Hebrews 1:4-14 Being made so much better than the angels, as he has by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they.… Angelic beings do not appear now to our eyes, and yet I do not doubt that God speaks to us now as much as He did to Abraham, and saves men now from ruin as He saved Lot. And the Bible itself confirms this view. As we pass on from the early history of the Jewish nation to the later, the physical appearance of angels is Succeeded by the visionary appearance of angels, the conversation at the tentdoor by the vision of Isaiah and Ezekiel. It is the tendency of men in early times, when feeling is master of intellect, to represent spiritual impressions as sensuous impressions; indeed they feel so strongly that they see, and it is without the slightest want of truth that a patriarch would say that he heard God's voice speaking to him when in fact he had only received a vivid spiritual impression. The whole account of Abraham's intercession with the Lord is probably a poetic account of a real spiritual struggle in Abraham's soul, the embodiment in words of the questions and replies of a passionate prayer. 1. The first principle, then, contained in the stories is that God speaks directly to man. We look upon these stories as isolated and preternatural. In this any we take all the comfort and reality out of the Bible. That book does not relate what God did once for men, but what God is always doing. If, in the wilderness, Hagar, in the hour of her bitterest desolation found that the Omnipresent was beside her; we know now and for ever that wherever a mother bends m misery over her dying child, there is then with her God's never-faliling Love. The child may die, but He is there waiting to take it to His fatherhood, and keep it for her coming. Oh I take these Old Testament stories to your hearts. Realise a living God, who penetrates with His presence and His action every moment of your being. In whatever light we view these accounts of angels, this they suggest at least. There is not a struggle of your soul which is not known to Him, not a crisis in your life which your Father does not hang over with intensest eagerness, waiting for the fitting moment to speak. 2. And if this be true of our individual, so it is also true of our domestic, social, and national life. When the angel came to Monoah's altar, the truth was revealed that God takes interest in each man's home; that it should be pure and happy, a sacred altar of love, a school for sympathy and forbearance: a centre from which an impulse for wider work may spring, and whence self-sacrifice in daily trifles may swell into the self-sacrifice of a life for universal objects: a place where warriors may be trained for the army of Christ against the evil, a place where the heavenly life may be imaged forth by each living in the life of all. 3. Nor is the related interference of angelic powers with social and national movements without a meaning to us now. If it tells us in the form of certain stories that God was watching over and guiding Jewish society and Jewish national life, it tells us that God is watching over and directing English society and the English nation, every society and every nation. And God knows that we want here in England some belief of thug sort to protect us from despair and the sloth and indifference which are born of despair. And when God has thus brought by strange ways the body of English society into a more active life of self-sacrifice, a higher morality, and a wider love of the race, then I cannot but think that men will turn with new eyes contemplate the life of Christ and sue in Him the true King of the new society. And now, to sweep back for a moment to our first subject, we have found a ground for the hope that the future society will be constituted as a host warring against evil, under the leadership of Christ. If that be so, we shall not be devoid of the sympathy, nor apart from the communion, of the other spiritual beings who may inhabit God's universe. Their life is no lazy dream, no indolent enjoyment. The spirit of the battle against evil is the spirit of there life. For "there was war in heaven; Michael and his angels fought against the dragon." When we read that stanza in the symbolical poem of Apocalypse, our soul kindles. We have brother warriors, purer than we, who are waging the same great contest, and who watch us with faithful and sympathising eyes. The hosts of earth and heaven are bound together by the comrade spirit, by a common indignation, by a common devotion to the same Leader. (Stopford A. Brooke, M. A.) Parallel Verses KJV: Being made so much better than the angels, as he hath by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they. |
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