, and against all our own despondent thoughts, we have to oppose the sunny hopes which come from such words as those of our text. Looking around us, we have indeed to acknowledge with plaintive emphasis, ‘we see not yet all things put under Him’ – but, looking up, we have to add with triumphant confidence that we speak of a fact which has a real bearing on our hopes for men – ‘we see Jesus.’ II. So, secondly, look upwards to Jesus. Christ in glory appears to the author of this epistle to be the full realisation of the psalmist’s ideal Our text deals only with the exalted dignity and present majesty of the ascended Lord; but before touching upon that, we may venture, for a moment, to dwell upon the past of Christ’s life as being also the carrying out of David’s vision of true manhood. We have to look backward as well as upward if we would have a firm hope for men. The ascended Christ upon the throne, and the historical Christ upon the earth, teach us what man may be, the one in regard to dignity, the other in regard to goodness. Here is a fact. Such a life was verily once lived on earth; a life of true manhood, whatever more it was. In it we may see two things: first, we may see from His perfect purity what it is possible for man to become; and second, we may see from His experience who said, ‘The Father hath not left Me alone, because I do always the things which please Him,’ how close a fellowship is possible between the human spirit that lives for and by obedience, and the Father of us all. The man Christ Jesus was visited by God, yea, God dwelt with Him ever; whatever more He was – and He was infinitely more – He was also our example of communion, as He was our example of righteousness. And that life is to be our standard. I refuse to take other men, the highest, as specimens of what we may become. I refuse to take other men, the lowest, as instances of what we are condemned to be. Here in Jesus Christ is the type; and, albeit it is alone in its beauty, yet it is more truly a specimen of manhood than the fragmentary, distorted, incomplete men are who are found everywhere besides. Christ is the power to conform us to Himself, as well as the pattern of what we may be. He and none lower, He and none beside, is the pattern man. Not the great conqueror, nor the great statesman, nor the great thinker, but the great Lover, the perfectly good – is the man as God meant him to be. As it has been said, with pardonable extravagance, ‘Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam,’ so in sober truth we may affirm that the noblest and fairest characters, approximating as they may to the picture in the psalm, and giving us some reason to hope that more is possible for us than we sometimes think, are after all but fragments of precious stones as compared with that one entire and perfect chrysolite, whose unflawed beauty and completeness drinks in, and flashes forth, the whole light of God. He is not ashamed to call us brethren. Therefore, if we would know what a man is, and what a man may become, let us not only look inward to our own faults, nor around us at these broken bits of goodness, but let us look back to Christ, and be of good cheer. We hear and see more than enough of men’s folly, stupidity, godlessness, and sin. Nevertheless – we see Jesus. Let us have hope. But turn now to the consideration of what is more directly intended by our text, namely, the contemplation of Christ in the heavens, ‘crowned with glory and honour,’ as the true type of man. What does Scripture teach us to see in the exalted Lord? It sets before us, first, a perpetual manhood. The whole force of the words before us depends on the assumption that, in all His glory and dominion, Jesus Christ remains what He was on earth, truly and properly man. There is a strong tendency in many minds to think of Christ’s incarnation and humanity as transitory. I do not mean that such a conception is thrown into articulate form as a conscious article of belief, but it haunts people none the less, and gives a feeling of unreality and remoteness to what the Scripture says of our Lord’s present life. Many believers in the eternal existence and divinity of our Lord think of His incarnation much after the fashion in which heathendom conceived that the gods came down in the likeness of men – as if it were a mere transitory appearance, the wearing of a garb of human nature but for a moment. Whereas the Biblical representation is that for evermore, by an indissoluble union, the human is assumed into the divine, and that ‘to-day and for ever’ He remains the man Christ Jesus. Nor is a firm grasp of that truth of small importance, nor is the truth itself a theological subtlety, without bearing upon human interests and practical life. Rather it is the very hinge on which turn our loftiest hopes. Without it, that mighty work which He ever carries on, of succouring them that are tempted, and having compassion with us, were impossible. Without that permanent manhood, His mighty work of preparing a place for us, and making heaven a home for men because a Man is its Lord, were at an end. Without it, He in His glory would be no prophecy of man’s dominion, nor would He have entered for us into the holy place. Grasp firmly the essential, perpetual manhood of Jesus Christ, and then to see Him crowned with glory and honour gives the triumphant answer to the despairing question that rises often to the lips of every one who knows the facts of life, ‘Wherefore hast Thou made all men in vain?’ Again, we see in Jesus, exalted in the heavens, a corporeal manhood. That thought touches upon very dark subjects, concerning which Scripture says little, and no other voice says anything at all. The resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ are our great reasons for believing that man, in his perfect condition, has body as well as spirit. And that belief is one chief means of giving definiteness and reality to our anticipations of a future life. Without the belief of a corporeal manhood, the unseen world becomes vague and shapeless, is taken out of the range of our faculties altogether, and soon becomes powerless to hold its own against the pressure of palpable, present realities. But we see Jesus – ascended up on high in man’s body. Therefore He is somewhere now. Heaven is a place as well as a state; and however, for the present, the souls that sleep in Jesus may have to ‘wait for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of the body,’ and, being unclothed, may be wrapped about with Him and rest in His bosom, yet the perfect men who shall one day stand before the Lord, shall have body and soul and spirit – like Him Who is a man for ever, and for ever wears a human frame. Further, we see in Jesus transfigured manhood. Once when He was on earth, as some hidden light breaks through all veils, the pent-up glory of the great ‘God with us’ seemed to stream through His flesh, and tinge with splendour even the skirts of His garments. ‘He was transfigured before them,’ not as it would appear by light reflected from above, hut by radiance up-bursting from within. And besides all its other lessons, that solemn hour on the Mount of Transfiguration gave some small hint and prelude of the possibilities of glory that lay hidden in Christ’s material body, which possibilities become realities after though not, in His case, be death; when He ascended up on high, beautiful and changed, being clothed with ‘the body of His glory.’ For Him, as for us, flesh here means weakness and dishonour. For us, though not for Him, flesh means corruption and death. For Him, as for us, that natural body, which was adequate to the needs and adapted to the material constitution of this earth, must be changed into the spiritual body correspondent to the conditions of that kingdom of God which flesh and blood cannot enter. For us, through Him, the body of humiliation shall be changed into likeness of the body of His glory. We see Jesus, and in Him manhood transfigured and perfected. Finally, we see in Jesus sovereign manhood. The psalmist thought of man as crowned with glory and honour, as having dominion over the works of God’s hands. And here is his thought embodied in far higher manner than ever he imagined possible. Here is a man exalted to absolute, universal dominion. The sovereignty of Jesus Christ is not a metaphor, nor a rhetorical hyperbole. It is, it we believe the New Testament writers, a literal, prose fact. He directs the history of the world, and presides among the nations. He is the prince of all the kings of the earth. He wields the forces of nature, He directs the march of providence, He is Lord of the unseen worlds, and holds the keys of death and the grave. ‘ The government is upon His shoulders,’ and upon Him hangs ‘all the glory of His Father’s house.’ Angels served Him in His lowliness, and strengthened Him in His agony they watched His grave, and when He ascended on high, the multitudes of the heavenly hosts, even thousands of angels, were the chariot of the conquering Lord. Angels are His servants now, and all do worship Him. He holdeth the stars in His right hand, and all creatures gather obedient round His throne. His voice is law, His will is power. He says to this one ‘Go,’ and he goeth; He rebukes winds and seas, diseases and devils, and they obey; to all He says, ‘Do this,’ and they do it. He speaks, and it is done. ‘On His head are many crowns.’ Thou art the King of Glory, O Christ – and, seeing Jesus, we see man crowned with glory and honour.

