The glory of Christ has however another side. He is Son of God before the worlds, Son of God incarnate, Son of God risen from the dead. He is God; He is Jehovah. His position suits and attests His divine dignity. But He is Son of man also; and the moral glory of His humiliation is answered by His conferred glory, as the Epistle proceeds to develop, but with marked reference to the present exaltation of our Lord since the cross on high, and not to the millennial day, though this is assured for the earth by-and-by.
“For not to angels did He subject the habitable [earth] to come, whereof we speak, but one somewhere testified, saying, What is man that Thou rememberest him? Or son of man, that Thou visitest him? Thou madest Him a little lower than angels; with glory and honor thou crownedst Him [and didst set Him over the works of Thy hands] : Thou didst put all things in subjection beneath His feet. For in that He subjected them all to Him, He left nothing unsubjected to Him. But now we see not yet them all in subjection to Him. But we see Him that hath been made a little lower than angels, Jesus, for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honor, that by God’s grace He should taste of death for everything” (vss. 5-9).
Here the angels are not only surpassed beyond comparison, but have no place whatever. It is a question of subjection and of rule; but this is not for angels. They serve; they never reign. Man is called to rule, to have dominion. God was looking on to His Son, the Son of man. For Him the habitable earth is destined. God has not made it in vain. He knew from the first that the first man would fail. His counsels ever center in Christ. But He must reign alone, if this were all; for all sinned and do come short of the glory of God. Yet rest for man with God in glory was ever His design. This could only be by death, the death of the Lord Jesus. His death is therefore the sole possible meeting-point, the solution of all hardest enigmas, the conciliation of perfect love with inflexible righteousness, of grace to the sinner with the untarnished glory of God, of man’s weakness and of Satan’s power, of judgment borne and of peace made, of the Highest taking the lowest place in obedience that He might receive the highest on a ground on which He could have the vilest now sanctified with Him, the sharers of His joy through redemption. Such the counsels, such the ways, of God in Christ.
It will be observed that man, the Son of man, comes into the greatest and most fitting prominence. It was only the name of shame and sin, if He to Whom it specially belongs were not Son of God as no one else is as divine. But this held fast, what can be sweeter to man if he believes God? For its true force and ways we have His word, the only sure standard. Now it is never applied to Him vaguely. It is His title when the consciously, evidently, rejected Messiah.
In the N. T. it first occurs in Matt. 8:2020And Jesus saith unto him, The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head. (Matthew 8:20). So He speaks of Himself to a scribe that proposed to follow Him “whithersoever Thou goest.” This might be all well for a Jew subject to the Messiah, the King, the fountain of dignity and reward. But the Lord even then realizes His position. “The foxes have holes, and the birds of the sky nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay His head.” He had come to His own things, but His own people received Him not. This was about to be fully and awfully demonstrated; but He knew it then, and speaks as already outcast and having nothing. The death of the cross would be ere long the undeniable and absolute proof; but He realizes it and expresses it, not only by the title but by what accompanies it, if any were ignorant of its import. Again, “the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins” and proves it by enabling the paralytic at a word to arise, take up his bed, and walk (Matt. 9). He will have come before His envoys shall have gone through the cities of Israel (Matt. 10) — a mission to be resumed before that day. At the later stage of Matt. 11:1919The Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, Behold a man gluttonous, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners. But wisdom is justified of her children. (Matthew 11:19) the transition is plain; as in the solemn charge of ch. 12: 32, 40, preparatory to His bringing out the mysteries of the kingdom of the heavens, the earth and earthly people were morally judged and found good for nothing. It was now a question of “the Sower,” of a new system which He was to begin, though Satan again would ruin, as far as public result on earth appeared, yet would He secure the good and judge the evil.
