Saturday 10th
Hebrews 12:3-17
NIV (v3) – ‘Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.’
ESV (v3) – ‘Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted.’
Today’s verse is a continuation from yesterday’s verses encouraging us to run with endurance, the writer continuing by encouraging us to ‘Consider him who endured . . .’ that is the Lord Jesus Christ himself. The long list of the heroes of faith in chapter eleven is a great list, all men and women who lived by faith and proved God to be faithful in so many various ways, and by looking at them we have great examples but there is an even greater example and that is the Lord Jesus Christ himself, he is our greatest example. Our verse continues that he ‘endured from such sinners such hostility against himself’, and then continues that it was for us, ‘so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted’.
Consider him, consider Jesus. I wonder who we may have as individuals placed in such a position that we see them as great examples to our faith. Men or women who have inspired us, they may have played an important part in our spiritual lives and they were examples to us so much so that we wanted to be like them or at the least follow their example? It may have been a godly parent or other family member, a pastor or church leader it may even been a friend, it may be a person of historical importance, a godly person of importance, a more recent hero of the faith than the list in Hebrews 11? And if we have set someone up in such a way that is okay, their influence on our lives will be beneficial and will have played an important part in our Christian progress, for myself I am grateful for the Christian heritage I had with godly parents, I think of my grand-father in particular and he was an inspiration to me, the pastor in my teenage years who along with his wife had a great influence upon me, but as good as these various examples may be the greatest and the best is the Lord Jesus himself. ‘Consider him . . .’
He is our great example, if we go back into the Old Testament, we read these words, ‘He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth. By oppression and judgement he was taken away; and as for his generation, who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people? And they made his grave with the wicked and with a rich man in his death, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth.’ (Isaiah 53:7–9) In Philippians 2 we read ‘Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.’ (vv5–8).
Then we have the verse here in Hebrews 2:2 ‘. . . who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.’
If we were to sit down for a while and stop to consider all that Jesus went through on his journey to Calvary, if ever anyone should have wanted to give up it surely would have been Jesus, the way so many treated him, he was betrayed, denied, beaten, smitten, mocked, lied about, falsely accused, executed by the most horrific means of a Roman Cross, while at the same time taking upon himself the punishment for humanities sin and the wrath of God toward that sin, but he endured it all, he never gave up, in the moment of deep anguish in the garden he cried out ‘Father if it be possible let this cup pass from me, but nevertheless not my will your will be done’ he wasn’t on the brink of giving up, he wasn’t having second thoughts but in his humanity he was feeling the anguish in soul that gripped him as he considered what lay ahead, but at the same time as the Son he was going to be obedient to the very letter, he would go through till the last breathe expired from his body, knowing the joy that was set before him. As a result, he has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
The earlier verses I have quoted from Isaiah 53 and Philippians 2 show us how he responded despite all the hostility that he faced and he is the one we need to consider, he is the one who is our great example that we should follow. He endured so much so that we can endure knowing that he has gone on before us and we are reminded from an earlier verse in this epistle, that he is able to support us while we are tempted because he himself knew what it was to be tempted. He was a man like us yet without sin. Consider him! (See also 1 Peter 2:21-23)