Superior to Angels

Want to honor and thank you for the way that you care for and serve people in our culture who are often the least seen and least valued—our children. It's an unseen, oftentimes self-sacrifice that mothers make. We want to honor you and thank you for doing so this morning.

I also want to acknowledge that Mother's Day is a complicated holiday for a lot of people. I just want to tell you, for those of you who struggle with having lost your mom and not being able to be with her today, or having a difficult or alienated relationship with your mom, infertility, unable to have children for many reasons—it's a complicated day. I just want to remind you that the Lord sees you, and that His heart is drawn toward His children, and He knows us and He sees us. So however this day is for you, I hope that there is both an opportunity for you to draw near and experience the love of Christ for you.

We're going to turn our attention to the book of Hebrews. We started a series last week, and we're going to look at Hebrews chapter one. This is a long passage, so I'm going to read from Hebrews 1:5 through 2:4, almost a whole chapter, as we look at this passage together.

For to which of the angels did he ever say, "You are my son. Today I have become your father," or again, "I will be his father, and he will be my son"? Again, when he brings his firstborn into the world, he says, "And let all God's angels worship him." And about the angels, he says, "He makes his angels winds and his servants a fiery flame." But to the Son, "Your throne, O God, is forever and ever, and your scepter of your kingdom is a scepter of justice. You have loved righteousness and hated lawlessness. That is why God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of joy beyond your companions." And in the beginning, Lord, "You established the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish, but you will remain. They will all wear out like clothing. You will roll them up like a cloak. They will be changed like clothing, but you are the same, and your years will never end." To which of the angels has he ever said, "Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool"? Are they not all ministers sent out to serve those who are going to inherit salvation? For this reason, we must pay attention all the more to what we have heard so that we will not drift away. For if the message spoken through angels was legally binding, and every transgression and disobedience received a just punishment, how will we escape if we neglect such a great salvation? This salvation had its beginning when it was spoken of by the Lord and was confirmed to us by those who heard him. At the same time, God testified with wonders, various miracles, and distributions of gifts from the Holy Spirit according to his will.

— Hebrews 1:5–2:4 (CSB)

Starting off my sermon, I just want to say I blame Amy Grant for this sermon. The Christian community in the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties was sort of obsessed with angels. It was a time period where angels and demons were a big deal, and I blame Amy Grant—her song "Angels Watching Over Me"—I think that sparked what I believe was an angel craze in our country, which continued with Frank Peretti's books, Piercing the Darkness and This Present Darkness, which imagined scenes of angels and demons duking it out over a particular Christian's thought life or temptations.

We also got all kinds of bad movies and TV shows. We got Touched by an Angel with Roma Downey. We got Highway to Heaven with Michael Landon. We had Angels in the Outfield baseball with Danny Glover. Very modeling portrayals of angels. We had a country band, Alabama, sang "Angels Among Us." We had Carmen's song "The Champion," which imagined Jesus and Satan in a boxing match. And then later on, some of you grew up with the Left Behind era, which had its own fascination with angels.

My point is that there was in the not-so-distant past in the United States a fascination with angels, and I'm sure this will come back around again. That may not be where you are this morning. This passage is all about angels and comparing Jesus, the Son of God, to angels. You may be like, well, I've got a lot of problems. I've got a lot of things going on in my life. That's not one of them. I'm not really overly concerned with angels. And yet I think this passage provides us with something really unique.

I'm going to take a little bit of a weird angle on this passage this morning. I'm following another pastor's lead who's from Greenville, South Carolina. I appreciated his orientation toward this. Because this passage, while it speaks of something that may not be in us this morning, there is something of what's in them in us. The same machinery of the human heart is at work in every generation, in every person.

And so I want us, as we look at this passage where we've been going through the book of Hebrews, which speaks of the superiority of Jesus today—Jesus superior to angels—I want to ask you to hang in because there's something of us in here.

Here's my outline. Three points all begin with the letter C: the context, the caution, the comparison.

The Context

So here's the context of this passage. The writer of the book of Hebrews is addressing a group of people who grew up in an explicitly Jewish community. These are people who went to the temple once a year for sacrifice, grew up going to the synagogue, knew the Torah—God's law—were raised in the things of Judaism. And yet when Jesus shows up on the scene and fulfills all the messianic hopes of Judaism, these are people who converted to that faith, to that new expression of what had been Judaism now fully realized in Jesus.