III. Finally, then, look forward. Though it be only too true that the vision seems to tarry, and that weary centuries roll on, and bring us but so little nearer its accomplishment; though the fair promise, at which the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy, seems to have faded away; though the hope of the psalmist is yet unfulfilled; though the strain of a yet higher mood, proclaiming peace on earth, which later shepherds of Bethlehem heard from amid the silent stars, has died away, and the war shout lives on; still, in the strength which flows from seeing Jesus exalted, we can look for a certain future, wherein men. shall be all that God proposed, and all that their Saviour is. Rolling clouds hide the full view, but through them gleams the lustrous walls of the city which hath the foundations. We look forward, and we see men sharing in Christ’s glory, and gathered together round His throne. Christ is the measure of man’s capacities. He is the true pattern of human nature. Christ is the prophecy and pledge of man’s dominion. From Christ comes the power by which the prophecy is fulfilled, and the pattern reproduced in all who love Him. Whosoever is joined to Him receives into his soul that spirit of life in Christ which unfolds and grows according to its own law, and has for its issue and last result the entire conformity between the believing soul and the Saviour by whom it lives. It were a poor consolation to point to Christ and say, ‘Look what man has become and may become,’ unless we could also say, ‘A real and living oneness exists between Him and all who cleave to Him, so that their characters are changed, their natures cleansed, their future altered, their immortal beauty secured.’ He is more than pattern, He is power; more than specimen, He is source; more than example, He is redeemer. He has been made in the likeness of sinful flesh, that we may be in the likeness of His body of glory. He has been made ‘sin for us, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.’ His exaltation, if it were ever so much a fact, and ever so firmly believed, yields no basis for hope as to any beyond Himself, but on one supposition. To see man exalted and his glory ensured in Christ’s, the glory of Christ must be connected, as is done in our text, with His tasting death for every man. When I know that He has died for me, and for all my brethren who sit in darkness, and hear each other groan as the poison shoots through their veins, then I can feel that, as He has been in the likeness of our death, we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection. Brethren, the Cross, and the Cross alone, certifies our participation in the Crown. Unless Jesus Christ have and exercise that wondrous power of delivering from sin and self, and of quickening to a new life, which He exercises only as Sacrifice .and Saviour, there were nothing which were more irrelevant to the hopes of man’s future than the story of His purity and of His dominion. What were all that to men writhing with evil? What hope for single souls or for the world in the knowledge that He was good, or in the belief that He had gone up on high? If that were all, what would it all matter? The lack-lustre eyes that have grown wan with waiting will have no light of hope kindled in them by such a gospel as that. But bid them look, languid and weary as they are, to Him who is lifted up, that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish – that vision will give to the still loftier sight of Christ on the throne its true meaning, as not a barren triumph for Himself alone, but as victory for us – yea, our victory in Him. If we can say, ‘God, who is rich in mercy for His great love wherewith He loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together,’ then we can add, ‘and hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Jesus Christ,’ And what wonderful hopes, dimly discerned indeed, but firmly founded, we have a right to cherish, if what we see in Jesus we may predict for His brethren! We shall be like Him in all these points to which we have already referred. We, too, shall have a corporeal manhood transfigured and glorified. We, too, shall have perfect union and communion with the Father. We, too, shall be invested with all the unknown prerogatives which are summed up in that last promise of His, beyond which nothing more glorious can be conceived, ‘To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with Me on My throne.’ Then the ancient word will be fulfilled in manner beyond our dreams, ‘Thou hast put all things under his feet.’ Who can tell what accessions of power, what new faculties, what new relations to an external universe, what new capacity of impressing a holy will upon all things, what new capability of receiving from all things their -most secret messages concerning God their Maker, may be involved in such words? We see darkly. The hopes for the future lie around us as flowers in some fair garden where we walk in the night, their petals closed and their leaves asleep, but here and there a whiter bloom gleams out, and sweet, faint odours from unseen sources steal through the dewy darkness. We can understand but little of what this majestic promise of sovereign manhood may mean. But the fragrance, if not the sight, of that gorgeous blossom is wafted to us. We know that ‘the upright shall have dominion in the morning.’ We know that to His servants authority over ten cities will be given. We know that we shall be ‘kings and priests to God.’ The fact we know, the contents of the fact we wait to prove. ‘It doth not yet appear what we shall be.’ Enough that we shall reign with Him, and that in the kingdom of the heavens dominion means service, and the least is the greatest. We, too, shall be exalted above all creatures-far above all principality and power, even as Christ is Lord of angels. What that may include, we can but dimly surmise. Nearness to God, knowledge of His heart and will, likeness to Christ, determine superiority among pure and spiritual beings. And Scripture, in many a hint and half-veiled promise, bids us believe that men who have been redeemed from their sins by the blood of Christ, and have made experience of departure and restoration, are set to be the exponents of a deeper knowledge of God to powers in heavenly places, and, standing nearest the throne, become the chorus leaders of new praises from lofty beings who have ever praised Him on immortal harps. They who know sin, who remember sorrow, who learned God by the Cross of Christ, and have proved His forgiving and sanctifying grace, must needs have a more wondrous knowledge, and be knit to Him by a tenderer bond than the elder brethren who never transgressed His commandments. The youngest brother of the king is nearer to him than the oldest servant who stands before his face. Our brother is Lord of all, and His dominion is ours. But we can speak little, definitely, about such matters. It is enough for the servant that he be as his Lord. This confidence, which can be certain, though it be not accurate, should satisfy our minds without curious detail, and should quiet our hearts however they be tempted to cast it away. Many enemies whisper to us doubts. The devil tempted first to sin by insinuating the question, ‘Shall ye surely die?’ The devil often tempts now to sin by insinuating exactly the opposite doubt, ‘Can it be that you will live?’ It seems to us often incredible that such hopes of immortal life should be true about such poor creatures, such wretched failures, as we feel ourselves to be. It seems often incredible that they should have any connection with men such as we see them on the average to be. We are tempted, too, in these days, to think that our psalm belongs to an exploded school of thought, to a simple astronomy which made the earth the centre of the universe, and conceived of moon and stars as tiny spangles on the hem of light’s garment. We are told that science lights us to other conclusions as to man’s place in creation than such as David cherished. No doubt it does as to man physically considered. But the answer to my own evil conscience, to the sad inferences from man’s past and present, to the conclusions which are illegitimately sought to be extended from man’s material place in a material universe to man’s spiritual place as an immortal and moral being, lies in that twofold sight which we have been regarding – Christ on the cross the measure of man’s worth in the eyes of God, and of man’s place in the creation; Christ on the throne the prophecy of man’s dignity, and of his most sure dominion. When bordering on despair at the sight of so much going wrong, so much ignorance, sorrow, and vice, so many darkened understandings and broken hearts, such wide tracts of savagery and godlessness, I can look up to Jesus, and can see far, far away – the furthest thing on the horizon – like some nebula, faint, it is true, and low down, but flickering with true starry light – the wondrous vision of many souls brought into glory, even a world redeemed. When conscious of personal imperfection and much sin, no thought will bring peace nor kindle hope but this, that Christ has died to bring me to God, and lives to bring me to glory. Then, dear brethren, ‘behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world.’ Behold Jesus entered within the veil for us. Look away from the imperfect men, the partial teachers, the incomplete saints, the powerless helpers around you, to Him, the righteous, the wise, the strong. Look at no man any more, as the hope for yourself, as the pattern for your life, save Jesus only. The gaze will feed your triumphant hope, and will make that hope a partial reality. Here you will be visited by God, here you will in some degree have all things for yours, if you are Christ’s. Here, from far beneath, look up through the heavens to Him who is ‘made higher than’ them all. And hereafter, from the supreme height and pinnacle of the throne of Christ, we shall look down on sun, moon, and stars that once shone so far above us; and conscious that His grace has raised us up on high, and put all things under our feet, shall exclaim with yet deeper thankfulness and more reverent wonder: ‘What is man, that Thou art mindful of him, and the son of man, that Thou visitest him?’

Fuente: Expositions Of Holy Scripture by Alexander MacLaren

nothing. Greek. oudeis.

not, &c. Greek. anupotaktos. See 1Ti 1:9. This is said by Figure of speech Prolepsis, or Anticipation. App-6.

now. Emph. see. Greek. horao. App-133.:8.

not yet. Greek. oupo.

put under = subjected to.

Fuente: Companion Bible Notes, Appendices and Graphics

8.] thou didst put (the Heb. is perfect: on which Hupfeld remarks, The imperf. is at first continued from the foregoing verses, but in the concluding sentence all is finished with the perfect , and treated as a standing arrangement and permanent ordering of things: all things hast thou put under his feet. So that our E. V., though imperfectly representing the Greek, is true to the original Heb.) all things under his feet (these words form in the Heb. and LXX the second member of a parallelism, the first of which, , is found indeed in our rec. text, but (see var. readd.) must be omitted on critical principles. The probable cause why the Writer omitted it, has been discussed by Bleek. He thinks that it was unnecessary to the argumentation, the latter clause expressing more definitely the same thing. This he gathers, believing the whole to apply to our Saviour: but the same will hold good on our understanding of the passage also.

