Christ's superiority to angels.
Heb. i. 10 — 12. Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth ; aiid the heavens are the works of thine hands : they shall perish ; but thou remainest ; and they all shall wax old as doth a garment ; and as a vesture shalt thou fold them up, and they shall be changed: but thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail.
THE Old Testament speaks much of Christ : the Psahns, in particular, abound with expressions re- lating to him : and, previous to his coming, the learned Jews, who looked forward to the advent of their Messiah, and longed for his appearance, inter- preted them in their true and proper sense. This is clear ; because we never find, in any one instance, that the construction put upon these passages by the Apostles of our Lord was controverted, or the application of them to him doubted. The Jews of later ages, in order to weaken the force of these pas- sages as proving the Messiahship of the Lord Jesus, have invented other explanations of them ; deter- mining to put any sense whatever upon their own Scriptures, rather than admit the validity of his claims. But it is not to be conceived that the Apostle Paul, at the very time that he withheld the signature of his name from this epistle, (lest, by the mention of it, he should excite the prejudices of his
countrymen to whom he wrote,) should, in the very outset of his epistle, cite passages in a sense which none of his opponents were ready to admit ; and that he should go on to build the whole weight of his ar- guments on passages so adduced, and so interpreted. Yet we find, that he has applied to Jesus many ex- pressions, which, if his construction of them be true, prove, beyond a doubt, not only the Messiahship of Jesus, but the infinite superiority of his dispensation to that which had been established among the Jews. The Jews gloried in the Mosaic dispensation, as having been given to them, not only by the hands of Moses, but through the instrumentality of angels '\ St. Paul shews them, in the beginning of this epistle, that, however much they might glory in this honour, the Christian had far higher reason to glory ; because his religion was revealed by Christ himself, who, both in his nature as God, and in his office as the appointed Mediator between God and man, was in- finitely above the angels.
In confirmation of the Apostle's statement, I shall set before you,
I. The majesty of Him by whom the Gospel was revealed —
Great and glorious things are spoken of him in the preceding context. But we shall wave all mention of those things, and confine our attention to the pas- sage before us ; and notice,
1. The passage cited by the Apostle —
[The words in my text will be found towards the close of the 102d Psalm. In that psalm, the writer, personating the Church, speaks of the afflictions under which he groaned'', and of the consolations which he derived from contemplating the future glories of the Messiah's kingdom, which should ex- tend over the whole world, and endure for evermore "=. The person of whom he speaks, he calls " his God:" " I said, O my God, take me not away in the midst of my years:" aiul
a Heb. ii. 3. Acts vii. 53. Gal. iii. 19. " Ps. cii. 1—11.
•= Ps. cii. 12 — 28. He speaks of "the heathen fearing the name of the Lord, and all the kings of the earth beholding his glory : and of a people who should be created to praise the Lord." ver. 15, 18, 22.
2271. J Christ's SUPERIORITY TO ANGELS. 145
then he immediately adds, " Of old hast thou laid the foun- dations of the earth," and so on. Now, no one ever doubted but the Person whom the Psalmist there addresses, was the God of heaven and earth : and the Jews themselves were wont to interpret the psalm as referring to the Messiah. St. Paul confirms that interpretation, by expressly applying the text to the Lord Jesus Christ. As for saying that he applied the passage to Christ in a subordinate sense, there is no intimation given of any such thing : nor would the passage have been at all to his purpose, if it were not understood in its full sense : for the Apostle's object was, to establish the superiority of Christ above all the angels of heaven : and to have asserted that the Father was superior to them, would have been of no use. It is clear, then, that the Lord Jesus Christ is the true God, even " God over all, blessed for ever."]