This is what the point of Hebrews is: Jesus is superior in every way. Don't go back to the traditions of Judaism. And today, Jesus is superior to angels. So a little angelology for you this morning.

What Are Angels?

First, what are angels? I have some bad news for each of you this morning. I'm not being mean, but none of you are angels in this room. No one in this room will ever become an angel. There's sort of a mythology in the United States, in American Christianity, that when you die, you become an angel. Angels are not people. They were never people. They are ministering spirits. Angels are divine messengers.

The word in the Old Testament for angel, mavach, just means messenger. It's the same thing in Greek and Aramaic. If you take a survey of all the parts of the Bible about angels, here's what you find: six things.

First, angels continually worship God. They continually worship Him. Isaiah sees this scene in the heavenly throne room of God, and he sees angels all around God's throne, and they're yelling to each other, "Holy, holy, holy." They're yelling this back and forth as they praise God. That's what angels are doing.

Second, angels communicate God's messages to humankind. We see angels appearing to Abraham and telling him ahead of time about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. We see angels appearing to announce to Mary and to Joseph and to Elizabeth the coming of John the Baptist, the coming of Jesus.

Third, angels minister to believers. We read this in chapter one verse 14.

They're ministering spirits who are sent out to serve those who are going to inherit salvation. — Hebrews 1:14

Jesus even quotes passages from the Psalms about angels. He says things like,

They will not allow your foot to dash against a stone. — Psalm 91:12

The picture of angels encamped around the people of God. All kinds of passages around this.

Fourth, angels will be God's agents in the second coming, in the final judgment of God when that's poured out.

Fifth, angels exist in some kind of hierarchy or an order. There are angels and archangels above them. They are seraphim and cherubim. They are called a host of heavens, pictured as a divine army that does God's bidding. And there are just a few angels that have names that are given in the Bible. Gabriel, who comes to bring the news of the coming of Jesus to Mary, that she's pregnant by the Holy Spirit. Michael, who's mentioned in the book of Jude and Revelation, is part of the war against Satan and his forces. Otherwise, we don't know the names of the angels.

What Do Angels Look Like?

So that's what angels are. What do angels look like? Unfortunately, we get most of our data about what angels look like from Renaissance art rather than Scripture. C.S. Lewis wrote about this contrast very famously. He said, in scripture, the visitation of the angel was always alarming. They had to tell people, "Do not fear. Don't be afraid of me." But in the Victorian pictures of angels, it always looks like they're going to say, "Oh, hi, they're there."

So angels in the Bible versus angels in art are quite different. Seraphim are described with fire imagery. Read in this passage:

He makes his angels winds and his servants a fiery flame. — Psalm 104:4

So different from classical art. The Renaissance painter Fra Angelico had these images that shaped how people imagine what angels look like today. Angels are kind of young, even effeminate, childish beings. They look girlish with wings.

They come in very human-like forms. But that's not what we see with seraphim in the Bible. Here's a picture from Hagia Sophia, which is a church in Istanbul, Turkey, which rightly shows what angels, the seraphim, looked like—covered in wings all over. Really, really different.

Or consider cherubim. You know, Raphael, the Renaissance painter, painted the cherubim in these kinds of ways that look like Cupid. Like little babies, little fat, chubby babies that are a little mischievous, maybe curious. By contrast, what do we see in the Bible about cherubim?

Well, a cherubim was given a flaming sword to guard the way back into the Garden of Eden so that Adam and Eve and none of the rest of humankind would go back that way. Fierce. The cherubim comprise the seat—their wings comprise the seat of the Holy of Holies. Right on top of the Ark of the Covenant is the cherubim with their wings that make the throne on top of the Ark of the Covenant.

