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“For if the word spoken through angels proved steadfast, and every transgression and disobedience received a just retribution, how shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation?” Hebrews 2:2-3.
The Jews were not mistaken in boasting of the singular honor God had put on the law, introduced as it was by angelic ministration. The New Testament is as clear in this attestation as the Old Testament. Nor were they wrong in maintaining the inviolability of the law in itself. How could its authority waver if it was God's law? It is not only in great things but in small, as man would think and say, that we see God vindicating it. Every transgression and every refusal to hear received righteous requital. Other ways of God came in no doubt, whereby mercy could rejoice against judgment; but unsparing judgment of evil was the principle proclaimed and enforced throughout. It was a ministry of death and condemnation.
Incomparably more serious is it to despise grace brought in by the Head of all glory. No notion more contrary to truth than that grace makes light of evil—that the gospel is a sort of mitigated attenuated law. It was when man, and man under law, was proved wholly bad and irreparably ruined, that God sent His Son and laid on Him the entire burden. Salvation is the fruit for him that believes. There is and can be for sinners no other way. It is entirely Christ's work, exclusively His suffering. His blood cleanses from every sin-if not from all, from none. Such is the grace of God that has appeared in Christ, and especially in His death. But man is the enemy of God through listening to an older and mightier rebel than himself; and grace is far more alien and offensive to man than law. In the law his conscience can but bow to righteousness, even though thinking him-self righteous; for he knows and approves what is right, while he follows what is wrong. Grace is beyond all his thoughts, all his feelings, all his hopes, because it is divine love in God, rising above all His hatred of evil which He lays on the only sacrifice capable of bearing it before Himself and taking it away righteously.
This the gospel proclaims, not promises only but preaches, because the Savior has come and finished the work given Him to do on behalf of sinners to God's glory. And hence the supreme danger of neglecting so great salvation. For its immensity is proportionate to His dignity Who came to save sinners, and to the unparalleled work in suffering at God’s hand for all our sins what they deserved. His divine person gave Him competency to endure as well as infinite efficacy to His work. He became indeed man to suffer for man; but He never ceased to be God.
Such is the doctrine here, and uniformly in scripture where it is treated. It is a salvation on which the Holy Spirit never wearies of expatiating. And how gracious of God toward those who have His word and yet are in danger of neglecting "so great salvation"—not only neglecting to receive it but negligent of it when professed! This snare of a religions people like Israel is just the danger of Christendom now.
From An Exposition of the Epistle to the Hebrews, by W. Kelly