The words themselves are plain. Universal dominion is bestowed on man by his constitution as he came from God. That that bestowal has never yet been realized, is the next step of the argument: the Redeemer being at present kept out of sight, but by and by to be introduced as the real fulfiller of this high destiny of man, and on that account, incarnate in mans nature. It is, as Ebrard remarks, astonishing that a thorough Commentator like Bleek should have so entirely misread and misunderstood the logical connexion of so clear a passage: while he himself confesses, that it looks as if the Person were first introduced in Heb 2:9, to whom Heb 2:6-7, have been pointing: and yet denies that in Heb 2:6 f. can mean mankind. Besides all other objections, on Bleeks view, the question … loses all appropriate meaning. The connexion was first laid out by Hofmann, Weissag. u. Erfll. ii. 23 ff.: Schriftbeweis i. 185-188; ii. 1. 38 ff., and is adopted by Ebrard and Delitzsch).

For (Bleek thinks that the rather repeats the former , Heb 2:5, than has any logical force of its own here. This peculiar use of , he says, is characteristic of our Epistle: see ch. Heb 4:2-3; Heb 4:15; Heb 5:1; Heb 7:12-13; see his vol. i. p. 330. Hofmann however protests strongly against this view (Weissag. ii. 26, &c. as above), holding the to be ratiocinative, and justificative of the Psalm, as referring back to Gen 1:28 to substantiate the . But, as Delitzsch remarks, this would be but to prove idem per idem; for the itself necessarily refers back to Gen 1:28. He therefore prefers Bleeks view, which is also that of Tholuck, De Wette, and Winer,-that grounds, or rather begins to ground, that already asserted in Heb 2:5) in that he (viz. God: not the writer of the Psalm, as Heinrichs: unless indeed we are to understand to mean , as St. Paul expresses it 1Co 15:27; but the other is much simpler, more analogous to usage, and more in the sense of the Psalm, which is a direct address to God) put all things (the universe: not , as before, merely, but ) under him (Man, again: not, Christ: see above, and remarks at the end of the verse) He left (aor. as in E. V.; not perfect, which would be ) nothing (Nec clestia videtur excepisse nec terrestria, Primasius: and so Estius, al. Possibly: and in the application itself, certainly: but we can hardly say that such was his thought here. The idea that angels are especially here intended, has arisen from that misconception of the connexion, which I have been throughout endeavouring to meet) unsubjected (see reff. where, as in , Symm. 1Ki 2:12, it is in the sense of rebellious. The word belongs to later Greek: we have, Arrian, Epictet. ii. 10, (to the will of man) , . : Porphyr. Oneirocrit. 196, : Philo, Quis Rer. Div. Hr. 1, vol. i. p. 473. : and in Polyb. several times, , narratio qu non habet notitiam antecedentem in animo discentis cui ceu fundamento et basi innitatur. Casaubon) to him: but (contrast bringing out the exception) now (ut nunc est: in the present condition of things: not strictly temporal, but as the , ch. Heb 11:16, and the , ch. Heb 9:26) we see not yet (cf. on the whole, 1Co 15:24-27) all things ( ., again) put under him (the in all three places referring to MAN: man has not yet attained his sovereignty. That the summing up of manhood in Christ is in the Writers mind, is evident throughout, and that he wishes it to be before his readers minds also; but the gradual introduction of the humiliation and exaltation of Christ in His humanity is marred by making all this apply personally to Him. Manhood, as such, is exalted to glory and honour, and waiting for its primval prerogative to be fully assured, but it is IN CHRIST, and in Him alone, that this is true: and in Him it is true, inasmuch as He, being of our flesh and blood, and having been Himself made perfect by sufferings, and calling us His brethren, can lead us up through sufferings into glory, freed from guilt by His sacrifice for our sins).

9] We do not see man, &c.: but (, strong contrast again: but rather-see on Heb 2:6) him who is made (better than was, or hath been, made; His humanity in its abstract position being in view) a little (not necessarily, here either, of time (as Delitzsch here, though not above): nor are we at liberty to assume such a rendering: though of course it is difficult to say, when the same phrase has two analogous meanings both applicable, as this, how far the one may have accompanied the other in the Writers mind) lower than (the) angels, we behold (notice the difference between the half-involuntary above, the impression which our eyes receive from things around us,-and the direction and intention of the contemplating eye (here, of faith: cf. ch. Heb 3:19; Heb 10:25) in ), (namely) Jesus (Lnemann is quite right against Ebrard here. The latter would take the words thus: But we behold Jesus (object) . . . (adjectival attribute to ), (predicate). But this would be to throw into a position of emphasis: and would have been expressed …, or, . . . . . . As it is, , standing as it does behind the verb, is, as Lnem. well remarks, altogether unemphasized, and is merely an explicative addition, to make it clear who is intended by . . . So that this latter clause is the object, to . (see below) the predicate, and an appositional elucidation of the object. So Hofmann now, Schriftb. i. 187. Formerly he took it as Ebrard; Weissag. u. Erfll. ii. 28. Delitzsch takes as the object and . … as the appositional clause. But I prefer as above: see more below), on account of his suffering of death (it has been much doubted whether these words belong, 1. to the foregoing clause, . . ., or, 2. to the following, . . The former connexion is assumed without remark by the ancient Commentators: so Origen in Joann. tom. ii. 6 (vol. iv. p. 62), : Augustine, contra Maximin. ii. 25, vol. viii. (misquoted in Bleek), Eum autem modico minus quam angelos minoratum vidimus Jesum propter passionem mortis. Non ergo propter naturam hominis, sed propter passionem mortis: Chrys., Thdrt. (see below), (not Thl. as Bleek: see below), Beza, Schlichting, Justiniani, a-Lapide, Cameron (but interpreting it per illud tempus quo passus est mortem), Calov., Limborch, Owen, Michaelis, Baumgarten, Semler, Dindorf, Wakefield. And these interpret the words two ways: . on account of the suffering of death, i. e. because He has suffered death ( , , Thdrt.),-thus making refer to the time of His sufferings and death, or as Chrys. ( ), al., to the three days of His being in the grave: . for the sake of the suffering of death, = . . So Aug[17] above, and most of the foregoing list.

[17] Augustine, Bp. of Hippo, 395-430

But, 2. the latter connexion, with the following clause, is adopted by Theophylact (as Thl. has been said by Bleek to maintain the other connexion, I give his note entire: , , . , . , , , . , . , . , . . , , . , , . ; ; Here, although he partially adopts the notion of referring to the three days, it is evident both from the words which I have noted by different type, and by the application which he makes to ourselves, that he joins . . . with . , not with the preceding clause), Luther, Calvin, Estius, Grot., Seb.-Schmidt, Bengel, Wetst., Schulz, Bhme, Kuinoel, Bleek, Tholuck, Ebrard, Lnemann, Delitzsch, al.