Or in Ezekiel's vision, he sees this rolling cart with fire. This very frightening vision of the cherubim. I think C. S. Lewis pictured this the best in his book Perelandra, one of the space trilogy. He describes cherubim this way:

Suddenly two figures stood on the opposite side of the lake from us. They were perhaps 30 feet high. They were burning white like white hot iron, the outline of their bodies. When he looked at it steadily against the red landscape, they seemed to be faintly, swiftly undulating, as though the permanence of their shape, like that of waterfalls or flames, coexisted with this rushing movement of the matter it contained. Their bodies were pure white, but a flush of diverse colors began around the shoulders and streamed up through the neck and flecked out over the face and head and stood out like plumage or like a halo.

Awesome. Terrifying. Can you understand then why the first century church, why even the intertestamental period, they were really taken with angels? They didn't have the cartoonish pictures in their heads that we have. They had visions of pure power—the most powerful beings they could imagine. This is so different from Amy Grant or Tim LaHaye or Frank Peretti or even Michael Landon.

And finally, you can see this interest in angels in this passage. There's a part in here that's actually not in the rest of Scripture. It's interesting. In chapter two, verse two, the writer of Hebrews says:

The message delivered by angels was legally binding. — Hebrews 2:2

Now, what is he talking about? What message? What was legally binding? Well, the first century Jewish community believed that the law of God given at Mount Sinai was actually delivered into human hands by angels. There's no evidence for that in Exodus or Deuteronomy—it's from some other Jewish writings—but this was very common at the time. People were like, wow.

And you have to understand the Jewish mindset. The law was one of the most amazing gifts from God. I can't overstate how much the Jewish people loved the law of God, the Torah. So to say this was delivered by angels means something like angels are even bigger than this, than the law. Angels are that much better. This is why these first century converts to Judaism were like, angels—that's where it's at. That's a big deal.

Now, some of you are wondering—and this is interesting for this morning, I didn't expect this today for this sermon—but what does this have to do with me? Good question. And it takes me to my next point, and this is the caution of the passage, chapter two, verses one through four. Listen to what he says:

For this reason, we must pay very close attention. Why? So that we don't drift away, so that we don't neglect such a great salvation. — Hebrews 2:1-2

Years ago, I was serving on a church staff where every year we would have a big summer picnic at this farm. And invariably, the guys in the church would play a game called King of the Raft. This is young adults. There's a square pontoon raft out in the middle of the lake, and the whole idea was to stay on it. So it was a giant wrestling match—you swam out to the raft and threw each other off of it. And I'm in the middle of this when I see, kind of in slow motion, my wedding ring plop into the water, never to be seen again. The great picture of drifting away. I didn't mean that to happen. That's what drifting away is.

The other caution here is not just drifting, but neglecting something. Really, neglecting something by failing to be attentive, by being apathetic. Think about your garden and your car. These are two things that with a lack of care will go bad very quickly. Your garden in Eastern North Carolina is subtropical jungle here. It will be taken over tomorrow by weeds. That's what weeds do—they neglect. The same with your car. You don't get the oil changed.

You don't do routine maintenance, and it will not last much longer. Right? Neglecting something. This is the danger. He's warning them, don't neglect. Don't drift away. Now how were these people in danger of drifting in their faith or neglecting something? Here it is. By being fixated on, overly interested in, preoccupied with angels. Isn't that bizarre? Hello, are you awake this morning? Isn't that bizarre? Angels are biblical. How in the world could you drift away from Jesus by something biblical?

Well, this is really important for us to realize that there are things, there are ways that we can move away from Jesus by being in the middle of the church community and all around the Christian things and all about doing the Christian things. Angels are biblical, but they aren't Jesus. And it's possible for us to do the same thing, to think less of Jesus by thinking of Jesus less than we think of other things. Does that surprise you?

How comes it that we are carried away with so many doctrines but the excellence of Christ is not perceived by us? Christ alone makes all other things suddenly vanish. There is nothing that Satan so much endeavors to accomplish as to bring mists that obscure our Christ because he knows that by the means of that, he will open up a way in us for all kinds of falsehood. — John Calvin

You know, the tools of the enemy we think of are like sex, drugs, and rock and roll, the bad stuff. Or we even think about those as idols, good things that become ultimate things. Those are all true. And yet I want you to think about the way that the human heart works. The same machinery that's working in this passage is at work in us. There's a way for us to think less of Jesus by thinking of Jesus less, by being into things that are even biblical and good, but forgetting Jesus and diminishing him.

