Clough Hebrews Lesson 10

Christ is Superior in His Historic Role – Hebrews 1:13-14

Going back to the big picture of Hebrews, the first ten chapters have to do with the superiority of Christianity and using this superiority of Christianity to exhort down and out of it believers. Remember, Hebrews is written to a group of Jews, probably at Rome, who were encountering difficulties in their life and increasing pressures, and they were susceptible to a particular kind of pressure because they had become Christians by second and third hand information. None of the people that read this letter had ever seen Jesus Christ, all of them had learned the gospel from the apostles or other believers. So they’re very analogous today to people in our own situation who obviously all have believed in Jesus Christ without personally seeing Him.

Now in Hebrews 1-2 we’ve worked with the theme that Jesus Christ is God’s Son and therefore what this means to our response to what he says. And Hebrews 1:5-14 has to do with the Old Testament proofs of His superiority and there are three proofs that we have studied, or will study. Verses 5-6, the Old Testament proof of His superiority as concerning His authority, that Jesus Christ as the eternal Son, because He is God He has a place of supremacy over all areas of the creation. And since He has this place over the whole creation He is superior by way of authority.

Then in verses 7-12 we have dealt with Jesus Christ’s superiority in power and last time you saw the contrast, on the one hand, between the angels who are mutable, that is they change, as some of the expressions in the apocryphal literature read, they change hour by hour in their form; they can take on the appearance of natural elements of fire and wind, and the angels, then, are constantly on the move under God’s sovereignty. They are constantly mutating from one form to another by divine command. But in contrast to this, the passage points out that Jesus Christ is immutable, He is not mutable because Jesus Christ stands above the flow of history; Jesus Christ stands above all the physical laws in the universe.

And those of you who can appreciate, have some physics to appreciate it, can be made aware and think, it makes it more vivid to me, to think in terms of the second law of thermodynamics here, where you have a deteriorative process involved in both physical and chemical systems. Actually if you want to be really modern about it the second law has been generalized in a statistical way so now it applies to everything, including information theories and so on. That is the second law simply states that all processes in the cosmos move from order to chaos, not the other way around. There’s always a tendency to destroy what is ordered, highly ordered, whether it’s a message of information you always will get static between the transmitter and the receiver and this is an occupational hazard, of course, with preachers, is that there’s always static that occurs between the time words leave my mouth until the time it rattles around somebody’s head and gets passed around by the telephone and so forth. And by the time you hear it twenty people down it’s a massive modification that’s occurred. Well, that’s simply another illustration of the second law.

The second proof in the Old Testament is Christ’s superiority with respect to His power. Because Christ is immutable over nature, He obviously is more powerful than the mutable angels in nature.

Now tonight we come to the most difficult proof of all three and that has to do with Hebrews 1:13-14. “But to which of the angels said He at any time, Sit on My right hand, until I make thine enemies Thy footstool? [14] Are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation?” Now these two verses have a massive amount of material in them and we want to take them slow so you understand the content of these verses. The content of these verses argues a third proof. Jesus Christ is superior to angels in His historic role. He’s not only superior by way of authority, which is eternal, it has to do with never-ending thing, He’s not only superior with respect to power, which again is an eternal position, but Jesus Christ is superior in His historic role.

Now you’ll have to be prepared when we come to grips with verses 13-14 to submit yourself to God’s decrees, submitting to yourselves to what He tells you that He is doing in history. The tendency always is to look out on history and see chaos or lack of order, or lack of plan. Now God is the author of history and He is telling us here what He is doing with history, and there’s some rather fascinating concepts that come out of this for your Christian life, but we can’t appreciate the things that come out of the passage until you go back into the details of the philosophy of history that these passages teach. So let’s take it slowly and go into the Old Testament background and see what happens.

Hebrews 1:13, “But,” this marks the third thing, it sets verse 13 off from verse 12. Each of these sections begin this way, notice verse 7, “and of the angels he said,” then verse 8, “But of the Son,” see each passage, angels then Son. Now here verse 13 is angels, “But,” and he ties in the Son. See, it’s a contrast between the angels and the Son again but this time from another perspective. “But to which of the angels,” now the word “to,” translated in your English as “to” is a Greek word, pros. By the way, those of you who want to take Greek and you’re not a university student there’s a professor of Tech that will see if he can get some evening and he’ll teach a class over here in Greek. Don’t bother to sign up if you’re not really serious about because that’s not much of a testimony, get the man over here and then flake out after two or three weeks. All major doctrines, of course, can be learned from the English translations of your Bible, but my argument why, if you have the opportunity, you should try to get at least a basic mastery of Greek is two-fold. One, there are numerous details in Scripture that you can’t appreciate if you don’t realize little things like the tenses of verbs, the singular plural on the noun and so forth. These are things that will mean a lot more to you if you do have a mastery of Greek.

