Hebrews 2:10 – 3:6

We look at what it means to be made “perfect through sufferings” – For Jesus through the suffering of the cross and death. This perfecting helps us see the trinity more clearly. We look at God’s knowledge and wisdom and how he declares the end from the beginning. And how that declaration appears to have included the making of perfection by suffering. Perfection we understand as that which is “useful to God”. We don’t ponder the theoretical perfection of Plato, because that doesn’t exist. And it’s foolishness. We ponder perfection as it’s presented in the Bible. And then we study to understand how Gods is making his creation useful. And that operation seems to include suffering. Te presence of the trees of life and knowledge before God made man is a clue that God’s foreknown and foreordained plan necessarily included suffering.

We examine the darkness in Genesis 1:2 in light of God’s intentional creation of free moral agents. And how “the darkness on the face of the deep” describes the beginning of this separate creation with a definite sense of uncertainty. Uncertainty for the creation. Not for God. He was certain he would achieve his end. But for the free moral agents there was uncertainty. And the extent of it could not be known, because God had created a situation in which freedom excludes absolute knowledge. And so it’s described as darkness. Isa 45:6-8, “That they may know from the rising of the sun, and from the west, that there is none beside me. I am the LORD, and there is none else. I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things. Drop down, ye heavens, from above, and let the skies pour down righteousness: let the earth open, and let them bring forth salvation, and let righteousness spring up together; I the LORD have created it.”

We study through the presentation in Hebrews of Jesus Christ as high priest in light of the fact that Christians have no priests at all, but instead we share with Jewish believers of the previous (and future) operation of Christ as mediator between God and man. We discuss what Christ mediates for us in the body of Christ, and what he mediates for believing Israel.

We look (once again) at the error of viewing God’s grace as “easy believism” and ask: “just how easy is it for a man to accept mercy from God?” Get out there and start offering it, and you’ll find out.

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