Hebrews 2:13 Commentary and Bible Study

Further Old Testament passages are brought to prove the humanity of Jesus Christ. The first is probably from 2 Samuel 22:3, though many places have similar words. What is being argued is that Jesus Christ took our nature and therefore the passages quoted must be applicable to him and must contain something which evidently proves his humanity. The relevance of the first quotation seems unclear at first sight, but the point is that the words, ‘I will put my trust in him’, could not have been uttered by Christ except in his incarnate state. As the Son of God he has no occasion to trust in the Father for he sees him face to face, he shares his every thought, and trust goes hand in hand with knowledge, with sight. But as a true man, living in this fallen world and not yet glorified, he must walk by faith. His divine nature certainly continued to know all things, but the mysterious union between his divine and human nature, uniting them in one person, allowed his human nature to continue as truly human and not as some superman, and therefore he did not have all knowledge; he too walked by faith and not by sight. The second reference is to Isaiah 8:18. These words were first spoken by Isaiah about his own children. They had been given names with prophetic meanings by the Lord himself and Isaiah had been told to bring one of them with him when he went to Ahaz with a word of prophecy. Both Isaiah and his children were signs in Israel, and Hebrews 2:13 helps us understand in what sense they were signs. Isaiah was a type of Christ and his children were typical of New Testament believers. Since both Isaiah and his children obviously had the same nature, the writer to the Hebrews argues that Christ too must have had the same nature as his people, since Isaiah spoke prophetically of Christ and the church. Believers are called sons and daughters of the Lord Almighty (2 Corinthians 6:18). They are partakers of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4), but this is not the basis on which Christ is said to call us children, for he had to take our nature in order to redeem us, and he had to redeem us before we could receive the divine nature. Of course, we receive it in a limited sense, according to our created nature; we receive the communicable attributes and not the incommunicable attributes. But he calls us children because he has assumed our human nature, and because he has redeemed that nature and given us the new birth so that we have perfected human nature; we have spiritual life in the soul.