Hebrews 2:10-15 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

For it became him, &c.— Very different are the explanations given of this passage; that which appears to me the plainest and most just, is as follows: Hebrews 2:10. "Such has been the conduct of God in the great affair of our redemption; and the beauty and harmony of it will be apparent in proportion to the degree in which it is examined. For, though the Jews dream of a temporal Messiah, as a scheme conducive to the divine glory, it well became him,—it was expedient that, in order to act worthy of himself, he should take this method; He, for whom are all things, and by whom are all things; that glorious Being, who is the first cause and last end of all,—in pursuit of the great and important design that he had formed, of conducting all his faithful saints to the possession of that inheritance of glory intended for them;—to make and constitute Jesus, his only begotten and best-beloved Son, the leader and prince of their salvation, and to make him perfect, or completely fit for the full execution of his office,by a long train of various and extremesufferings, whereby he was as it were solemnly consecrated to it. Hebrews 2:11. Now, in consequence of this appointment, Jesus, the great Sanctifier, who engages and consecrates men to the service of God, and they who are sanctified (that is, consecrated and introduced to God with such acceptance,) are all of one family, all in a sense the seed of Abraham by faith; for which cause he is not ashamed to call them, who thus yield to be saved by his grace, his brethren: Hebrews 2:12. Saying,—in the person of David, who represented the Messiah in his sufferings and exaltation,—I will declare thy name to my brethren, in the midst of the church will I praise thee. Hebrews 2:13. And again, speaking as a mortal man, exposed to such exercises of faith in trials and difficulties, as others were, he says in a psalm which sets forth his triumph overhis enemies, I will trust in him, as the saints have done in all ages, only in an infinitely higher sense; and again elsewhere, in the person of Isaiah, Behold I, and the children which God hath given me, are for signs and for wonders, Hebrews 2:14. Seeing then that those whom he represents in one place and another, as the children of the same family with himself, were partakers of flesh and blood, he himself in like manner participated of them, that thereby becoming capable of those sufferings, to which, without such an union with flesh, this divine Sanctifier could not have been liable, he might by his own voluntary and meritorious death abolish and depose him, who by divine permission had the empire of death, and led it in his train, when he made his first invasion on mankind;—that is, the devil, the great artificer of mischief and destruction; at the beginning the murderer of the human race; who still seems to triumph in the spread of mortality, which is his work, and who may often, by God's righteous permission, be the executioner of it. Hebrews 2:15. But Christ, the great prince of mercy and life, graciously interposed, that he might deliver those miserable captives of Satan,—mankind in general, and the dark and idolatrous Gentiles in particular, who, through fear of death, were, or justly might have been, all their lifetime obnoxious to bondage: having nothing to expect, in consequence of it,—if they rightly understood their state, but future misery; whereas now, changing their Lord, they have happily changed their condition; and are, as many as have believed in him, the heirs of eternal life."