HEBREWS II. 6—8.
The passage: What is Man, that you keep him in mind? What is the Son of Man, that you visit him? You made him a little lower than the angels, crowned him with glory and honor, set him over the works of your hands, and put all things under his feet.
The opening words of this Epistle are the key to the whole of it: “God spoke to our fathers.” This states the principle on which the Jew’s history and life rested. Everything earnest and brave in the Jew came from the conviction, “We are the Lord’s servants; He has made Himself known to us; He has chosen us; He is reigning over us.” Everything cowardly, sensual, or idolatrous came from lacking this conviction—from forgetting the Covenant, from the feeling that after all the law came from no unseen Being and the prophet did not utter the Word of the Lord. Whatever explanation of the Old Testament we adopt, whatever interpolations we imagine, we can build it on no other basis than this. The moment we try, the records become a heap of incoherent fragments. It takes no learning to prove they do not form a whole; they cannot, once what unified them is gone. The Jews were no nation unless the Divine Covenant was real, not a fiction; they have no history if their books record only certain limited speculations about God, not what He spoke to man.
God has spoken to us by a Son. This is the fact the New Testament unfolds. Put any other fact in its place—say these books set forth an idea, not a fact, or are occupied with many subjects rather than this one—and it takes no great argument to show they too are a collection of incoherent fragments. You have taken away the bond that holds them together, and they must fall to pieces. Try to rebuild them on some other ground, and you find a hopeless, unintelligible mass that no re-forming can bring into any reasonable order.
But the writer wants to do more than state what a revelation assumes and what the later revelation was; he wants to show that the later was implied in the earlier—that the prophetic speech was a riddle until the speech in a Son explained it, and that only those who acknowledged that speech as the one adequate Divine utterance could understand their own oracles. To establish this he refers to many Old Testament passages. Understanding how he uses them is the only real difficulty in interpreting the Epistle. He who evades it must throw the whole book aside as unintelligible; he who overcomes it will, I think, find brightness where he had found the most obscurity.
Some quotations in the first chapter—important for the subject and for correcting a practical error—raise no difficulty. They concern angels. In the Jewish scriptures, the writer says, angels are always spoken of as mere servants, ministering spirits. No divinity is given them; they are sent on errands of mercy, doing works for man, not claiming to be his masters or to mediate between him and his Creator. That idea of mediation does run through the Old Testament—not in what it says of angels, but in its words about one of whom it is written, “Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee.”
Here the difficulty begins, one that has troubled simple readers and theological students still more. The passages that follow seem tied to events happening when they were written, events in which the speaker or the nation was deeply concerned. Are we to suppose they did not refer to those events? Did they have a double sense, like a heathen oracle? Or was a later writer allowed to put in a sense not originally there? Every commentator has had to meet these questions, and the answers given have chiefly been three.
Some assume that a New Testament writer, by his commission and inspiration, could declare such and such a meaning to be the true one, and we are bound to accept his interpretation however far it differs from what we would naturally give.
Another class say: no doubt we should accept an inspired writer’s word, but should we expect from one so gifted merely a set exposition of a few passages, rather than receiving him as a guide to the right principles of interpretation? May we not suppose the writer of Hebrews is sanctioning the use of allegory, stamping it as the true Divine method of reading the Old Scriptures, and so confirming beforehand the later doctors who applied it?
An opposite and bolder school cries: would it not be truer to say the writer had learned the allegorical system of the Alexandrian Jews, and adopted it readily—partly because it suited his feeling, partly as an argument aimed at those he addressed—and that by doing so he helped form a very perverse and perplexing system in the Church? In spite of his authority we must return to a fair reading of the original text, from which his translations sometimes depart widely, and give it the most literal meaning we can.