And the second thing really has nothing to do with Greek but the act of having to sweat another language will be the best mental exercise some of you will ever have, particularly if you haven’t had a language. Greek is not that hard to learn; the only thing that snows you about Greek is you look at the letters in the alphabet and they look different. Once you know the letters of the alphabet the Greek vocabulary is pretty easy to learn compared to other vocabularies. Nothing like French with 85 different exceptions to the verb and it’s obviously nothing like English where nothing is regular. How a child ever learns English I’ll never know but Greek is regular and it is a language which just your mental discipline of working through that language will teach you to observe things in the text of Scripture and will make a much, much better observer. See, if you have to sit there and look at each word because you won’t become as skilled in the Greek, obviously, as you are in your native language, so you’ll always tend to think in your native language rather than the Greek, so it forces you to observe every word, every tense, and you’ll see things in Scripture that are there right now but you’re not looking at them. And these are things that I try to point out as we go along but you can do this on your own.

“But to which of the angels,” now the word pros, “to,” “to which of the angels” is different from the word used in verse 7. In verse 7, “And of the angels he says,” or literally “to the angels,” or “concerning the angels” but when he uses, in verse 13 pros, it draws attention to the fact that this is a formal address to these angels. In other words, this is something specifically addressed, not about the angels, not incidentally given to them, but this is a formal saying that is made face to face with the angels; pros, by the way, is the same preposition that’s used in John 1 where it says “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,” pros, face to face. Okay.

Now, “to which” or “toward which of the angels did He ever say,” now the verb to say in verse 13 is different also. This is a perfect tense. The verb that you saw in verse 5, for example, “unto which of the angels said,” that was an aorist, simple past. However, in this one he uses a perfect. Now why does the tense shift. Now this is one of the things where Greek will help you. When you translate this you’ll come to this thing, you’ll try to conjugate the verb and you’ll say wait a minute, it’s a different word, different form, why is it a different form. And you begin to say look, let’s find out why did the Holy Spirit, when He wrote this thing, put it in a different verb tense. Well, the verb tense, perfect, emphasizes the result of an action. So the action that’s described in verse 13 is an action which occurs at a point in time but continues. That’s the perfect tense. So, “toward which of the angels has He said at any time with the results that continue into the present.” In other words, are there angels now reigning because of a past decree. So he’s looking not so much at the decree given but the fact that the decree simply was given and the results are experienced in the present moment.

So, “Unto which of the angels has He said at any time,” and then he quotes another passage from the Old Testament, Psalm 110. Now before we turn to the Psalm there are some passages that we’re going to look at on our way back to visit Psalm 110. The first word you’ll see in verse 13 where the quote starts with “Sit,” “Sit on My right hand, until I make Your enemies Your footstool.” Now the word “sit,” imperative, is a key word in this whole epistle. For example, if you look back at verse Hebrews 1:3 you recall that part of verse 3 is a reminiscence from Psalm 110, same passage, “When He had by Himself purged or sins He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high.” There’s the sitting. Now you say why all this emphasis on the sitting, I don’t understand, why the sitting. That one very itself is a bombshell if you appreciate Biblical thought and you’re prepared and to be ready for what the idea is that’s coming across. The word “sit” is a word that can never be used of an angel in God’s presence.

For example, as we turn back in the Old Testament, first stop at the Gospel of Luke. In the Christmas passage there’s a very interesting statement. Luke 1:19, Zacharias is the husband of Mary’s cousin; he’s an old man and he had prayed that he might see the Messiah and see the dawning of the Messianic era before he died. And the angel comes to him and says you will see it Zacharias, and then in verse 19 the angel identifies himself, he’s given a name, called Gabriel, one of the two named angels in the Bible, the other one is Michael. “I am Gabriel, that stands,” see that, stands, not sit, “stands in the presence of God, and I am sent to speak to you, and to show you these glad tidings.” So again notice the position. Why are the angels always pictured as standing instead of sitting. Well, standing connotes readiness to move, and so they’re always on the move. See here’s that ever constantly going, flowing, going, coming, returning, getting sent on one mission after another, that’s the angels, never sitting down, always busy, always doing something. So, “I am Gabriel that stands.”

Now if you turn to Isaiah 6:2 and you see the throne of God itself and there another category of angels are introduced called the seraphim; they’re called seraphs because seraph means to burn. They’re the burning ones. Now we don’t know exactly what they look like, it says they have wings, but whatever they do they appear like fire and they’re burning. But they’re standing in Isaiah 6:2, they’re standing, and if you want another reference on this theme of them standing I would refer you to 1 Kings 22:19.

