Hebrews 2:14-15 “Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.”
We might find it strange that God refers to Himself as having children – “since the children have…“, but it is true God does have children. He has people whom He has adopted for himself to receive an inheritance as His own sons and daughters. His children are made of the same stuff all people are – flesh and blood, but crucially they are indwelt by the Holy Spirit of God – that’s what makes them different!
We’re told in the text, that the precise reason for Jesus’ incarnation; for his being made a human being, is that we have flesh and blood – in other words, because we do, he had to also. He had to share in our humanity, but why? This is a massive question; why did God have to become a man at all? The text continues, it says that the power of death is in the hands of the Devil and that he exerts that power over flesh and blood; over people. Therefore in order for Jesus to break the power of Satan and relinquish people from death, He Himself had to die also. And, since God cannot die, He – that is Jesus – had to become human. In other words God the Son, to make himself capable of death, became a man in order to vanquish death by his own death. The death of Death can only be accomplished in the death of Christ Jesus, as John Own’s famous title says.
This is huge because it defines the purpose for the birth and death of Jesus. This one short text sums up the design of the incarnation of God. So many people downplay the significance of Jesus today; calling him a prophet or minimising his miraculous virgin birth, or trying to explain his death in ways that conform with science. But, apart from the fact that these efforts ignore the clarity of scripture, they also nullify salvation. If the significance of Jesus is downplayed, then there is no hope of salvation for any one of us, and then, as the Apostle Paul says, we are to be most pitied.
This truth about Christmas is of such vital importance to our hope of eternal life, that not one of us can afford to have the vapid, surface deep secular appreciation of it that so many do. We must delve as deep as Hebrews does! We must understand why he had to come at all.