I fully agree with the first school that the interpretations in this Epistle are the safest to adopt in reading the Old Testament. I agree with the second that neither a Divine nor even a great human teacher merely gives us samples of a method without initiating us somewhat into the method itself. And I am wholly with the last in holding that reverence for Scripture binds us to seek an exact meaning for the passages quoted, found only by considering the occasions that called them forth and their historical contexts. But I differ from the first where they think it ever safe to treat Scripture as a mere set of words; and I differ from the other two in their common belief that the writer ever resorted to allegory, or ever once overlooked the circumstances under which the words he adopts were first spoken and the meaning they must have carried to those who first heard or spoke them.
There is an ambiguity in the word “literal.” Sometimes it means “exact”; sometimes it is the opposite of “spiritual” or “inward.” In the second sense it names the result of merely staring at words and syllables—a result almost worthless, for no one who spells out a sentence without asking who spoke it, to whom, when, and where will find what it means, or even that it means anything. The most exact interpreter takes most heed of everything that raises a sentence from dead to living. Such exactness, I hope to show, belongs to every reference in this Epistle; the absence of anything allegorical must be tested another way. Compare it calmly with any book, Jewish or Christian, that is confessedly allegorical, and I shall be surprised if you are not struck by a direct opposition between them. Two hints, out of many: the writer, mentioning the Temple-worship, names the cherubim and the mercy-seat, and says, “of these we cannot now speak particularly.” Could an allegorist have resisted speaking particularly on exactly those things, drawing endless spiritual analogies from their form and position? Again, he spends a whole chapter on the faith of the Jewish elders—illustrated by their common acts and ordinary daily history: Abraham living in tents, waiting for a son, ready to offer him up; Moses hidden three months, refusing to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter. Could an allegorist have endured such plain events, rather than dwelling on the meaning of the patriarchs’ names and treating each act as a type of something Divine or future? In general, this writer is impatient of shadows; he always wants to turn them into something practical and substantial. Where the allegorist avoids history and treats institutions as merely earthly things, this writer shows that the history and institutions of the land were the very instruments through which the Divine revelation was made and by which minds were awakened to receive it. The passages he quotes were all bound up with parts of the Jewish constitution, familiar to the Palestine Jews in that connection—and far from hiding this, he wants them to notice it. His whole art seems devised to press this on them. Sometimes he dwells on a significant word; sometimes he neglects words—not quoting or translating with strict accuracy—if by a plainly recognized departure from the letter he can bring the subject more vividly before them, and show that the principle lay not in the words but in the fact or institution they spoke of. By this he counteracted what was harmful in his countrymen’s reverence for institutions while justifying it and setting it on its right ground; for he showed how what they were tempted to worship for its own sake had been a method of Divine education to bring out the great idea of a Son—the idea realized in Jesus Christ. The steps of this Divine education mark, it seems to me, the pauses and stages of the Epistle; tracing them, we shall better value it as an exposition of Scripture and history.
I. The passages quoted in the first chapter plainly refer to the office of the Jewish King. With one exception they are all from the Psalms, and that exception is very significant: “I will be to him a Father, and he shall be to me a Son,” from 2 Samuel 7. There David, after overcoming his enemies, plans to build a Temple. A prophet tells him the purpose is approved but will not be carried out in his reign: when he sleeps with his fathers, God will set up his seed, who shall build the house and whose throne shall be established forever—“I will be his Father, and he shall be my son.” Every Hebrew would turn to this as the title-deed of the Jewish kingdom, the statement of the principle on which it stood. The words said directly that God had set it up; that the visible king held from the Invisible and witnessed His power and presence; that David’s continuing house meant the permanence of the Divine rule and of the nation in Him. All this would be granted. The writer’s aim is to show that this document held more than the mere setting up of a human kingdom by Divine will. When God said “I will be to him a Father,” He signified a real relation between Himself and the human king—indeed between Himself and the nation and each of its members. This was the mystery every true Jewish king felt to be the basis of his power, what made it real power and not arbitrary; losing that faith, he became a self-willed tyrant. Yet it was a mystery, and one it might take ages to unfold.