Let’s turn to Psalm 110 and look at this Messianic psalm. This is the psalm that the author of Hebrews expected his congregation to know, and like many of the other psalm passages we know that this was a psalm circulated in the time of Jesus Christ as a Messianic psalm. See, the proof, remember the three step proof of the author of Hebrews; his first step is that Messiah is greater than angels. The unstated minor premise of the syllogism is that Jesus Christ is the Messiah. And the conclusion of the syllogism is therefore Jesus Christ is greater than angels. Now this author presupposes a massive number of things. He presupposes that you are already in agreement with the minor point of the syllogism, that Jesus Christ is the Messiah. He can do this because he was writing to a group of Jews that did this, it was legitimate for him to presuppose this.

He also, however, presupposes something else and that is that you understand a little bit about Messiah. In particular what he presupposes is that you are aware of where to find passages in the Old Testament about Messiah. So I tried to show you in these previous Psalm passages that when he goes back here he’s not inventing this. It’s not the case of the author of Hebrews stands up in the synagogue and he says hey, did you ever notice over in this psalm what it says, do you know what that’s talking about? Messiah. No, he’s not doing that. What this man in effect is saying is, now as all of you know, in that famous Messianic passage in Psalm… it says. In other words, he is not arguing that this is Messianic, he doesn’t have to do that either. His readers in the first century know that Psalm 110 is a Messianic psalm. So that’s why there’s no argument in Hebrews about it. It’s presupposed and since it’s presupposed we presuppose it also.

Now let’s look at Psalm 110 and make some very interesting points. It’s short enough so we can look through it quickly because this is the Psalm that is the most quoted in the New Testament. This is one of the most famous Psalms behind the New Testament. Notice who it’s by, it’s “A Psalm of David.” Now that’s very interesting and Christ is going to build a whole argument off this thing. Psalm 110:1, “The LORD said unto my Lord, Sit Thou at my right hand,” now the King James has those Lords written differently. What do the modern translations do? Anybody have a New ASV? [someone says something] It’s different. I’m glad they did it, some modern translations don’t do this. “The LORD said unto my Lord,” now the first one is different because the first noun refers to Yahweh, so that’s a reference to Yahweh, the Tetragrammaton, Yahweh, sometimes Jehovah, “Jehovah said unto my Lord,” and the second noun is different, notice. That is the word Adonai, it means master, or husband, or it can mean Lord.

“The LORD said to my Lord, Sit Thou at my right hand until I make thine enemies Thy footstool.” Now if David’s saying this and he’s writing the psalm and he’s king and he’s the highest one in Israel, who is the Adonai. We know who Yahweh is; yet the Adonai is “my” and David’s down here, so here’s the mystery of this psalm. This is the only psalm in the Bible that is Messianic and does not appear to have a contemporary application. Dr. Delitzsch, who was one of the greatest Bible scholars of the 19^th century in Germany has had a classification of the Messianic Psalms that’s never been beat, no scholar has ever improved on Dr. Delitzsch’s classification of Psalms, and this one, Dr. Delitzsch confessed, would not fit into any category he made. Psalm 110 is a psalm all by itself because it doesn’t fit any contemporary historic personage. It’s completely ahistorical, in other words, it looks completely to the future. This is unusual; in most cases it always has a current application as well as a future one. This psalm does not. Why doesn’t it? Because if David’s the highest figure in the land and there’s no lord over David, who is the Lord spoken of in verse 1? Who is it that David says “my Lord,” “Yahweh says to my Lord,” both “Yahweh” and “my Lord” are above David. So this is one of those strange places in the Old Testament where the Trinity begins to show in the progress of revelation. Here at least two personalities in the Godhead are manifest and clear.

Now he goes onto say, whoever this “my Lord” is, that is superior to David, “the LORD,” that’s Jehovah now, “shall send the rod of Thy strength,” now this is God addressing Adonai, this is Yahweh addressing Adonai and Yahweh says to Adonai certain things. Verse one He says, “You sit at My right hand.” The sitting means that whatever occurs, remember in the passage I showed you with Bathsheba, came into Solomon’s right hand and she asked him a petition, there’s your expression right hand, that’s what it means, the Father is saying “Son, sit at My right hand.” Now if you remember when we first started Hebrews 1 you remember what Psalm 2 says the Son does? God says something, “This day have I begotten Thee,” I have decreed such and such, etc. and then what does He ask the Son to do? Do any of you recall Psalm 2.

Turn back to Psalm 2. This is written about the same kind of thing. Psalm 2:7, is this Adonai, this strange king, except of course here it has a contemporary application. Now if you look at Psalm 2:8 you’ll see the petition that Adonai makes to Yahweh; see what He says. Jehovah says, “Ask of Me, and I will give Thee the heathen for Your inheritance,” so now the Son is at the right hand of the Father. Let’s get this in position, this sitting business. Here’s the throne if you can visualize it; the Son is seated over here at the right. In the Bible that is an expression for the place of petition, at the right hand, just like Bathsheba stood at Solomon’s right hand, Solomon sat on the throne, the queen mother walks up to him, she comes up to his right side and she asks him. So sitting at the right hand… she was standing in that case, she stood at his right hand and she asked him something. So Psalm 2:8 tells you what the Son asks the Father. See, the Father says go ahead and ask of Me. Now that indicates that the Son has to want to do the asking, it’s not an automatic IBM program that clickety clacks on by itself. There has to be a personal asking by Jesus Christ from His Father.