The question must be determined by the arrangement of the words, and by the requirements of the context. And both these seem to require the latter, not the former connexion. The words . . . are emphatic; they are taken up again in the next sentence by (which words themselves are a witness that suffering and exaltation, not suffering and degradation, are here connected). But emphatic they could not be in the former connexion, coming as they would only as an explicatory clause, after . . Again, the former connexion hardly satisfies the with an accusative; certainly not if the sense ., because He has suffered death, be taken; and if the other, ., we should have expected rather ., or . Whereas the latter connexion entirely satisfies the context, the sufferings of Christ being treated of as necessary to His being our perfect Redeemer: entirely also fulfils the requirements of with an accusative; wherein, which is no small consideration in its favour, it is in strict analogy with the construction in ref. Phil., , . … And this connexion will be made even clearer by what will be said on the next clause, …), crowned with glory and honour (viz. at His exaltation, when God exalted Him to His right Hand: not, as some (e. g. Hofmann, ubi supra; see also Schriftbeweis i. 271, um des Todes willen ist Iesus mit der Berufsherrlichkeit und Berufsehre gekront), at His incarnation, or His establishment as Saviour of the world: see above, Heb 2:7): in order that (how is this logically constructed? In answering the question, we may at once dismiss all impossible senses of , invented to escape the difficulty: such as the supposed ecbatic sense, so that (Erasm. (paraphr.), Valck., Kuinoel, &c.), postquam mortem gustavit, Schleusner; &c. &c. has no such ecbatic sense any where: and its temporal sense is altogether unexampled with the subjunctive mood. It can have here none but its constant telic sense: in order that. And as to its dependence we must have recourse to no inversions of construction, but take it simply as we find it, however difficult. It depends then on the last clause, which clause it will be best to take in its entirety, . The full connexion we cannot enter into, till the three other questions arising out of our clause are disposed of: – -and ) by the grace of God (here comes into question the very important various reading , the authorities for which see in the digest. That it does not owe its origin to the Nestorians, whatever use they may have made of it, is evident from Origen reading and expounding it. In his time it was the prevalent reading, the present being found only . Theodoret here, and on Eph 1:10 (see below), knew of no other reading: nor did Ambrose, nor Fulgentius. Jerome on Gal 3:10 says, Quia Christus gratia Dei, sive ut in quibusdam exemplaribus legitur, absque Deo, pro omnibus mortuus est. In the Greek Church, the Nestorians mostly held fast to the old reading, as favouring their views. It may be well to cite Theophylact on this point: , , , . , , , , , . And similarly cumenius. In our copies of the Peschito this reading is not now found, but the passage runs Nam ipse Deus per gratiam suam pro omni homine gustavit mortem (For He Aloha in his grace for every man hath tasted death, Etheridges version): but (see digest) in certain mss., we have a combination of the readings, Ipse enim excepto Deo per gratiam suam pro omni homine gustavit mortem, [but this combination appears to be due to Editors only, and not to mss.] Bleek adduces, from the 8th century, Anastatius Abbas, a writer of Palestine: Absque Deo: sola enim divina natura non egebat. In modern times, the reading has been defended by Camerarius, Colomesius, Bengel, Ch. Fr. Schmid, Paulus, and more recently Ebrard and Baumgarten. Hofmann once defended it, Weissag. u. Erfll. i. 92; but has now given it up;-Entstehungsgeschichte, u.s.w. p. 338. By those who have adopted it, it has been interpreted three different ways: 1. as Origen ( ), Thdrt. ( , . , ), Thl. and c. (hypothetically, see above), and Ebrard; and in a modification, Bengel and Schmid (Omne, prter Deum, Christo subjectum est, Beng.: in accordance with 1Co 15:27). 2. as Ambrose, Fulgentius, and the Nestorians, and Colomesius (Ut divinitate tantisper deposita, ut homo mortem subiret pro omnibus). 3. as Paulus and Baumgarten,-forsaken of God, as witnessed by the cry on the cross. In considering the probability of this reading, as to, . external evidence, and, . internal probability, it must, . be confessed, that such instances as this, where an important reading, prevalent in the early ages, is found only in two or three of our present mss., tend considerably to shake the trustworthiness of mere manuscript evidence as to the original text of the N. T., and to enhance the testimony of those sources which are anterior to any of our present MSS., viz. the earlier Fathers. In treating of (), we must deal with each of the assigned meanings separately. Of (1) it may be said, that however true in fact,-the thought that Jesus died for every rational being ( as Origen), or for every thing (neut.), except God, is quite alien from the present context, where the sovereignty of MAN in the new world is the subject-of man, in and through the Son of man, Jesus Christ: cf. the Heb 2:10, Heb 2:12; &c. &c. And as to (2), it is even more alien from the context, as it also is from the N. T. Christology. We have no analogical expression whereby to justify it, nor any safeguard against such a view being carried out at once into the bi-personality of the Nestorians. It is hardly to be imagined that the Writer here, with no end in view at all requiring such a severance of the two natures in Christ, should thus gratuitously have introduced a sentiment of the most novel and startling character. And with regard to (3) it may well be said, that we have no right to press the exclamation of our Redeemer in His agony to so bare and strong a dogmatic fact as that He really was on the cross. We no where find Himself so speaking, nor His Apostles: nay the Writer of our Epistle would be the first to testify against such an understanding of his words: cf. ch. Heb 5:7, and indeed our next verse here. So that it does not seem possible to assign to the words a meaning in accordance with the demands of the context, and the analogy of Scripture. This indeed would be no argument against a reading universally and unobjectionably attested by external authorities; but where no such attestation exists, may well be brought in to guide us to a decision. If so then, and we reject , how are we to understand the rec. reading, ? At all events we have strong Scripture analogy for such an expression. In Gal 2:21, the Apostles confession of faith in the Son of God, he says, , . And in Rom 5:8, we read, ( ), . And in Tit 2:11, . So that, in point of meaning, no difficulty need be found in the words. It was by the love and grace, the and of the Father, that all Redemption was effected, and above all that one sacrifice which was the crowning act of Redemption. Bleeks account of the origin of the reading in a mistake of a scribe, copying an illegible , and Origens possessing this copy or one made from it, and the further progress of the reading being due to his mention of it,-is perhaps a shade more probable than that mentioned in the digest,-but at the same time far from satisfactory.

I may mention, as a curious instance of the helplessness of those who read Scripture in a version only, that (see Bleek) Primasius and Thom. Aquinas, in the sentence Ut gratia dei pro omnibus gustaret mortem, take gratia dei as nominative, and interpret it as a title of Christ) He might for (, on behalf of, for the benefit of: where this ordinary meaning of suffices, that of vicariousness must not be introduced. Sometimes, as e. g. 2Co 5:15, it is necessary. But here clearly not, the whole argument proceeding not on the vicariousness of Christs sacrifice, but on the benefits which we derive from His personal suffering for us in humanity; not on His substitution for us, but on His community with us) every man (is neuter or masculine? and if the latter, to what to be referred? Origen (apparently, see above), Thdrt., c., Thl. (above), take it as neuter, and apply it either to all nature, or to all reasonable beings. The latter see discussed below. The former can hardly be here meant: for of such a doctrine, however true, there is no hint (see above on the reading , . 1). Then taking masculine, are we to understand it for every one, angels included? So Ebrard: but where do we find any such usage of , absolutely put as here? And where in this chapter again is any room for the position, that Christ suffered death for angels? In the logical course of the argument, we have done with them, and are now treating of man, and of Him who was made man to be our High Priest and advocate. And therefore of none other than man can this word be here meant, in accordance indeed with its universal usage elsewhere. If it be asked, why rather than , we may safely say, that the singular brings out, far more strongly than the plural would, the applicability of Christs death to each individual man: and we may say that this again testifies to the sense every man, as there would be no such reason for individualizing other rational beings, as there is for shewing that the whole nature of man, to which this promise of sovereignty is given, is penetrated by the efficacy of Christs death) taste of death (reff. and so frequently in the classics with other substantives, e. g. Soph. Trach. 1103, Pind. Nem. v. 596, Eurip. Alcest. 1069, Hecub. 379, , Homer, , Herod. iv. 147; vi. 5,-but never with . So that Bleek infers it has come into the N. T. diction from the Heb. phrase, which is not uncommonly found in the Rabbinical writings. Some have seen in the phrase an allusion to the shortness and transitoriness of the Lords death: so Chrys., , , , . , , : then, comparing Christ to a physician who first tastes his medicines to encourage the sick man to take them, adds, , , , , . And so Thl. and c., , . And so many other Commentators, among whom Beza and Bengel find also the verity of His Death indicated in the words. But it is well answered (not by Calvin, as Bleek; for he says, Quod Chrysostomus gustare mortem exponit, quasi summis labris delibare, eo quod Christus victor e morte emerserit, non refello neque improbo, quanquam nescio an adeo subtiliter loqui voluerit apostolus), that in none of the places where the phrase appears, either in the N. T. or in the Rabbinical writings, does any such meaning appear to be conveyed. Nor again can we, as Bleek himself, understand the implication to be that Christ underwent all the bitterness of death. But, as has been just before mentioned, I cannot help regarding its position here behind the verb as throwing that verb into some little prominence, as itself is this second time in a place of insignificance. Thus viewed, the phrase falls into exact accord with the general argument of the passage, that it became Christ, in order to be the great and merciful High Priest of humanity, to be perfected through human sufferings: and it forms in fact the first mention of this idea, and prepares the way for which follows. I would say then, that must be regarded as slightly emphatic, and as implying the personal undergoing of death and entering into its suffering. And I doubt much, whether it will not be found that in the other passages where the phrase occurs, this personal suffering of death, though not boldly prominent, is yet within view, and agreeable to the context.

And now, having considered the three points, – -and ,-we return again to the question of the connexion of the , with which this clause begins. We before stated that, avoiding all tortuous and artificial arrangements, we find it dependent on the former clause . . This exaltation, being the (see Heb 2:10) of Christ, was arrived at , and -both by means of and on account of, His suffering of death. And this exaltation has made Him the divine Head of our humanity-the channel of grace, and the . Without His exaltation, his death would not have been effectual. Unless he had been crowned with glory and honour, received to the right hand of the Father, and set in expectation of all things being put under his feet, His death could not have been, for every man, the expiation to him of his own individual sin. On the triumphant issue of His sufferings, their efficacy depends. And this I believe is what the sacred Writer meant to express. His glory was the consequence of His suffering of death;-arrived at through His suffering: but the applicability of His death to every man is the consequence of His constitution in Heaven as the great High Priest, in virtue of his blood carried into the holy place,-and the triumphant Head of our common humanity: which common humanity of Him and ourselves now becomes the subject of further elucidation).