That a Greek should look up to one dwelling on a Thessalian hill among a council of warriors like his own chiefs, and call him “Father of gods and men,” was nothing strange. But that a Hebrew king should dare such language about the I Am—Him whom none had seen or could see, who dwelt in thick darkness, from whom the Law came amid thunder and lightning—this was wonderful. Was it that awe of Jehovah had grown less since Moses? No; nowhere is that awe deeper than in the shepherd-king’s songs and in Solomon’s consecration prayer. As nearness to the Divine Majesty was felt more, its awfulness was felt more too. How this could be must be learned from the experience of those who lived under this kingdom, and the Epistle turns to them next. The quotations from the Psalms seem chosen from different parts of the history, to show through what opposite circumstances and conflicts the idea grew in holy Israelites’ minds—the idea of One to whom “I will be his Father, and he shall be my Son” might strictly be spoken, and in whom they must be spoken to the visible King.
The second Psalm speaks of a time when Jewish and heathen foes both rebelled against the anointed king. The holy man—king or another—is sure they will be confounded, because a king sits not in the palace but on Zion, where the Invisible Presence dwelt, to whom the Lord says, “Thou art my Son.” The writer of the 97th, perhaps surrounded in Samaria or Phoenicia by worshippers of heroes and demigods who taunted him with atheism and may have stirred his own doubt whether homage to an unseen being could be real, finds relief in “The Lord reigneth”—He is the true King—but expands it into the assurance that God would raise up a true image of Himself to put down all false images, One to whom He was even then saying, “Worship him, all ye angels,” heroes, gods, whatever you be. The singer of the 45th, at some festivity celebrating a royal wedding, sees a higher king, perfectly loving righteousness and hating iniquity, the true bridegroom of the nation and of humanity. The writer of the 102nd, “sitting like a pelican in the wilderness,” reviled all day by enemies, is sustained by belief in a king who would reign over his own people and the heathen, because the earth is God’s, who laid its foundation of old; the heavens are His work and may perish, but He endures. Finally the writer of the 110th, who probably saw no signs of royalty but lived when a priest ruled, sees that the perfect King must unite priestly and kingly offices, and that to such a one the Lord says, “Sit at my right hand till I make your foes your footstool.”
A Hebrew would gladly dwell on these as showing his nation’s glory and its privileges held in reserve. But was that all they meant to the holy men of old? Surely not. David asked, in my text—which throws the clearest light on all the rest—“What is man, that you are mindful of him? or the son of man, that you visit him? You made him a little lower than the angels, crowned him with glory and honor, set him over the works of your hands, and put all things under his feet.” Through this revelation of a Divine King he was led to feel not just his own greatness, or Israel’s, but the greatness of man.
The Jew’s elevation could not be meant to degrade the human race he belonged to; it must raise it, and witness to the state God created it for. The first records of Jewish history had said all creatures were put under man, that he was made king of the world in the image of God. As yet those words seemed poorly realized: the ruler seemed slave to the servant; man’s homage from the creatures was often exchanged for his homage to them; one death claimed both. Yet the feeling lay deep in all hearts that dominion over the earth and intercourse with heaven were meant for them; they had wrestled with Death as a strange intruder and unlawful usurper. So the vision of one in whom not the Jewish nation only but humanity had its true head and representative must be realized. And did not the Hebrew Christians believe there was one who had exercised kingship over all material things here on earth, proved the great tyrant an intruder, and overcome him? Though they did not yet see all things put under man, did they not see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honor?
- The Jewish king chiefly embodied dignity, glory, and superiority. These were often shown in deepest weakness and involved condescension to the meanest—David’s history showed the anointed ruler might be a fugitive and outlaw—yet these were not the first things one thought of about the office, nor did the writer want them to be. Those he addressed tended to lower the dignity of man, to make him the servant of angels. They showed this even when they spoke nobly of Christ as the poor man, for they meant He was nothing else and had no royalty.