Turn back to Psalm 110. The first thing that Yahweh tells Adonai, those are the two personalities, none of them are David, it can’t refer to David because David’s below both of them. Yahweh says to Adonai, first, You sit at My right hand. Now the fact that it says “right hand” tells you immediately that it’s going to be in a petitioning situation. But the fact that He says “sit” should blast you because this is a new thing. Nobody sits in God’s presence. The angels don’t, Gabriel doesn’t, who is this that sits in God’s presence? Sits! He has the audacity to sit, total relaxed acceptance in the face of God. Now what is this? That word “sit” is a very important word.

All right, look what Yahweh asks further or tells. He says, even though it’s third person here it’s to be considered as first, Hebrew poetry is that way, [2] “The LORD shall send the rod of your strength out of Zion; rule Thou in the midst of Your enemies.” In other words, Yahweh says conquer. So as the Son sits at the right hand of His Father, the Father turns and says Son, ask of Me and I’ll give it to You, now conquer! My power is with you to conquer Your enemies. [3] Your people will be wiling in the day of Your power; in the beauties of holiness from the womb of the morning, You has the dew of Thy youth. [4] The LORD has sworn and will never change His mind, You are a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek. [5] The Lord at Thy right hand shall strike through kings in the day of His wrath. [6] He shall judge among the nations; He shall fill the places with the dead bodies; He shall wound the heads over many countries. [7] He shall drink of the brook in the way; therefore shall He lift up the head.”

Now that is an obviously highly militant psalm of promise toward a conquering Adonai. Now, if David is down here and he’s looking up and he sees two personages, Yahweh says to my Lord, those two personages actually turn out to be the Father and the Son in the Trinity. Here you have it in the Old Testament. And David looks up to this… the Spirit, it could be argued that the Spirit is present here too but we’ll just say He’s in the background. So you have the Father and the Son and they’re having a personal relationship between each other, the Father and the Son, a perfect personal relationship but in this part of their relationship it is only for a time because back in verse 1 you have the connective, “until.” Therefore, what is described in Psalm 110 is not something that goes on for eternity. It is something only to do with time, only to do with history. And it is a promise that something will happen in history that will definitely come to a conclusion.

Now let’s come back and stop at Matthew 22:41, Jesus Christ picks up Psalm 110 and uses it as a rapier in an argument with the Pharisees. He is going to use Psalm 110 as a weapon to knock down the false human viewpoint of Messiah prevalent in His time among Pharisees. So He says, “While the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them,” this is a case where Jesus Christ is sitting around, if you have read the classics and so on, this is like Socrates annoying the people. Jesus is in the same kind of thing. “Jesus asked them,” now He’s a tease he’s really teasing them here because He knows they can’t answer the question. And so He says, “What do you think of Christ?” And then He asks the question again, “Whose son is He?” See, he’s leading them out on a limb because He knows what they’re going to say. Why, “they said, He’s the Son of David.” And that was normal and that sounded legitimate, but what the Pharisees were doing, they were taking the concept, “Son of David” out of 2 Samuel 7, out of Psalm 2, but they were loading it as only human. In other words, they were knocking out the deity of the Messiah and keeping Him as a human Messiah. So what they meant by the Son of David and what Jesus meant by the Son of David were two different things. So Jesus has to knock them a little bit here to straighten them out that the Messiah is both God and man in one person. So the Pharisees say no, He is only human, He is not God, He is only human.

So Jesus traps them and He says If you say that the Messiah is the Son of David, then, now he’s going to close in on them, [43] He said unto them, How, then, does David, in the Spirit, call Him Lord,” now the phrase “in Spirit” of verse 43 is a testimony to the inspiration of Scripture because what Jesus declares in verse 43 is that David, while he was under the influence of the Holy Spirit wrote Psalm 110. There is one of the texts in the New Testament that shows you how the Bible was written. Jesus saying when David penned that psalm the Holy Spirit was working in a unique way so that the words of the psalm would be the words of God. “How, then, does David, in Spirit, call Him Lord,” and then he quotes Psalm 110:1, “The LORD said unto my Lord, Sit Thou at My right hand, until I make Thine enemies Thy footstool?” And then Jesus draws the application, [45] “ If David, then, calls him Lord, how is He his son?” See how He’s trapped them. In other words, would David call Solomon his Lord, would David call any of his physical lineage His superiors? Not unless the physical lineage was more than a physical lineage, unless the physical lineage was God and man, the David could call Him Lord. And that’s the point that He’s doing in verse 46, the quiz was flunked by everybody there because nobody could answer the question. Now we can read between the lines, I think they knew what He wanted them to answer but they were too stubborn and rebellious to answer the truth.