Testing the Message

Let's test this out, and I'm going to pick on myself and things that I'm fascinated with and things that I'm all about. I'm not trying to do hypocrisy this morning. I want to tell on myself with this.

How about Reformed theology? Do we love Reformed theology in our church? Yes, we do. We are a Reformed church. That's the branch of the Christian family tree we are. I think it's really great. I love Reformed theology. But is there a way to be so about the right theology and knowing the right theology that we miss Jesus or neglect Jesus? Yes, there is.

What about end times and prophecy? Is it good to read all the weird parts of your Bible? Yes, I love the weird parts of your Bible. I love to preach on the weird parts of your Bible. But is there a way that we can take that focus on that part of Scripture and constantly scan the news and try to figure out, is this the day? Is that the day? What's going on geopolitically? How does that mesh with my Bible? Is there a way that we can be all about that and drift from Jesus? Yes.

What about biblical justice? We talk about biblical justice in our church a lot. It's a neglected doctrine in much of the evangelical church. It's part of our vision as a church. I love talking about biblical justice. But is there a way that biblical justice could be something that we're so focused on that we neglect Jesus? Yeah.

So what about gender? It's all the hot topic right now. Important. Shouldn't we talk about gender? Absolutely, we should. We should be talking about this. But you can get into this so that you miss Jesus.

What about Christian orientation toward politics? That's a big one for this year. Is there a way that we could be so about what's the right way to think? What's the right orientation of the Church toward culture? The way that we engage that, you begin to forget about Jesus?

Okay. I made my point. Let's shift some gears then.

The Messenger and the Message

What about losing the message because you love the messenger? What are angels? We said from the very beginning, they're ministering spirits. They're messengers. Is there a way that we can lose the message for the sake of the messenger?

Some of you have your favorite podcasts or your favorite pastors or your favorite speakers or your favorite authors, and you consume that stuff. You're like, yes, give me some more of that. But is there a way that we miss the message? Jesus Himself, the center point, the main idea, because we love the messenger.

What about Bible adjacent or Christian adjacent things? Spiritual practices, ancient spiritual practices. This is something lots of people are talking about. Important, really good things that the church is recovering, like silence and solitude and meditation, all those good things. But is there a way that ancient spiritual practices become more important than our Jesus?

Or let's try the Enneagram. This was hot a couple years ago. I personally like the Enneagram. I think it could be helpful.

But is there a way that became too big and eclipsed just a little bit our view of Jesus? D. A. Carson writes about this problem. We must ask one another this question: What is it in the Christian faith that excites you? What consumes your time?

Today, there are endless subgroups of confessing Christians who invest enormous quantities of time and energy in one issue or another—abortion, pornography, homeschooling, women's ordination for or against, economic justice, certain styles of worship, a defense of a particular Bible translation, and much more. What devours your interest?

Each of us must ask: In what fashion am I confusing the periphery for the center, the outside for the very person of Jesus Himself?

Here's what we see in Hebrews one and two regarding their fascination with angels. I think it's alive and well with us. There's a way in which thinking less of Jesus is really thinking of Jesus less.

Now it may sound like what I'm saying to you this morning is: "Hey, let's keep the main thing the main thing." I had a pastor who used to say that all the time. That's not a bad statement, but that's not really the best statement, and that's not what Hebrews is talking about. It's not like let's keep Jesus central. It's this: Jesus is better and He's more than and He is superior in every way.

Five Ways Jesus Is Superior to Angels

Let's look at the comparison. Jesus has a superior name to angels. His name is more excellent than theirs.

Now we live in a time where names don't mean much. Probably a lot of us grew up in a time where kids call adults by their first names. I'm just saying, we don't live in a time where name has value in the way it used to. But to the Jewish mind, a name revealed something of a person's essential nature. It could express their dignity and rank. And this is what he's saying about Jesus' name—it has weight to it. Jesus has a name that's unlike any other name.

Do you know what that particular unique name is given to Jesus? It's this one: Son. He is the Son of God eternally, not just because he came as a baby, but eternally the Son of God, meaning he has all the authority, all the inheritance, all the rights and privileges. Everything you see belongs to him. He has a name that's superior to their name. Many of the angels don't even have a name that we know.

