Made like unto his brethren

That the Son of God became man is stressed in this chapter. We are told that He‘was made a little lower than the angels’, v. 9. Chapter 1 has been emphasizing His superiority to angels. Here the name Jesus fixes our attention upon the Lord’s humanity. The human nature which Christ assumed, He still retains. ‘Made a little lower’ indicates that He became man. It has in view degree rather than time, the moving from a more exalted position to a lesser one. This was that He might suffer death and ‘taste death’. Tasting death has to do with the experience, Matt. 16. 28, and nothing to do with brevity. He tasted all the humiliation and bitterness of death. All that was in death was concentrated in that cup which the Lord emptied on the cross. ‘Partaking of flesh and blood’ signifies humanity. He partook of the same. They were sharers of flesh and blood, but He of His own free choice ‘took part’ in them. Human life was not His first condition. He ‘took hold’ of human nature, without its sin, in the incarnation. This He did that being incarnate He might die, and rising again break the power of one who had the power of death, Heb. 2. 14-16. The writer refers again to the necessity of the incarnation in verse 17. Note the force of the word ‘wherefore’. ‘It behoved Him’, i. e., ‘He was bound’, has the idea of a necessary condition to achieve a desired result.

Here was a moral necessity if He was to become our Mediator. The purpose of becoming like His brethren was that He might be a merciful and faithful high priest. He had to become like men because a priest must always partake of the nature of those for whom he officiates. So He must share in the circumstances, trials, temptations, sorrows, and pain of men, and thus He was fitted to be merciful. At the same time He is faithful, in the first instance to God, though the word also has the idea of one who is absolutely to be relied upon. The purpose also was to make propitiation, breaking down the barrier which sin interposes between God and man, and delivering the believer from God’s wrath by His own death. ‘In order to die He must take on Himself our human nature. Others die because they are born; Christ was born that He might die’, F. B. MEYER.