“Very God of Very God”
Thus the wonderful epistle opens; and then that Son is presented first as one who expresses the very image of the substance of God. He is compared with angels, and shown to be infinitely above them. God the Father speaks of his angels as messengers; he addresses the Son: “thy throne, O God.” In the second chapter again are angels compared, this time with man. The same Son is shown to be made for a little while lower than the angels, taking the form of man.
In this first chapter of Hebrews the Holy Spirit, when he seeks to attest the truth that Jesus is God, calls the Old Testament to witness, and two groups of three quotations each are made, each time the words being put in the mouth of God the Father. In the second chapter when the Spirit seeks to press home the parallel truth that Jesus is a man, one with us, he uses a group of three quotations from the Old Testament. In these quotations we shall discover something of the preciousness for us of the truth that the Lord Jesus was a man, one with his brethren. “For both he that sanctifieth and they that are sanctified are all of one: for which cause he is not ashamed to call them brethren, saying ...” (Heb. 2:11).
Then there follow in the twelfth and thirteenth verses of the second chapter of Hebrews the three quotations from the Old Testament.
This is the first:
“I will declare thy name unto my brethren,
In the midst of the congregation will I sing thy praise.”
One With Our Lord in Resurrection
This is the twenty-second verse of the twenty-second Psalm, the Crucifixion Psalm. But the twenty-second Psalm is more than a crucifixion Psalm; it is a resurrection Psalm as well. This twenty-second verse that the Spirit uses to prove that Jesus is one with us is the first verse of the resurrection half of the Psalm. When our Lord rose from the dead he said, “Go unto my brethren, and say to them, I ascend unto my Father and your Father, and my God and your God” (John 20:17). This was the first time that our Lord linked those words “my Father and your Father.” For in his resurrection he was in a new way “the firstborn of many brethren.” “Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee,” was not spoken of the eternal generation of the Son of God, the living Word who was not begotten on a day but was before all time. Neither do the words refer to the glad day when the babe was born of the Virgin. They refer to that glad resurrection day when in a new way he declared God’s name unto his brethren. This is made clear in Acts 13:32, 33: “And we bring you good tidings of the promise made unto the fathers, that God hath fulfilled the same unto our children, in that he raised up Jesus; as also it is written in the second psalm, Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee.”
We are one with our elder Brother, then, in death and resurrection, and here is the death-blow to Satan’s lie of universal brotherhood and universal fatherhood. The firstborn of many brethren is brother only to those who share in his death that they may share also in his new birth.