Fuente: The Greek Testament

Heb 2:8. [13] ) See 1Co 15:27, and what goes before with the annot.-, for) The apostle shows the reason why he quoted this passage, namely, because we are taught in it that it was Jesus to whom all things were subjected, and therefore the world to come, Heb 2:5. Often , for, is useful for the tiology of [assigning a reason for] what is said; ch. Heb 7:14, Heb 9:24; and so Paul, Rom 3:28.-, ) under Him, under Him, the man of whom he is speaking, the Son of Man. This is explained in the middle of Heb 2:9, concerning Jesus, the application to Him having been most suitably put off till that place.- ) in the second and third place has the force of a relative to the , all things, which precedes. The same force of the article may be found at Joh 19:5; Joh 19:7; Gal 5:13; Gal 6:14.-, nothing) not even angels; Heb 2:5, ch. Heb 1:6.-, left) in the language of the psalm, to which the events partly correspond, partly will correspond.- , but now not yet) , now, serves the purpose of an Anthypophora;[14] for the time is denoted in , not yet, and the latter is construed with , we see, in antithesis to the present , we perceive.[15] More things are already subjected to Christ than we see; and all things will be entirely subjected to Him at the proper time, and we shall behold it; Eph 1:22; 1Co 15:27-28. But why not yet all things? Because both His body, the Church, is in distress, and He Himself is not acknowledged, at least is not seen. The verb , I look, I perceive, denotes something more definite; , I see, something more extensive and more august.

[13] , the works of Thy hands) The sun, moon, stars, etc., Psa 8:4.-V. g.

[14] Part of a refutation of an objection that might be made by anticipation. Append.

[15] , to look, to use the eyes, whether seeing something or not. , to see something; and is never used absolutely. Thus the Greeks never used , but always , of the situation of a region. Tittm. Syn.-ED.

Fuente: Gnomon of the New Testament

The Crowned Christ

But now we see not yet all things subjected to him. But we behold him who hath been made a little lower than the angels, even Jesus, because of the suffering of death crowned with glory and honour, that by the grace of God he should taste death for every man.Heb 2:8-9.

We have a comparison in this chapter between humanity uncrowned and humanity in Jesus Christ crowned. Humanity is a tender and beautiful plant, but it is flowerless apart from Jesus Christ. All the strength, the grace, and the beauty of the race express themselves once for all in Christ who is the flower of the race. And we see the meaning, the purpose and the sovereignty of the human race when we see Jesus crowned.

Following the writers thought, let us consider,

I.Mans unrealized Destiny.

II.His Sovereignty secured in Christ.

I

Mans unrealized Destiny

But now we see not yet all things subjected to him.

1. That man was made for sovereignty was declared by the Psalmist whom the writer quotes. Thou hast made himthat is, mana little lower than the angels. Thou hast crowned him with glory and honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet. And this is not a doctrine peculiar to the Psalmist; it is not merely the excitement and rapture of genius that affirm it. Read the earliest pages of the Jewish Scriptures, and you will discover that in the record of creation it is said that man was made in the image of God, was appointed to have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth; and he was charged by God to subdue the earth, which had been made his kingdom.

Readers of Tennyson will remember the magic Hall of Camelot, with its four great zones or belts of sculpture. On the lowest belt were represented beasts slaying men. On the next higher, men are slaying beasts, on the third are warriors, perfect men, while on the highest are men with growing wings; and over all the ideal man beckoning upward to those beneath. A wonderful parable of the advancing man. To the writer of the 8th Psalm man had already tamed the beast, tamed its passions. He had made the ox the slave of agriculture. He had harnessed the fury of the fire, and found a way for his commerce in the seas. But while he thus felt how great was his place in the universe, nothing impressed him so much as that God thought about him and visited him. The greatest thing one can say is that man can hold communion with his God, that man can walk with the Eternal and have the atmosphere of heaven.1 [Note: J. E. Rattenbury.]

(1) Mans sovereignty extends over the material universe.Man is infinitely more than the last and the highest result of operations entirely within the material. He is the last and the highest result of such operations, in certain senses; but he did not become man by such operations and processes. He became man by an act of God, distinct from all other acts; an act by which He did, in the mystery of His wisdom and the operations of His might, differentiate by infinite distance between man and everything that lay beneath him in the scale of creation. Gods place for this man in the earth is that of dominion. He made him to have dominion over the whole earth; over all that the earth yields in the mystery of its life; over all that dwells upon the earth, having sentient life. Over all these He placed man, that he might have dominion over them. All beneath man is imperfect without him, and can be perfected only as he exercises his dominion.

I refuse to be reduced to the same rank, to be placed in the same order, as the cattle that browse on the hills, or the fish that people the sea. I assert my supremacy. I believe that I have received from the hand of God crown and sceptre, and that although other designs may be accomplished by the existence of the material and living things around me, they are intended to serve me. The sun shines that I may see the mountains and the woods and the flashing streams, and that I may do the work by which I live. For me the rain falls and the dews silently distilto cherish the corn which grows for my food, to soften the air I breathe, and to keep the beauty of the world fresh and bright on which I rejoice to look. The music of the birds is for me, and the perfume of flowers. For me it was that forests grew in ancient times and have since been hardened into coal; for me there are veins of iron and of silver penetrating the solid earth; and for me there are rivers whose sands are gold. The beasts of the earth were meant to do my work; sheep and oxen are given me for food. Fire and hail and the stormy wind were meant to serve me. I have authority to compel the lightning to be the messenger of my thought, and the servant of my will. Man is placed over the works of Gods hands; for those works were meant to minister to mans life, mans culture, and mans happiness.1 [Note: R. W. Dale, The Jewish Temple and the Christian Church, 49.]

(2) Man bears the image of God.In the creation which surrounds us, there are marvellous manifestations of the Divine attributes. A power to which we can give no other name than omnipotence, a knowledge which we cannot but call infinite, a wisdom whose depths are unfathomable, and an inexhaustible goodness, are revealed in the heavens above and in the earth beneath. But in man, God has given existence to a creature in whom we recognize not merely the operations of the Divine attributes, but the attributes themselves, though in a less noble form and an inferior degree. There is the manifestation of wisdom, of power, and of love, in the other works of God; but in man there is wisdom itself, love itself.

The preparation of the Declaratory Act, to remove difficulties and scruples felt by some in reference to the declaration of belief required from persons who receive office or are admitted to office in the Free Church, was undertaken with great care. At the Assembly of 1891, Principal Rainy was able to bring up the document which the Committee proposed to be adopted. The fourth section read as follows: That in holding and teaching, according to the Confession of Faith, the corruption of mans whole nature as fallen, this Church also maintains that there remain tokens of his greatness as created in the image of God; that he possesses a knowledge of God and of duty; that he is responsible for compliance with the moral law and with the Gospel; and that, although unable without the aid of the Holy Spirit to return to God, he is yet capable of affections and actions which in themselves are virtuous and praiseworthy.1 [Note: P. C. Simpson, The Life of Principal Rainy, ii. 125.]

(3) Man is endowed with freedom.He is like God in this, that he possesses freedom to choose the objects of his life, and the means by which he will secure them. Let the iron hand of necessity control all things besides,the eagle in her daring flight, the tumult of the ocean, the dance of the spray, the rush of the winds, the fury of the storm,the will of man stands erect, confronting and defying all authority and all power. No outward force can compel it; no inward necessity bind it. The foundations of that throne on which the human will has been placed by the hand of the Creator cannot be shaken by the tremendous energies which rend asunder the everlasting hills. A solitary man can stand against a million; they may torture his physical frame till he cries aloud in his agony, but the whole force of a great empire has been met and mastered by the will of a quiet scholar and of a feeble woman. God has given to the human will the power of refusing to bow before His own greatness, and of disobeying His own commands. This imperial faculty it is, beyond all others, which stamps man as the rightful master of the world. He alone has this indispensable attribute of sovereignty. All creatures besides are in bondage to irresistible law; he alone has received the gift of freedom. Thou hast crowned him with glory and honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet.

But it exceeds mans thought to think how high

God hath raised man, since God a man became;

The angels do admire this mystery,

And are astonished when they view the same.

Nor hath he given these blessings for a day,

Nor made them on the bodys life depend.

The soul, though made in time, survives for aye;

And though it hath beginning, sees no end.2 [Note: Sir John Davies.]

