Hebrews 2:8-9

Hebrews 2:8-9. The supremacy is certainly promised, and is intended to be complete; for nothing is excepted, though as yet (Hebrews 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 spectacle Jesus 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 Paul's Epistles: 1 Corinthians 15:27; Ephesians 1:22; Philippians 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 Philippians 2:9; and this rendering is all but essential if we are to do justice to the Greek (διά 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 (Matthew 16:28; John 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 suffering the ground of our Saviour's honour and exaltation was by God's 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 God's gifts the 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.