Now let’s turn back to Hebrews 1, “But to which of the angels has He ever made this declaration, Come in, Sit down, until I make Thine enemies Thy footstool.” Now verse 13, Hebrews 1:13 quotes Psalm 110:1, we also know that it was customary in the time of Jesus Christ that psalms were not, obviously, numbered, He didn’t say, hey, you know I’m over in Psalm 110; they didn’t have numbers on then, so how did you recognize the psalm if you didn’t have any numbers on it. You recognized the psalm by the first verse. This is why, for example, in the Gospels it says Jesus was on the cross and He said, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me,” and you say isn’t that an interesting statement He made. But He made more than that statement on the cross; what that statement is in the Gospels, it’s saying while Christ was on the cross He quoted that psalm with a title, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me, in other words, it’s saying He quoted Psalm 22. Christ quoted the whole psalm apparently while He was dying on the cross for your sins. Now it’s the same thing here in verse 13, apparently the author is just citing the title of Psalm 110, knowing that his readers will say okay, there’s a whole bunch more coming after this, because he’s going to build his argument on other things in Psalm 110. So verse 13 isn’t just meant to be limited to the first verse of Psalm 110; verse 13 is meant to show you the whole, every verse in Psalm 110.

Now with this we have to reflect on God’s grand strategy for history. I’m going to try to summarize this strategy in two sets of five statements so that we can go through this quickly, you can get an overview, and then you can appreciate the argument. The first part is what we’ll call God’s master plan to glorify Himself, or His grand strategy of history. Now obviously the strategy can’t be adequately summarized in five points, it takes the whole Bible to do it, it’s taken us nineteen centuries of church history to understand it and even now we don’t understand all there is to understand about it, so don’t be snowed that we’re going to learn it in five little points. The five points are just to outline very, very broadly the scope of the big picture.

Here’s the first point: I’m doing this this way tonight because this is going to come up again and again and again, if you’re taking notes and you get it down then we won’t have to go through this again but review it because this concept comes up again and again, it’s going to come up again at least two or thee more times before we finish chapter 2. At creation God placed man as potential king, with emphasis on the “potential.” How do we know this? Well, what does Genesis 1:26 and following say? I’ve given you dominion, there’s your word to rule, there’s your kingly word, I’ve given you dominion to rule the works of My hands. So Genesis 1:26 and Psalm 8; those two passages are two among many that you can cite that God at creation set man as the potential king.

Now just so you understand the point, let’s look at some ways in which man’s going to rule. One way in which man rules that’s very exciting to contemplate if you’re in education or just general life really, and that is that man in his soul acts as a prism, sort of as a prism. Now a prism takes some white light, because of refraction scatters that light, it has a certain angel of refraction that varies with the frequency of the light wave and therefore sets up a spectrum. The prism breaks up light into its various parts. Now intellectually this is what man does; he takes the raw creation and one function of man in subduing the creation is that he breaks it up logically into categories. He breaks it up, for example, first he has a mathematical aspect, he might have a physical aspect, a biological aspect and so on. Man has the mental capabilities of breaking up the creation. The danger is that once you get it broken up you think that this is really something; men tend to abstract and here’s where you get the university which has become a diversity in our day. Instead of a university, you don’t go to a university you go to a place there are a lot of competing empires. And one department tries to snow you with a lot of assignments to outdo the other department. So you have somebody in this department, somebody over here, somebody over here and it’s a tragedy and it’s a denial of the Biblical worldview.

The Biblical worldview is that there is a university and it’s concentrated in man’s soul, that man was made to be the university, where all the aspects of creation come together, and he takes them out to look at them but he puts them back together again and they function. Just like you break light up to study it and then it comes back together again and functions as white light. And so man intellectually operates this way. He does it so many, many other ways; for example, morally speaking man can do things angels can’t. What things can man do that angels can’t. He can give up his life in love. This is why God did not become an angel, He became man, because angels cannot die and angels cannot love so much they’d give up their life for you. Only God, as man, can give up His life for you, and so love can be appreciated by man to a degree that it cannot be appreciated by angels. So man, then, is the superior appreciator of God’s revelation. This ultimately is what it means to subdue the earth. It means to rule, under God’s authority, to rule and to appreciate what God has created.

