HEBREWS 1:5-14

Better Than Angels

Hebrews 1:5–14

Purpose: To demonstrate the different ways Jesus is superior to the angels.

The initial excitement of discovering that Jesus was the Messiah in whom all God’s dealings with his people since the days of Abraham had now found their fulfillment was soon challenged by continuing contact with fellow Jews who saw Jesus very differently. For them, Jesus had been a deceiver, and those who followed him had abandoned their ancestral heritage; they were traitors to the values and hopes of Israel, shamefully cutting themselves off from the community of God’s covenant people through the ages. Subjected to such suspicion and hostility, Jewish Christians might well look over their shoulders and wonder whether they had taken the right step, and the more so when following Jesus seemed only to have brought greater suffering. The roots of one’s cultural and religious inheritance are strong, and it must have been painful for these first Jewish Christians to find themselves isolated from their own people

The writer’s perspective is summed up in 8:6–13 as he shows how the coming of a new covenant has rendered the old one “obsolete.” Surely there can be no going back to the old when the new is in every way “better.” So the argument is summed up in 10:19–12:29 with an impassioned call to enter into their new heritage and to hold on in faith, whatever the cost, knowing that God has promised “better” things to those who run with perseverance the race in which Jesus has already gone before them