Hebrews 2:15 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Hebrews 2:15

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This was the Lord’s great aim in being made flesh – to release his chosen ones from the power of death, where the devil claimed to hold them as his own. He came to release them from actual death and from the fear of death. He could not remove the fear of it without overcoming death itself, for our salvation must be real or it is nothing at all. Nevertheless we remain mortal until the final victory at the resurrection. At present we possess our victory over death by faith, assured of the certainty of the promise of life given us by our Lord who has gone before us in the body to heaven.The fear of death is the fear which towers over all other fears which men experience in this world. It cannot be avoided by any amount of wisdom, power or riches. Mankind has striven since the beginning of time to find a remedy for death but none has ever found it, by even the greatest and most resourceful who have lived. Science has discovered how to increase health while we are alive but not how to lengthen life. The fear of death brings men into a state of bondage from which it never releases them, not even for a moment. There is no pleasure on earth that is so diverting that it makes us completely forget that we are mortal. Death reminds us all that even the greatest happiness in this world cannot last. Friendships must come to an end; those who experience the deepest love must be torn apart. Except on the rarest of occasions recorded in Scripture, no word has ever come back from those who have departed this world to show what is their new experience or even that they continue to exist at all. Death makes a nonsense of life and reduces life to an absurdity. It effectively makes all human endeavour pointless, because nothing of any permanence can be gained by any amount of work or study, knowledge or science, art or skill. Many man-made religions have been invented to take away the fear of death, but they fail to be convincing for they do not address the whole man and speak only in vague terms of a future existence without body and soul together. We can never be persuaded that the problem of death is dealt with while the conscience continues to accuse. We must have an authoritative word from the Lord before we are prepared to believe that an enemy as great as death has been overcome.This alone answers the ever-present threat of death: that Jesus Christ has come into the world and has taken upon himself a mortal body like us. He has gone to Calvary and there he has experienced death himself. He has allowed it to bind him and to do its utmost to hold him in its power. He has done all this as the representative man who stands in the place of his people as their substitute before the law of God. He has then broken its hold over him and smashed its tyranny, releasing not only himself but all those who put their trust in him, who are his elect chosen from before the world began.His people who trust in him are now set free from the fear of death for they know that in Christ they are no longer under condemnation. It was the penalty of the law that enforced the sentence of death upon them. It was sin that gave occasion to the law to accuse them. But the law of God is now satisfied and the wrath of God expressed through his law is exhausted in punishing Christ in our place. Physical death, it is true, still awaits us at the end of life, but this is transformed for us into the gateway to life. Death is swallowed up in victory. It is left in place so that the world may not see what the Christian sees only by faith. It remains as teacher to the believer to remind him to put his trust in God who alone can raise the dead. It sets a limit on what we can take out of this world and so tells us to value spiritual things above the things of this world.

Application

Broadly speaking it is the biological norm for people to be afraid of death. Even a Christian who is near to death, who might be looking forward to heaven in his spirit and in his mind, somehow in his body he trembles at death; both are true. This should be reflected in funerals. If a funeral service is not solemn, it is not doing justice to the Christian faith. The glorious side to death is obviously that we are with Christ in eternal bliss, with souls saved, but of course there is a very sad side, because death means separation and grief and loss to those left behind and a funeral service should balance those things.

Questions

Some people are not afraid of death; does the text apply to them? Do all spend their lifetime in fear of death? Yes they do in one sense or another. Some people actually feel frightened of death, if there is a shadow on the x-ray or something of that sort, but everybody fears death in the sense that they are at least cowed by it and limited by it and know their time will come. Even if you're one of those who doesn't tremble, you bow to it, you are cowed by it, so in some sense or another you fear death.

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Hebrews 2:15 Commentary and Bible Study