That’s point one, that at creation God placed man as potential king. Now the second point; man was lower than angels in the sense of strength and intelligence. Man was lower than the angels in strength and intelligence but he could morally improve. Adam could have morally improved. That doesn’t mean Adam’s was sin but the point remains that when Adam was innocent he wasn’t a totally sanctified person even though he had not sinned. Why? What does total sanctification mean? That you have +R learned behavior patterns; even Adam in innocence had to be sanctified and you’re going to see an amazing passage in chapter 2, Christ had to become sanctified, even without a sin nature, He had to become sanctified. So that should teach you right away that sanctification is not automatic, it is something that happens by virtue of your free responsible acts and nobody does this except you. You have to, so to speak, with grace, now this side of the fall, but nevertheless, we are all in the process of morally improving. Angels cannot; angels apparently made a decision, that was it and there’s no sanctification about it. But men can improve morally.

Now it’s interesting, man always wants to improve his intelligence, he wants to overcome his mental limitation, he wants to overcome his physical limitation but what God says is you stick with the mental and physical limitations I’ve given you and work on the spiritual limitations, sanctify yourself and then we’ll see about the other limitations. See, God emphasizes the moral or spiritual part. So man can improve whereas angels cannot, and man eventually will become morally superior to angels, as taught in 1 Corinthians 6:3.

The third thing, Satan rebelled against God’s plan to acquire this position himself. Satan rebelled to acquire the king-priest position. That is a deduction based on a comparison of Ezekiel 28:13 with Exodus 39:10-14.

The fourth point, Satan then tempted man in order to gain control. See, Satan couldn’t do it this time, he rebelled and he knew he couldn’t get into the position, he couldn’t get at the Father’s right hand, he couldn’t get himself in that position so he did the next best thing, which was to trip up man. He figured if God wasn’t going to give him a place in the plan then he’d fake out man so man couldn’t get to his high position. So Satan tempted man in order to gain control of the world and prevent man from rising to his destined position. So Satan wanted to put down man morally. He wanted to stop any cut off, any moral improvement of the human race. He did not, obviously he was threatened, he did not want man to morally improve to be his judge, as taught in 1 Corinthians 6:3. Passages on Satan tempting man: Genesis 3:1-6 obviously a key passage, and then other passages that prove that he is now the god of this world, meaning that he is in a position that man should be in, Matthew 4:8-9, the temptations of Jesus Christ, he offered Christ the kingdoms of the world and Jesus didn’t say they’re not yours to give me Satan; Jesus admitted they were in Satan’s hands; He just didn’t want them on Satan’s terms. 1 Corinthians 4:4, the god of this world.

Now the fifth point, this is the most interesting of all. God, in His fantastic sovereignty works through this rebellion to pull of the very plan that Satan tried to stop. It’s Satan’s very rebellion that causes the plan to go on to its final conclusion. God in His sovereignty works through the rebellion, ironically to bring the plan to pass. The very plan that Satan tried to stop He Himself winds up fulfilling. That is the most damming thing about God’s sovereignty. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, God runs the universe in which heads He wins, tails you lose. You’re free to flip the coin, any time you want, but He’s always going to win, no matter which side comes up. Now Satan, you see, is in a very, very despicable position because every time he tries to pull something off it winds up, like the cross, the cross is the arch illustration, he wanted Christ dead, kill Him. God said okay, go ahead, and then after, probably a split second after Christ died Satan knew what he’d done, he’s just brought salvation to pass. That was a brilliant move. And this occurs time and time and time again. In fact, apparently prophecies teach us that Satan is going to pull something off in heaven and it’s that very war in heaven that sets up the Tribulation which is the process that brings Christ back to earth again, so he undoes himself again. This is always the way it works. And this is always the way every person on negative volition is in life. This is why people who rebel against God are the most miserable people you’d ever want to meet, whether in religious circles, whether they’re Christians out of fellowship, whether they are unbelievers, in absolute rebellion, the most miserable. Why? Because they’re constantly frustrated every time they try to buck the system it comes crashing down on their head and they wonder why it hurts. Well, the answer is why buck the system; it’s a lot easier.

Now let’s look at the next part of this thing, that’s the first five steps, that’s the overview. Now we want to pull it down to the Church Age, what’s going on in the Church Age. This is what is meant by this “footstool” thing. The Church Age is the last, one of the last parts to this whole process of satanic frustration and Jesus Christ asking the heathen for the inheritance, and God, with the right hand, slaying the kings of the earth. The battle is intensified throughout the Church Age. Right now we’re in the battle. What has gone on for nineteen centuries?

The first thing, in the Church Age God’s instrument for raising man is the body of Christ. God’s instrument for carrying out His original purpose, which was to raise man into the position of king-priest, God’s instrument is the corpus Christi, the body of Christ. This is taught in Ephesians 1:22-24. Now, the body of Christ, made up of all persons who have received Christ, from Pentecost up to the present hour, whether they’re in a church, not in a church, whether they’re in this denomination, that denomination, whether they’re independent or not, if they have personally received Jesus Christ they are members of the body of Christ. Now it’s this body that is the center of action today in history. Israel is coming into activity but only in a secondary way. The battle still is central to the body of Christ.