But one order of men brought this suffering character before the Jews directly. The prophet was the reprover of kings; he interpreted the office and showed how it must be fulfilled—yet he was himself the suffering Israelite. The next quotations plainly relate to this: they touch the new prophet’s person, his own feelings, and the witness he bore by his life more than his words. They show how the very inspiration that most raised a man above others made him more completely their brother, even in the depth of sorrow; how it bound him to greater trust and dependence than other men, and turned human relations into the means by which he and others grasped the Divine relation. There is a strange ambiguity in the words the writer wants us to notice—removed only when it was clearly shown how “he who sanctifies and those who are sanctified are all of one.” As the idea of a king could be realized only in one shown to have dominion over nature and man, so the idea of a prophet could be realized only in one who had full fellowship with the lowest human estate—who, because the children shared flesh and blood, himself took part of the same, and because they were all their lives subject to the fear of death, himself entered it and overcame it.
In both offices, King and Prophet, there were plain signs of incompleteness, witnessing to something mightier behind, and each obviously needed the other; neither’s meaning could be fulfilled till they were united. But was there this incompleteness in Moses, their first legislator? Was not the Divine King’s authority marvellously joined in him with the suffering Prophet’s? The awful Name was spoken to him from the bush; he spent forty days and nights on the Mount in communion with the Lord God; yet he was also the guide of the people through the desert, bearing their burdens and sins, feeling with them, interceding for them. Every Jew must have thought of this, and these Christian Jews, who liked to see their Master as the great reviver of the Jewish law and polity, would be especially tempted by it. Had the writer followed chronology he would have met this first. But he could not meet it effectively without first showing what was implied in their later history—in the covenant with David and the teaching of the holy men after him. From those he had gathered that a Son of God was promised to the Jewish nation, and that its greatness could not be realized except in such a person. Now, granting all Moses’ glory, it was certain he never claimed this honor—he expressly disclaimed it. He proved himself a faithful servant in a great household God was raising up. If there was such a Divine family, it must have a ruler as well as a servant. So Moses’ acts and words and office must also have been a prophecy; a Son of God must have been implied in them, one who would fully realize the idea of one admitted into the Divine converse yet sharing human griefs. The legislator was a witness of things to be spoken later. Did not Israel’s journeys through the wilderness, felt then and interpreted after, betoken an imperfection? Their state was one of progress and transition; they were on their way to a rest Moses was not allowed to bring them to. All the way the promise was set before them; they were to trust it would be kept, and their distrust caused them, and even their leader, to die without seeing the land.
Into that land Joshua led them. Was this, then, the promise fulfilled? This question leads the writer to another Jewish institution—one Moses pronounced holy in words showing it was held from an earlier time, one that deeply affected every Jew’s life and was still kept with almost idolatrous reverence. The sabbath had been expressly linked with the hope of rest in Canaan, but it had also been enjoined in solemner words linking it to the Rest of God. It embodied a twofold idea: God resting in beholding what He made, and man resting in beholding God. Through the writings of holy men we trace a sense of a higher rest not gained by conquering Canaan, of a day implied in that sabbath, of something in its meaning not yet accomplished, though the works were finished from the world’s foundation. No Jew, the writer argues, could understand the Scriptures or expect the promise to the Fathers fulfilled who was not looking for such a rest; otherwise he was repeating his forefathers’ very sin—the sin for which they fell in the wilderness—resting in the present and visible, not confessing his relation to an unseen Lord, and not looking to have the darkness over that relation removed. Only the acknowledgment of One in whom both God and man could rest—in whom the fellowship of heaven and earth was fully realized—could satisfy the sabbath’s meaning and the hopes it awoke in those who truly profited by it.