2. Mans sovereignty, conferred on him originally by the appointment of his Creator, has not been fully realized. How miserably he has come short of it has been shown by the condition of all nations and of all ages. His freedom has been manifested in his violation of the most solemn and imperative obligations. The image of God has been so defaced that it has almost disappeared. The intellect of man has sunk into a chaos of ignorance and error, and, instead of rightly understanding the universe, he has constructed a thousand monstrous theories concerning its origin, concerning the very structure of material things, concerning his own nature and destiny. The commonest laws of the external world remained hidden from him for thousands of years, and remain hidden even now from the immense majority of his race. Instead of being the master of the inferior creation, he has beenand to a large extent, continues stillits unhappy victim. His life is destroyed by the poison of reptiles, and by the brute strength of beasts of prey. The vineyards he has laboriously cultivated he cannot protect from blight. The harvests he is ready to reap are wasted by destructive rains. On the land, his cities perish by earthquakes: on the sea, his ships go down in the storm. His health is ruined and his moral nature corrupted by the strong temptations of the outward world, which betray him into sensual excesses. He has come to be so humiliated and degraded that he has looked up to the moon and stars which were made to serve him, and has called them his gods; he has placed four-footed beasts and creeping things in the shrine of his temples, and has implored them to avert the calamities he dreaded, and to bestow on him the blessings for which he longed. The traces of his kingship have not disappeared; slowly and painfully in one province of his dominions after another, especially since Christ came, and in the lands of Christendom, he has been winning back the authority he had lost; but his hand is too feeble to hold the sceptre, and on all sides the subject creation is in open revoltrevolt which he seems often unable even to check, and is quite unable to subdue. We see not yet all things put under him.

If that psalm be Gods thought of man, the plan that He hangs up for us, His workmen, to build by, what a wretched thing my copy of it has turned out to be! Is this a picture of me? How seldom I am conscious of the visits of God; how full I am of weaknesses and imperfections, the solemn voice within me tells me at intervals when I listen to its tones. On my brow there gleams no diadem; from my life, alas! there shines at the best but a fitful splendour of purity, all striped with solid masses of blackness. And as for dominion over creatures, how superficial my rule over them, how real their rule over me! I can tame animals or slay them; I can use the forces of nature for my purposes. I can make machinery, and bid the lightning do my errands, and carry messages, the burden of which is mostly money, or power, or sorrow. But all these things do not signify that man has the dominion over Gods creation. That consists in using all for God, and for our own growth in wisdom, strength, and goodness; and he only is master of all things who is servant of God. All are yours, and ye are Christs. If so, what are most of us but servants, not lords, of earth and its goods? We fasten our very lives on them, we tremble at the bare thought of losing them, we give our best efforts to get them; we say to the fine gold, Thou art my confidence. We do not possess them, they possess us, though materially we may have conquered the earth (and wonderfully proud of it we are now), spiritually, which is the same as to say really, the earth has conquered us.

The sense I had of the state of the churches brought a weight of distress upon me. The gold to me appeared dim, and the fine gold changed, and though this is the case too generally, yet the sense of it in these parts hath in a particular manner borne heavy upon me. It appeared to me that through the prevailing of the spirit of this world the minds of many were brought to an inward desolation, and instead of the spirit of meekness, gentleness, and heavenly wisdom, which are the necessary companions of the true sheep of Christ, a spirit of fierceness and the love of dominion too generally prevailed. From small beginnings in error great buildings by degrees are raised, and from one age to another are more and more strengthened by the general concurrence of the people; and as men obtain reputation by their profession of the truth, their virtues are mentioned as arguments in favour of general error; and those of less note, to justify themselves, say, such and good men did the like.1 [Note: The Journal of John Woolman.]

II

Sovereignty secured in Christ

But we behold him even Jesus crowned with glory and honour.

The writer of the Epistle has quoted the 8th Psalm as an illustration of his thesis that Christ, and we in Christ, are exalted above angels, and then he proceeds to admit that, as a matter of fact, men are not what the Psalmist describes them as being. But the psalm is not, therefore, an exaggeration, or a dream, or a mere ideal of the imagination. True, as a matter of fact, men are not all this. But, as a matter of fact, Jesus Christ is, and in His possession of all that the psalm painted our possession is commenced and certified. It is an ideal picture, but it is realized in Jesus, and, having been so in Him, we have ground to believe that it will be so in us. We see not yet all things put under manalas, nobut we see Jesus crowned with glory and honour; and as He tasted death for every man, so in His exaltation He is prophecy and pledge that the grand old words shall one day be fulfilled in all their height and depth.

1. Christs sovereignty was won through humiliation and suffering.

(1) He was content to be made a little lower than the angels.Wherein was Jesus set under the angels? Not simply in that He became man; for His manhood is as truly the ground of His exaltation as of His humiliation. It is to man as man that the psalm ascribes the coronet of glory and honourthe exaltation over all creatures into which Jesus has entered. With Jesus, as with man in general, the inferiority to the angels is one of dispensation, not of nature. To be subordinated to the angelic dispensation is the same thing as to be made under the law. Jesus shared mans humiliation, to win, not for Himself only, but for men, His brethren, the destined glory. God brings many sons to glory along with Him, inasmuch as He that sanctifieth and they that are sanctified are all of one piece. Thus the blessings of the psalm do, in the world to come, fall to man. But they are earned for him by the man Christ Jesus who, tasting death for all, delivers us from the fear of death and so from bondage. And this blessing of deliverance from the bondage of the Old Covenant belongs even now to Christians, who have already tasted the powers of the world to come, who are regarded as dissociated from the earthly theocracy and living in view of that which is to come. The world to come is in fact the equivalent of the Kingdom of God in the gospelalready present among men, though hitherto as an object of faith, not of sight.

(2) He endured the suffering of death.There are many ways of winning a crown. Here, and in these great chapters of Revelation (5, 6), we see Jesus greeted with unspeakable acclaim because He has suffered. Because of the suffering of death which He bore, because of the way in which He bore it, and because He bore it to such limits of endurance as are possible on earth, He was raised from the cross of shame to the throne of God. If we see truly, He changed the cross of shame into a throne of glory. Because it was He who was crucified, and because of the manner and spirit in which He bore the suffering of death, He Himself transformed and transfigured the shameful cross, until to-day it is the throne from which this universe is ruled.

(3) Because He wears the crown He still drinks mans cup.That by the grace of God he should taste death for every man. Jesus did not finish His suffering on Calvary. We have to recall the thought which John taught us when he showed us the Lamb standing in the midst of the throne, as though it had been slainthe thought that Calvary was but the revelation of the suffering of God which was from the foundation of the world, and shall be until earth and heaven are brought to peace and righteousness. So here we have this thought in a new and wondrous form. The crown of Christ and the glory which was awarded Him were like no other crown or glory ever awarded to man. We speak in our poor fashion of Christs suffering being followed by glory, and we mean a glory according to the fleshly heart of man. We speak of His exchanging the cross for the crown, not knowing that the crown is ever the crown of thorns. This writer tells us that the glory with which He was crowned was the glory of tasting death for every man. That was the glory He won by suffering so supremely on Golgotha. That was the glory He attained to because He was very faithful on that narrow cross, even as far as death.

The Cross of Calvary was taken into the very heart of the Eternal. From earth there went One who, by the experience of earth, was fitted to regain His place in the fellowship of God. That is the thought that places us at the very heart of what we generally mean by the Atonement. The Saviour who bears the sin of this world to-day is a living crucified Saviour to-day. Wherever there is sin, there is He crucified. So much of it as was possible out of the venom and malice of those Jewish foes fell upon Him in Jerusalem, but to-day He is free from the limits of mortal flesh, and has entered into the eternal Spirit of God once again; and wherever there is sin, there is Christ crucified. As He died that day for those who then lived, He tastes death in every ruined life, He is crucified in every lustful heart; His heart is broken in every ruined home, and smitten with pain by our coldness, and failure, and disobedience.1 [Note: F. W. Lewis, The Work of Christ, 86.]

2. Christs crown is the prophecy and pledge of mans dominion. He is the pattern of human nature. From Christ comes the power by which the prophecy is fulfilled and the pattern reproduced in all who love Him. Whosoever is joined to Him receives into his soul that spirit of life in Christ which unfolds and grows according to its own law, and has for its issue and last result the entire conformity between the believing soul and the Saviour by whom it lives. It were a poor consolation to point to Christ and say, Look what man has become, and may become, unless we could also say, A real and living oneness exists between Him and all who cleave to Him, so that their characters are changed, their natures cleansed, their future altered, their immortal beauty secured. He is more than pattern, He is power; more than specimen, He is source; more than example, He is Redeemer. He has been made in the likeness of sinful flesh, that we may be in the likeness of His body of glory. He has been made sin for us, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.