Let’s look at a second point. The struggle against Satan occurs at regeneration and during sanctification. The battle that goes on occurs first at regeneration. Regeneration is when God the Holy Spirit gives a birth to the soul that transforms the heart. It is not somebody trotting down an aisle, raising a hand, signing a card, joining a church, being water baptized or something else. Regeneration is something that occurs, you can’t feel it, but if you are here tonight and have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ it’s happened at some time in your life. Some of you it might have happened very, very early in your life, you can’t remember. Maybe there’s some here to whom it hasn’t happened yet, but regeneration occurs at a point in time and that is a work that is equal in magnitude to the original creation. That’s what it’s called, the new creation, something is created in a miraculous way deep in the depths of the human heart that cannot be destroyed by hydrogen bombs or anything else. It’s impermeable to destruction. God grants regeneration, it is a work of His sovereign omnipotence. Now Satan is undone every time somebody is regenerated. Every time someone becomes a Christian that’s one more person lost to his cause.

The second area is sanctification. This is the process that goes on on a daily basis in the life of a Christian. Every time we trust and respond to grace we do two things; by our response to grace we vindicate God’s character before whoever is watching, including the angelic powers around us. So every time you respond to God’s grace by faith you are an outward historic testimony to God’s character and Satan’s accusations against God’s character do not hold. And of course in the process you’re strengthening that regenerated nature in your soul, every time you choose to respond to God’s grace. Verses on this, Colossians 1:12-14; Hebrews 2:10-11, there are many, many more verses but these are good ones.

Three, at completion the Church is resurrected and translated, called the rapture. The Church is finished at a point in time, it’s not going to go on forever. Don’t think church history, just because it’s gone on for nineteen centuries is going to go for another nineteen. Huh-un, it’s going to come a time when it’s all going to come to a screeching halt and the ballgame is going to be over. 1 Thessalonians 4:16-18, the Church will be finished and God’s purpose for this stage of the battle will have been accomplished.

Point four, during the Tribulation on earth the Church in heaven is prepared as a bride. During the Tribulation on earth the Church in heaven is being prepared as a bride for the wedding, Philippians 3:20-21; 1 John 3:1-2; and Revelation 19:7-8. What this means is that the Church is judged, it’s purified, all the human good that we have confidence in at the point of death, oh we’ve done this, we’ve done that, we enter death, we go into eternity with a basically false picture of our life, and the purging that has to happen on the other side of the grave is God straightening us out on what really did count in our life and what was just a bunch of wasted time. Now the only way you can kind of anticipate what’s going to happen to you the other side of the grave is the more you line your sights on the Scriptures the less surprised you’re going to be on the other side of the grave, because on the other side of the grave God is going to give us all a real clear picture of what we’ve accomplished in history. And the wood, the hay and the stubble and all those wasted efforts and time and so on spent out of fellowship, doing stuff He never asked us to do, doing stuff He didn’t want us to do, just phoof, that’s it. And that which is left is what the Holy Spirit genuinely wrought in our lives.

Now point five, beginning at the Second Advent, the Church reigns with Christ as King-priests over all. Revelation 5:10. You see, the net accomplishment, remember what the goal was at creation, to elevate man to the position of King-priest over all. Satan thought he could stop it but in all the chaos, in all the reversals of history, in all the (quote) “accidents,” setbacks, disasters, suffering, quietly the sovereignty of God works on, works on, works on, works on, then bang, at the end that was the thing where we started. That’s exactly what we’re going to get first. How did it come about? As stubborn rebellious creatures that didn’t want it to happen; they were the means by which it happened. See, that’s the damning thing about the sovereignty of God and what makes the lake of fire so hateful psychologically; there’s a lot more to the lake of fire but psychologically one of the damning things of the lake of fire is the awful realization that my own acts of rebellion accomplished God’s will. They were the ones that caused it to come about.

Now let’s turn to this last part of Hebrews 1:13, I told you there was a lot in there, “Sit at my right hand, until,” see the “until?” “…until,” that’s until the Second Advent of Christ; the rapture occurs before the Second Advent and then the details of the Tribulation, and then “I make Your enemies Your footstool?” Now the concept of making an enemy a footstool, we do not have time except I refer you to Joshua 10:24 where… the point is when Joshua conquers he brings the conquered kings down and then he puts his foot on their neck and it’s a picture of total victory and that’s what Jesus Christ is doing, “when I make Your enemies Your footstool,” it means that Christ sits with His feet on the necks of Satan and all fallen angels.