Second, he has a superior honor. Look at verse six. Jesus is superior in that the angels worship Jesus. The Son is worthy of greater honor because even the angels show us this. They point to what is most worthy.

Third, superior status. In verses eight and nine, the Son is eternally sovereign. He will inherit the kingdom. There's kingly language ascribed to him in this passage—scepter, throne, crown. All of that is His. King Jesus is over all things.

Fourth, a superior existence. Jesus established the earth, and the heavens are the work of His hands. His years will never end. We can never trace back from before Him. We will never know a time beyond Him.

Now that's good news for us because the comparison means that the angels are temporary. They have a beginning. They're not eternal beings. But Jesus is forever, and Jesus is forever the same.

Can you imagine what good news that was to people living in the Roman Empire in such chaotic times? Knowing that Jesus was there at the beginning, He's the same and will always be the same. The one thing that you can count on is not death and taxes. It's Jesus. He will always be the same. That's good news for people who are feeling the chaos of this world.

Finally, a superior vocation. Jesus rules. Angels serve.

We could take this same list of superiors and apply this to everything in our lives and even all these Christian things. So listen to this list: Jesus is superior to reformed theology. Jesus is superior to end times and prophecy. Jesus is superior to biblical justice. Jesus is superior to gender. He's superior to politics, Christian orientation before politics. He's superior above any podcast or preacher. He's superior to the Enneagram, ancient spiritual practices. He's superior to abortion. He's superior to homeschooling, superior to a certain style of worship, superior to any particular Bible version.

Jesus is greater and more than and deeper. You will never plumb the depths.

Here's a suggestion for how to apply this sermon today.

I want you to think of the things that you love—not the bad things, not the sex, drugs, and rock and roll, not the idols of this life like "I really, really want a Jeep" or "I need a great vacation"—but even the good Christian things. Those speakers who really speak to you, those things about your faith that you're excited about right now. I'm glad for those things. But I want to encourage you.

You want to apply this sermon today? I want to encourage you to pull out a piece of paper and list the ways that Jesus is superior. How is He superior to the Enneagram? "You knew me in my mother's womb. You know me inside and out. You designed me, and every hair on my head comes from you"—you know the number. I want you to be specific about this. How is Jesus better?

Now this may sound silly, absurd to you, but listen to the warning: We must pay attention. Do you hear the weight of that? I don't say that to very many people. You must do this. I mean, there's a command. There's an urgency in that. We must pay attention to this.

We will drift without even realizing we're drifting. We will neglect while being right here in God's people and not even being aware of how our hearts are slipping away.

A Vision of Clarity

When it comes to videos, here's my conclusion for the kids. Apparently lots of people are cat people—you love cat videos. Statistics don't lie. Me personally, I love social media baby videos, infants, particularly two kinds. I love the ones where children who are hearing impaired and visually impaired encounter the world for the first time.

The doctor puts the hearing aid on the little baby for the first time and she hears the voice of the one who loves them the most for the first time. What happens? Some of them start giggling. They can't stop. They're so delighted. For others they start crying—the little lower lip comes out, tears of joy.

Or what about the ones where they put glasses with a little stretchy band on the babies, and for the first time they can see clearly the face of the one who loves them the most? The child responds with wide-eyed jaw drop.

Brothers and sisters, this is what the book of Hebrews is for us. I pray for us as we go through this series that either for the first time or the one thousandth time, we will be those who hear again the voice of the one who loves us more than anything else. And we'll see again, more clearly, Jesus—the one who loves us and cherishes us and prizes us and laid his life down for us so that we might be forever with him, that we might love him and see him and prize him, in the name of the Father and the Son and Holy Spirit.

Prayer

Would you pray with me?

Father God, we are weak and distracted people. It's so easy for us to miss the forest for the trees, to forget, to move on, to drift away even while we're among God's people, to neglect even while we're singing your praises. There are just things that excite us, and we lose sight of Jesus. We lose the beauty and the power and the majesty and the glory. We miss the fact that, Lord Jesus, You are superior in every way.

Lord, would You remind us of our first love? Would you put those hearing aids and those glasses on us that we might see you more clearly, hear you more clearly, and love you more deeply? We pray this in Christ's name, amen.

Would you stand in response to God's Word and let's sing together.