Up to these verses, Hebrews 2:5f, the writer has been focusing on the deity of Jesus and how His superiority to the prophets and to the angels should drive us to “think more carefully” about Him. We should fix our attention on Jesus because there is so much for us to see and understand about His person and His work. The deeper we sink our roots into Jesus and His sacrifice on our behalf, the stronger our branches will be in life. Paul prays that the Ephesians would do just that in Ephesians 3:17-19. He explains that Jesus is God’s love demonstrated to us in the flesh and wants them to sink their roots into that so “…that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” Growth in the spiritual life comes not from trying harder, but from sinking our roots into God’s love as expressed on Calvary. There is so much nourishment to be drawn from the person and work of Christ.
The author of Hebrews gives us more wonderful truths about the person and work of Jesus to which we should pay close attention. He moves on in these verses to talk about Jesus’ humanity. He writes in Hebrews 2:5-8, “For it was not to angels that God subjected the world to come, of which we are speaking. It has been testified somewhere, ‘What is man that you are mindful of him, or the son of man, that you care for him? You made him for a little while lower than the angels; you have crowned him with glory and honor, putting everything in subjection under his feet.’” The title “Son of man” was Jesus’ favorite designation of himself. It’s the focus on His humanity as foretold in Genesis 3:16 that He would come into the world as the seed of the woman. The Psalm that is quoted here is normally taken to refer to mankind in general because in Genesis, God gave dominion over all creation to us! But we gave it away. Hagner observes, “Jesus is the true embodiment of humanity, the last Adam who realizes in himself that glory and dominion that the first Adam and his children lost because of sin. In him the words of the psalmist have their fulfillment. If the words were meant originally to apply to human beings, they find their fullest realization in the one who is preeminently human, who reveals humanity as humanity was meant to be.”[1]
Jesus was not like the angels because He was fully human. He knows what we know. He feels what we feel, as the author tells us later in his letter in Hebrews 4:15 “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.” We must sink our roots down deep into God’s love as expressed in Christ. His divine position in eternity past as creator of all things was set aside because He loved us. He took upon Himself the nature of a man, being born of a woman, and experienced the pain and sufferings of death because He loved us. As a man without sin, He restores to us the dominion God had planned for us over all creation. Here is where we should focus our attention! These are the things we should be thinking carefully about. Only in Christ will we find peace and rest with God and dominion over the world. The law brings nothing but condemnation.
[1] Donald A. Hagner, Hebrews, Understanding the Bible Commentary Series (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2011), 45.