Now Hebrews 1:14, if you’ve paid attention to the grand strategy this will not come as too great a shock. Verse 14, “Are they not all ministering spirits?” now who is the “all?” Usually Christians read verse 14 and they say verse 14 teaches guardian angels. Well yes it does, it teaches more than guardian angels because what is the antecedent of “all?” Verse 13, “to which of the angels,” that means any angel, so the word “all” in verse 14 means “all” angels, both fallen and elect. ALL are “ministering spirits.” Now the word “minister” means ministering to God.

Now there are two words here, there’s two words translated in the King James “minister” but they’re different in the Greek and they refer to different things. The first one, “minister,” is a word that refers to ministry to God. Even the fallen angels, if I don’t get to it, 1 Kings 22:19-23 is a case in point, the fallen angels actually minister to God’s grand strategy for history. They don’t like it, but they wind up doing it, even when they think they’re not they wind up doing it anyway. They are ministering spirits. Now, being continually dispatched, “sent forth” is a present participle, they are continually sent forth. See, that’s a picture of verse 7, remember sending the spirits in and out, moment by moment, hour by hour, as the flame, as the wind, as something else, as this, as that, constant shifting, constant sending, a lot of traffic in the angelic world.

“Are they not all ministering spirits, being continually sent to minister,” now look, “to those who are about to become heirs of salvation.” Now those “who are about” means that one is imminent, “heirs,” except it doesn’t read this way: those who are in the status of gaining inheritance. In other words, they’re just about read to have it, it’s an imminent state. “Those who are about to inherit.”

Now the second word “minister” in verse 14 is not minister like the first one. The first one means ministering spirits to God, but the second noun means ministering spirits to you, as a believer. They are “continually sent forth to minister for those who will be heirs of salvation.” Now you see, it’s fantastic how Jesus Christ is greater than the angels. Why is Jesus Christ greater than the angels in this third argument, verses 13-14, in the historical role? Because Jesus Christ and those in union with Him are the focal point of every… repeat, every angelic action. That’s what verse 14 is saying. Every time, whether they’re in the Satan side or God’s side, any time under the sovereignty of God an angel moves to affect history, God has it so worked out that ultimately he is “ministering to those who shall be heirs of salvation.” That’s the power of Jesus Christ, and no angel can get out of the net; every angel is trapped, so to speak, in the net. He winds up, whether he likes it or not, “ministering to those who shall be heirs of salvation.” He cannot help himself.

We’ve gone over but I do not apologize to explain how the angels minister, giving you some examples, some specifics. Here are the good ways that angels minister, these are the elect angels and how they minister to you; the first way they can minister, not that they always do this, but they can minister to physical needs at critical times, such as providing food and water. Illustration: 1 Kings 19:5-6. They can provide physical food. Where they get the food nobody knows but remember, tie it with 1:7.

Second, they can minister to physical safety, such as in 2 Kings 6:18; such as Acts 12:7-10. They can minister to your physical safety.

Now two negatives that they don’t do; we’ve got two pluses, now two negatives. Elect angels do not, basically, administer to you spiritually; that is the Holy Spirit that does that. They minister to you spiritually only in an indirect way in the sense they do battle with the evil powers around you, to protect you. But apart from acting as a screen, a defense screen around you from evil powers, they do not help you in a direct way, that’s the job of the Holy Spirit. Daniel 10:13.

Second, in the Church Age they do not preach the gospel. They get believers into position and believers do it but angels apparently have been cut off; they apparently did preach the gospel down through history in various ways but when the Church Age began it appears they were phased out of business, Acts 8:26; Acts 10:3-7, where the angels get believers to do the witnessing but they don’t do it.

Now the bad ways. Here’s how they attack you, but it turns out, under the Romans 8:28 principle, to your good. Romans 8:28, 1 Corinthians 10:13; those two verses control the bad ways. First, they can attack your body physically, 2 Corinthians 12:7. They can attack your body physically. Read the context of that also and you’ll see how Romans 8:28 works around.

Two, they attack your mind through attacking emotions in the body. They can work on your emotions, inferred from Ephesians 2:2-3, noting the relationship between verses 2 and 3 in Ephesians 2, stimulating the flesh. Also noting 2 Corinthians 11:4; they can work on your emotions and this is one reason why the Bible always emphasizes the mind over the emotions. Religious groups that emphasize your emotions are religious groups that are opening the doors wide to satanic attack. Always watch that. Any time emotions are placed before mind you are asking for Satanism.

Third way they can attack is by spreading false doctrine and whispering it into our ears, and the do so well that you’ll never recognize that they’re doing it until you finally see the thought pattern operate in your mind. How they do this I don’t know, but they do it. They whisper false doctrine and bad attitudes into your mind and the only guard you have against it is the Word of God.

1 Timothy 4:1-2; 1 John 4:1-3. There are many, many other areas of attack, this isn’t meant to be comprehensive, this is just simply meant as an illustration. Next week we’ll deal with the warning passage of chapter 2.