V. And such a one, he goes on, must be a priest, the High Priest of the Universe. This office naturally stood out most to a Hebrew Christian then. However degraded its present holders, it was the office Aaron fulfilled; they had the law that ordained it and its whole history of preservation and restoration. From here it becomes the Epistle’s leading subject. The argument runs thus. First, what a priest must be: he is appointed for man in things toward God, so he must share men’s feelings and wants, and there must be clear evidence he does not take the office himself but is called by God. The Jew would grant this and say, “Our priest meets both conditions—he is one of us and feels with us, yet he belongs to a tribe the Law openly designates for this service.” True, the writer says, but does that legal designation satisfy the idea of the High Priest that your holy men, raised under the Law, themselves held? The 110th Psalm speaks of a Priest after the order of Melchizedek as the highest conceivable order. What order was that? Your early records tell how Abraham, returning from the slaughter of the kings, found a priest already dwelling in what later became the holy city. His name marks him a king. Nothing is said of his parents or nation, yet Abraham, father of your nation and ancestor of the Levites, recognizes his priesthood and does him homage. And the Psalmist thinks this priesthood—resting on no formal enactment, marked by no tribe or nation—the highest of all. He evidently supposes a priest may be, and the highest Priest must be, called in some more direct, absolute way than by an outward Law, however solemnly proclaimed. And the Psalmist himself hints what that designation must be: the oath “Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee” must lie at the root of it—only a filial priest can satisfy the idea. Only one who, like Melchizedek, is both king and priest, shown by some tokens to be a Son of God, can meet the first condition of a perfect Mediator. And only such a one can meet the second: the priest’s own sinfulness was the great hindrance to the full sympathy with a sinful creature that the office implies. Only One holy, harmless, separate from sinners could truly be touched with the feeling of their infirmities and so be their needful Intercessor. Only One who had been on earth, suffered death, and passed into the heavens, now at God’s right hand, could have that permanent priesthood which the legal succession in Aaron’s family had only pointed to. Only One who had actually gone from the visible world into the presence of the unseen God could lead men in.
The idea of a constitution older than all formal enactments—grounded, as we might say, in the nature of things, or, more devoutly, on the “oath of God”—has now been brought before us in these remarks on the priesthood and Melchizedek, and has been assumed throughout the letter. On it the writer grounds another doctrine. Christ, ascended on high, has become the Mediator of a New Covenant. Now the Jew’s Covenant was the most sacred thing of all to him. He might reluctantly admit that Christ’s coming made it wider and let the Gentile share some of its privileges, but it was made to his fathers and to him, and the highest gift he could claim was its fulfilment. Nothing could be sounder, and his teacher would strengthen him in it—but what fulfilment was he looking for? As the priesthood needed something deeper than an ordinance, so must the Covenant. Their prophet Jeremiah had felt this. He had spoken of a New Covenant for the latter days, of this tenor: “I will write my laws in their hearts and minds.” He had seen that the Covenant too rested on something older than the choice of one family or nation, and must be referred to that constitution in the Son of God which exalted not a nation only but mankind. It too could be fulfilled, as the prophet foresaw, only by a Man’s ascension to God’s right hand and the gift of the filial Spirit, who would write the Law in the worshipper’s heart—changing it from a law of carnal commandment into the power of an endless life.
Having established that Man was brought into God’s presence by Christ’s ascension, and that he was treated as a spiritual being to be ruled and guided by God’s Spirit, the writer turns to Divine Worship. The ark that went through the desert and the temple raised on Zion testified generation after generation that the Lord was in their midst; disbelieving this had been their greatest sin and the root of all others. Yet the Temple itself witnessed that something was hidden from the worshipper: a veil hung over the mercy-seat. By the very figures they prized, they were reminded that they were not yet admitted into the pure presence of Him they served. Yet everything in their Covenant and discipline had taught them to be content with nothing less—everything meant to draw their minds from the visible to the invisible, from the shadowy to the real. If they had really entered the temple-worship, really sought the Unseen Presence, they could not rest until the figures were exchanged for the reality, until they could enter it and hold actual, awful communion with the living God.