The hopes for the future lie around us as flowers in some fair garden where we walk in the night, their petals closed and their leaves asleep, but here and there a whiter bloom gleams out, and sweet faint odours from unseen sources steal through the dewy darkness. We can understand but little of what this majestic promise of sovereign manhood may mean. But the fragrance, if not the sight, of that gorgeous blossom is wafted to us. We know that the upright shall have dominion in the morning. We know that to His servants authority over ten cities will be given. We know that we shall be kings and priests to God. The fact we know, the contents of the fact we wait to prove. It doth not yet appear what we shall be. Enough that we shall reign with Him, and that in the kingdom of the heavens dominion means service, and the least is the greatest.1 [Note: Alexander Maclaren, Sermons Preached in Manchester, ii. 185.]

(1) For every man. The virtue of Christs cross is for all. Criminals may put themselves outside the pale of human sympathy easily enough. Their misdeeds may slay the sentiment of pity for them even in the heart of the most pitiful. Society, horrified and revolted by their evil doing, may with one voice demand the full penalty of the law. Yes, and even a mothers love, the divinest thing on earth, may not be deep enough to condone the evil. Man by his sin may put himself outside the circumference of the tenderest human affection, beyond the range of the most pitiful human compassion. But no sinner can outrange the infinite love of God. His compassions flow beyond the widest and wildest wanderings of mans transgressions. His tender love is deeper than the lowest depths of vice and wickedness. And the death of the Crucified One is gloriously sufficient to atone for the sins of every member of our sinful race.

I do find the love of God is the only power in the universe to accomplish any result. All must be the Devils, if it were not at work. Shall it not in some way or other vindicate all to itself? I wish to think awfully on the question, confessing with trembling that there is an unspeakable power of resistance in our wills to Gods lovea resistance quite beyond my understanding or any understanding to explainand not denying that this resistance may be final, but still feeling myself obliged when I trust God thoroughly to think that there is a depth in His love below all other depths; a bottomless pit of charity deeper than the bottomless pit of evil. And I answer that to lead people to feel that this is a ground for them to stand upon is the great way of teaching them to stand. They are not made to hang poised in the air, which is the position I fear of a good many religious people, in a perpetual land of mist and cloud, never seeing the serene heaven, nor feeling the solid earth. God is in the midst of us, therefore we cannot be moved. What might there is in these words!1 [Note: The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, i. 528.]

(2) Christs crown and ours are in the last resort the fruits of grace. This was granted to Himthis awful eminence, this sole right and power to taste death for every man, was granted to Him by the grace of God. It was by Gods gracious act and permission that He was welcomed back into the eternal Sonship. He had lived with the Father in eternity before He came to earth, and He went back not only Son of God but Son of Man. He went back the Head of our race. He went back our Brother. He went back, as He is called in this letter, the Leader whose followers we are. We have gained a place in the fellowship of the eternal suffering; our blood is there shed, mingled indistinguishably with the blood of God. We see not yet all things won and conquered, but we see this: that from our cradle, and our weakness, and our frailty, and our strife, Jesus has gone into the perfect suffering of God our Saviour, and man with God is on that awful throne. By the grace of God it has been granted. We have been taken into the veriest Divinity, for there is no Divinity ever imagined by man comparable with the Divinity that is revealed in the suffering of God; and we in Jesus Christ have been united with the very heart of the mystery of God Himself. Many thingsall good thingscome from the grace of God, which giveth all; and St. Paul tells us it has been granted to us not only to believe, but also to suffer (Php 1:29). The word there is the same as the word herethe word grace. Gods highest gift is not the gift of all enjoyment, it is not the gift of all peace and blessedness; the highest gift of God is the gift of the fellowship of suffering, whereby we are raised into the society and friendship and likeness of no less an One than the Eternal God, who thereby becomes, as He never was before, our Father; thereby we become, as never before, His children.

I have so much cause for wonder at the human as well as the Divine love which has been poured out upon me. No one ever deserved it less. I am sure if I do not know what free grace means, or use the expression as a mere cant one, I am more to blame than all. It seems to me, from the highest to the lowest, from the manner of Gods redemption to the kind look and obedience of a servant, all is grace; all are parts of one living chain which is let down upon me and which is meant to draw me up.1 [Note: The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, i. 527.]

Seven vials hold Thy wrath: but what can hold

Thy mercy save Thine own Infinitude,

Boundlessly overflowing with all good,

All loving kindness, all delights untold?

Thy Love, of each created love the mould;

Thyself, of all the empty plenitude;

Heard of at Ephrata, found in the Wood,

For ever One, the Same, and Manifold.

Lord, give us grace to tremble with that dove

Which Ark-bound winged its solitary way

And overpast the Deluge in a day,

Whom Noahs hand pulled in and comforted:

For we who much more hang upon Thy Love

Behold its shadow in the deed he did.2 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti, Poetical Works, 264.]

The Crowned Christ

Literature

Edwards (T. C.), The Epistle to the Hebrews, 21.

Griffith-Jones (E.), Faith and Verification, 146.

Lewis (F. W.), The Work of Christ, 80.

Maclaren (A.), Sermons Preached in Manchester, ii. 170.

Norton (J. N.), Short Sermons, 136.

Sowter (G. A.), Trial and Triumph, 199.

Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xxv. (1879), No. 1509.

Westcott (B. F.), The Historic Faith, 59.

Wynne (G. R.), In Quietness and Confidence, 138.

British Weekly Pulpit, iii. 225 (A. Cave).

Christian World Pulpit, xl. 241 (J. Clifford); lvi. 4 (J. T. Parr); lxx. 166 (J. E. Rattenbury); lxxii. 73 (A. Clayton); lxxxii. 273 (G. C. Morgan).

Marylebone Presbyterian Pulpit, ii., No. 6 (C. Lorimer).

Record, Feb. 6, 1914 (E. N. Pearce).

Fuente: The Great Texts of the Bible

hast: Heb 2:5, Heb 1:13, Psa 2:6, Dan 7:14, Mat 28:18, Joh 3:35, Joh 13:3, 1Co 15:27, Eph 1:21, Eph 1:22, Phi 2:9-11, 1Pe 3:22, Rev 1:5, Rev 1:18, Rev 5:11-13

but: Job 30:1-12, Job 41:1-34, 1Co 15:24, 1Co 15:25

Reciprocal: Psa 8:6 – put Zec 3:5 – fair Mat 11:27 – are Mat 17:27 – and take Luk 10:22 – All things Luk 24:26 – General Joh 17:2 – As Act 19:17 – the name Heb 1:2 – appointed

Fuente: The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge

Heb 2:8. Thou hast put all things in subjection under his feet. This is said in reference to what is declared in Gen 1:26-28. From here on the apostle extends his remarks to Include Jesus, which is not considered in the original passage in the Psalms. This is not the only instance where a New Testament writer makes a second or extended use of an Old Testament passage. Hos 11:1 is said regarding the departure of ancient Israel from Egypt, but Mat 2:14-15 quotes it and applies it to Christ. Likewise Mat 1:23 cites Isa 7:14 and applies is to Christ, yet the passage in Isaiah first referred to an infant born to the prophet and his young wife. See not yet all things put under him is said of Jesus, and the next two verses will indicate what it is that is not yet put under or been conquered by Jesus, and what he must first suffer before His final victory over all except his Father.

Fuente: Combined Bible Commentary

Heb 2:8-9. The supremacy is certainly promised, and is intended to be complete; for nothing is excepted, though as yet (Heb 2:9) the promise is imperfectly fulfilled. The humiliation is clear enough, and the crowning with glory is begun. By and by there will be universal subjection, and He will be universal king. Meanwhile we may well turn from the imperfect conquest which it is so easy to see, and contemplate (see Gr.) the great spectacleJesus made man, tasting death for men, crowned, and awaiting His full reward. From that spectacle suffering Christians will gather fresh patience and faith. This use of the expression, subject to Him, and its application to Christ, is found only in Pauls Epistles: 1Co 15:27; Eph 1:22; Php 3:21. The words, for the suffering of death, are connected by the ablest scholars (Tyndale, De Wette, Winer, etc.) with the words that follow: because of the suffering of death He was crowned, as in Php 2:9; and this rendering is all but essential if we are to do justice to the Greek ( with the accusative expressing an actual existing reason, not an end to be gained). To connect them with the previous clause, a little lower, etc., as if dying were the purpose of His humiliation, is to do violence to the original, and to anticipate and so repeat the thought of the next clause, that He might taste death for every man. To taste death is a common Hebraism for to die (Mat 16:28; Joh 8:52). Merely to taste is sometimes the meaning of the Latin gustare, but that meaning must not be pressed here. In classic Greek, the phrase means to give oneself up to; but the Hebrew meaning to die is nearer the truth, with the added idea, perhaps, that He experienced and felt it, and so came to understand more fully what death is….And yet all this sufferingthe ground of our Saviours honour and exaltationwas by Gods grace. Herein is love, love in its noblest form, that God sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. If God Himself be not deeply concerned in this work, if the Divine nature have no share in what Christ did and suffered, the whole teaching of Scripture is confounded; and for our salvation we owe more to a man than to the blessed God. God is outdone by a creature in the exercise of His noblest perfections, and that in the very dispensation which was intended to reveal them.

