Hebrews 2:18

18. For To illustrate the word sufferings by the particular case of temptation.

Being tempted An historical confirmation of Matthew 4:1-11.

He is able We are connected to the man Jesus by a pure and beautiful human sympathy. Abstract theism, presenting a pure infinite, fails to awaken our human affections until deity is to us humanized. But in Jesus we find a divine brother. And, through Jesus, infinite righteousness is able to deal with us, not by the rule of the infinitely perfect law, but according to the measure of human weakness. Under the Old Testament the psalmist could say, “As a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him. For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust.” In Jesus we find one who has suffered as we, and been tempted like us, and with a human sympathy for us can bring a divine succour to us.

On this chapter we note: 1. Pure theism, as in Judaism, (whether philonean, rabbinical, or modern,) as in Mohammedanism and in modern deism, is cold and barren, (throwing God to an infinite distance upward,) destitute of that element of tenderness embodied in the divine Jesus, and so beautifully portrayed in the closing part of this chapter. There is added, also, especially in Mohammedanism, a fierceness, a fanaticism, which is adverse to a genial civilization, and holds its subjects in a dreary semi-barbarism. Just so far, too, as the incarnation is rejected from a professed Christianity, the piety tends towards a cold morality, and the religion to become a mere philosophy. 2. Yet while we deeply recognise the tender sympathy of the blessed Jesus, neither thought nor language should forget a most profound reverence. We must not assume his interference in our trifling secular affairs, nor speak of him in fondling or amatory language. It is as our sympathizing Saviour from temptation, sin, and death, that we are ever reverently to contemplate him.