But what was the Veil? The other services—the purifications—told them. Something overshadowed the worshipper’s heart and separated it from Him he would draw near to. It was the inner man that aspired to fellowship with the unseen God, and it was within, in himself, that he found the obstruction. All the appointed ceremonies for purifying the flesh reminded him of this fact but could not change it. The Covenant told him there was something from which he must be separated to be united to God. The blood sprinkled on the book of the Covenant, on the worshippers, and on all the temple vessels seemed to connect purification somehow with death. All this was a wonderful education for man’s spirit; but, like every part of the Jewish discipline, it led him to see that his relation to the Creator must live in a person, not in a thing—an animal—and to expect that that Person would somehow show what sacrifice meant, what death meant, and how the very thing that seemed to divide every creature from God could become the instrument and bond of reconciliation.
That the Jewish psalmists and prophets came to feel no purification was enough that did not reach the conscience, their confessions and prayers abundantly prove—the 51st Psalm is only the most striking specimen of a tone running through all. But the mystery of Sacrifice, though bound up with the purifications and every other service, stood out as involving something deeper than the rest, and it revealed itself through still more terrible struggles and doubts, sometimes reaching despair. The writer cites the 40th Psalm as illustrating the whole subject. The man there seemed to himself stuck in deep mire with no ground; there was a fathomless abyss within him that no ordinance or grace he knew or could imagine could close. But he waited patiently for the Lord, and gradually saw implied in that Institution—which of itself availed him nothing—One who could offer the real, acceptable sacrifice, One who could say, “Lo, I come; in the volume of the book it is written of me, to do your will, O God… your law is within my heart.” This entire consent of the will to the Divine will, he saw, must be the ground of all sacrifice. Resistance to that loving Divine will had been man’s curse, what divided each from his fellow. He who delighted to do it, who had the law in his heart, must be the Man—must fulfil the idea of Man—and yet be the Son of God, in whom God’s very Being and Character shine forth. All other notions of sacrifice were either leading to this or else false; this alone could take away the sin of the world, its disobedience and selfishness. He who could offer it must be the reconciler of God and man, the living complete atonement between heaven and earth; He who by the Eternal Spirit offered Himself to God could alone purge the conscience from dead works to serve the living God, and alone give the Spirit by which all creatures united in Him might offer themselves as sacrifices well pleasing to the Father.
Thus far we have traced, through the various parts of the old Economy, the unfolding of the great truth the writer says lies at the root of the new. I beg you not to trade this view of the Jewish Scriptures too quickly for a more modern one. Learned men often satisfy themselves with a phrase like “a Theocratic Idea lies at the basis of the Jewish commonwealth.” I do not say such a phrase means nothing to those who use it—they should ask themselves seriously what it means, and not become the victims, as so many have, of their own generalizations. It may convey their apprehension more honestly than language which seems to me more real and living. But remember: such paraphrases bring us no nearer this writer’s meaning; they destroy it. He thought the living God had actually made Himself known to the Jewish people, was their King and Teacher, gave them their institutions, and through them and every event of their history was educating them to know Himself. This education, he affirms, bore toward one object: God would speak in the latter days by a Son—One who had always been a Son, the brightness of His glory and express image of His person, in whom He made the worlds. How God unveiled this Son to His servants’ hearts—showing them He was implied in every part of their polity, that their life, personal and social, was intelligible only in Him, and that they could reach their true stature as Israelites and as men only when allowed to behold themselves and God in Him—we learn from the passages I have considered. We gain little by reducing them to “they merely set forth the theocratic idea of a Jew”; but by patiently considering them we may learn better what that theocratic idea was. We may find it was no notion of a Being who sometimes interferes by strange acts in the world’s affairs, nor of a sovereign who by mere pleasure decides one nation shall be better than the rest, nor of a lawgiver laying down arbitrary rules with terrible penalties and promised rewards. Such notions did often arise in Jews’ minds—they so counterfeited the truths that they could be justified by particular words and acts taken apart from the whole revelation. But they were exactly the notions the old prophets rebuked, against which they proclaimed the Lord God of righteousness, who by a Divine order of His own devising was leading His creatures away from the idols of sense that divided and brutalized them, into the knowledge of Himself, the unseen and living Lord, the God of all the families of the earth—and thus into the free exercise of the capacities that knowledge alone could satisfy, and of every other capacity He had given them for their good and His glory.