For every man; rather, for every one. The extent, the design, and the effect of the death of Christ have been, as is well known, the subjects of great controversy. Some hold that He so died for all, that all are to be saved by Him; others, that He died only for all whom the Father gave Him; and others, that He died for all, inasmuch as His sufferings and death remove the obstacles to the pardon of sinners which are created by the character and government of God. The question is partly verbal, and may be raised in relation to all Gods giftsthe Bible, the means of grace, blessings of every kind. The thing that may be safely affirmed here is that the explicit teaching of this Epistle makes it impossible to accept these words in the first sense. Those who are saved by His death are the sanctified, the brethren, the many sons; not those who reject the Gospel and die in unbelief; and yet so large a company made heirs of blessings, moreover, so numerous, so varied, and so lasting, that if the dignity of His person gives value to His sacrifice, the efficacy of His sacrifice reflects back a glorious light on the dignity of His person.

Fuente: A Popular Commentary on the New Testament

We had an account of the depth of our Lord’s humiliation before, of the height of his exaltation now, all things are and shall be put under him: for though God has given Christ dominion over all things, and all things are subject to his power, yet he hath not as yet exercised his complete power in ruining all his enemies, and reducing all his people to subjection; and this will not be seen until the last saint to be converted, and until death, the last enemy, be destroyed.

But yet, in the mean time, Christ is exalted with great triumph to his kingdom in heaven, and there crowned with dignity and honour, and glory in heaven. It is easy to believe, that every thing shall be put under him that riseth up against him, in his own appointed time.

Observe here, 1. The wonderful humiliation and abasement, the examination and deep depression of the glorious Jesus; he was made for a little time lower than the angels; that is, he was made man, and mortal, and did suffer death.

Observe 2. The manner of our Lord’s death, He tasted it, that is he died really and not in appearance only, he tasted it. Implying that he underwent the bitterness of it: he found out experimentally what death was by dying, as a man finds out the bitterness of a thing by tasting.

Again, he did but taste of it, he was not finally overcome and vanquished by it; he continued but a short time under it, it was not possible that he should be long holden of it; the dignity of his person rendered a short continuance of him under the power of death sufficient for our redemption.

Observe, 3. The persons for whom he tasted death, of died: for others, not for himself; that is, in their room and stead; he underwent that death in our stead, which we should have undergone in our own persons.

Observe, 4. The extent of Christ’s death, he tasted death for every man; that is, Christ by his death has made God propitious to every man, made sin remissible, and every man saveable: The death of Christ renders God willing to be reconciled unto all sinners; faith renders him actually reconciled. The reason why every man doth not obtain salvation, is not for want of a sufficient propitiation.

Observe, 5. The moving cause which inclined God to deliver up Christ to death, and to transfer our punishment upon him, and that was his own grace, and free good-will, “That he by the grace of God should taste death for every man.”

Observe, 6. The glorious reward of our Lord’s sufferings with reference to himself, We see Jesus, for suffering of death, crowned with glory and honour. As Christ’s meritorious sufferings for us, so shall our patient suffering for him be rewarded with the highest glory in heaven, The God of all grace who hath called us unto his eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after ye have suffered awhile, make ye perfect, &c. 1Pe 5:10

Fuente: Expository Notes with Practical Observations on the New Testament

Heb 2:8-9. Thou hast put all things All things without exception; in subjection , under his very feet Such are the psalmists words, expressive of a dominion every way unlimited and absolute. For in that it is said, he put all things under him, he left nothing That is, nothing is excepted; that is not put under him But the whole universe and every creature in it is included. But now we see not yet all things put under him That is, under man, concerning whom the words were spoken, being connected with Heb 2:4 of the Psalm, What is man? As if the apostle had said, A long space of time hath elapsed since the giving out this testimony, and much longer since the creation of man; and yet, during all these years, or rather, all these ages, we see that all things are very far from being put under mans feet, from being subjected to the human race in general, or to any individual mere man. Hence, (as if the apostle had added,) we ourselves, by our own observation, may easily discern that these words of the psalmist respect not only, or principally, either the first man or his posterity, under whom certainly all things are not, and never were, put in subjection. But we see Jesus That is, it is only in Jesus that the psalmists testimony is verified; he was made lower than the angels And he hath had all things put in subjection to him. These things, says the apostle, we see. Yet it was not on his own account that he was made lower than the angels, in being clothed with our frail and mortal nature, but in order that he might suffer death, which is further explained by the addition of the next clause. For the words , for the suffering of death, are evidently intended to express the final cause of the humiliation of Christ, (he was made lower than the angels, who cannot die, that he might suffer death,) and not the meritorious cause of his exaltation. This, therefore, is the import and natural order of the words: we see Jesus crowned with glory and honour, who was for a little while made lower than the angels, for the suffering of death; that he by the grace of God By his gracious, free, sovereign purpose, suited to, and arising from, his natural goodness and benignity, mercy and compassion; might taste death Tasting death, (like seeing death,) is a Hebrew form of expression, signifying really dying, not dying in appearance or pretence, as some of old foolishly taught respecting the death of Christ, which shadow of dying could only have produced a shadow of redemption. The expression may also imply, finding by experience what is in death; Christ knew by experience what bitterness was in that cup of death which is threatened to sinners. He understood and felt it fully. The expression might also be intended to intimate, (as Chrysostom and the ancients thought,) our Lords continuing only a short time in the state of the dead, and, of consequence, his conquest over death; for though the phrase be used concerning other persons also, yet as applied to him, the event shows that it was only a thorough taste of it that he had. He neither was nor could be detained under the power of it. For every man That ever was or will be born into the world, without the exception of any. To die for another, according to the constant use of the expression, imports to die in his room and stead; and this the Jews understood in the use of their sacrifices, where the life of the beast was accepted instead of the life of the sinner. Thus Christ tasted death; he was, by the grace and wisdom of God, substituted as a mediator and surety in the stead of others, of all others; for he gave himself a ransom for all, 1Ti 2:6; when all were dead, he died for all, 2Co 5:15.

Fuente: Joseph Bensons Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

8. This verse testifies to the fact that the Father, in view of the Sons heroic and vicarious humiliation, has actually subordinated all things in this world beneath His feet. The autocratic decree of the Almighty bas gone forth, eternally irrevocable; but, as it here says, we do not now see that all things have yet been subordinated to Him. The final verification of this promise of the Father to subordinate all things to the Son has been reserved to the awful executive retributions to be inflicted on the wicked nations and fallen churches of this rebel world, during the premilennial judgments of the great Tribulation.

Fuente: William Godbey’s Commentary on the New Testament

2:8 Thou hast put all things in subjection under his feet. For in that he put all in subjection under him, he left nothing [that is] not put under him. {5} But now we see not yet all things put under him.

(5) An objection: But where is this great rule and dominion?

Fuente: Geneva Bible Notes

Even though believers do not yet see Jesus glorified on earth, we do see Him with the eye of faith glorified in heaven. God has crowned Jesus with glory and honor because He endured death. [Note: See Moffatt, p. 24.] He suffered death because it was God’s will for Him to taste death for every person. Suffering, introduced here, becomes a dominant theme in this epistle. This was God’s purpose in the Incarnation.

Jesus Christ’s death was for everyone in that by dying He paid the penalty for the sins of every human being, elect and non-elect (cf. 1Jn 2:2; 2Pe 2:1; Joh 3:16). His death was sufficient for all, but it is efficient only for those who rest their confidence in it as what satisfied God.

"There is a profound note of anticipation in the OT teaching about humanity. The words of the psalmist look forward into the future, and that future is inextricably bound up with the person and work of Jesus. His condescension to be made for a brief while ’lower than the angels’ set in motion a sequence of events in which abasement and humiliation were the necessary prelude to exaltation. His coronation investiture with priestly glory and splendor provide assurance that the power of sin and death has been nullified and that humanity will yet be led to the full realization of their intended glory. In Jesus the hearers are to find the pledge of their own entrance into the imperial destiny intended by God for them." [Note: Lane, p. 50.]

Fuente: Expository Notes of Dr. Constable (Old and New Testaments)