Still more emphatic is the testimony of Matt. 16, where the utter unbelief of the Jews forms the background, in contrast with which shines the faith of the chief spokesman of the twelve, who receives a new name from the Lord and learns that, on the rock of the Father’s revelation of the Son, the Son of the living God, Christ was to build His church. It was then He charged His disciples to tell no one that He was “the Christ “not Jesus, (which is absurd and not authentic, but the addition of copyists ignorant of the truth). From that time forth He began to show them that He must suffer many things and be killed and raised again: His manifest change to the fall meaning of Son of man, as is pointed out expressly in Mark 8:29-3129And he saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am? And Peter answereth and saith unto him, Thou art the Christ. 30And he charged them that they should tell no man of him. 31And he began to teach them, that the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders, and of the chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. (Mark 8:29‑31), Luke 9:20-2220He said unto them, But whom say ye that I am? Peter answering said, The Christ of God. 21And he straitly charged them, and commanded them to tell no man that thing; 22Saying, The Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be slain, and be raised the third day. (Luke 9:20‑22). The Gospel of John in his personal way sets out the same truth of transition for the Lord in chapter 12., where, after being presented as the Christ, as is written in Zecheriah 9:9, in the face of the Pharisees more hostile when He raised Lazarus from the grave as the quickening Son of God, His word to Andrew and Philip speaking for the Greeks is, “The hour is come that the Son of man should be glorified. Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit” (vss. 23, 24). All judgment is committed to the Son of man, Who must be honored thus by those who, not believing in Him as Son of God, despised Him as man: He will judge all such (John v.). So He appears coming in the clouds of heaven (Matt. 24); so He deals with the Gentiles in that day (Matt. 25).
Nor is it otherwise in the O.T. It is the same Spirit, as the truth is one. For it will be observed that, as Psalm 2 is a weighty testimony to His Sonship as incarnate in Hebrew 1, Psalm 8 is the no less appropriate citation here in chap. 2. Nor is this casual, but the kernel that they respectively bear. The first Psalm sets before us the Jewish covenant and contrasts the righteous with the ungodly, as the judgment will manifest. Psalm 2 introduces the Christ, Jehovah’s King on Zion. Such is the decree. For He is Son, begotten in time, as we are told here for His kingdom, before time and all things (being their Creator) as we are told elsewhere. When He asks, He will receive not Judea merely but the nations for His inheritance and the uttermost parts of the earth for His possession. But this is characterized by judgment executed publicly, by His breaking them with a rod of iron, and dashing them in pieces like a potter’s vessel. Clearly this is postponed by His rejection on the part of the unbelieving Jews and lawless Gentiles; and when it is fulfilled, the church will be with Him and share His rule in a glorified state as is explicitly declared in Revelation 2:26, 2726And he that overcometh, and keepeth my works unto the end, to him will I give power over the nations: 27And he shall rule them with a rod of iron; as the vessels of a potter shall they be broken to shivers: even as I received of my Father. (Revelation 2:26‑27). Now this further stage of His rejection and its blessed consequence in a higher elevation and larger sphere, not as the Messiah only but as the humbled and glorified Son of man is precisely the truth taught in Psalm 8 as we are instructed in our Epistle.
Thus, the prefatory Psalm 1 and 2 give us the righteous and the Messiah according to Jehovah’s purpose, spite of opposing kings and peoples, the Psalm that follow, 3-7, point out how His Spirit works in the circumstances and sorrows of the righteous while He does not reign; and Psalm 8 closes this series by Christ as the humbled Son of man set over all things. Though the habitable earth be not yet subjected to Him, as our scripture tells us, yet when we look at Him crowned with glory and honor on high, we behold by faith even now the divine glory set in Him above the heavens, the pledge that His name will soon be acknowledged excellent in all the earth, as it really is. Without Christ man is indeed feeble and fallen. Angels excel in might; and we naturally look up to the heavens, the moon, and the stars, though but the work of Jehovah’s fingers and His ordinances. But look at man in Christ! His shame and suffering on the cross are the ground of the highest glory even God could confer on the Man that went down below all, now exalted above all far beyond the oath to David or the promise to Abram. It is the glorious denouement of His abasement for the suffering of death, as it is here explained, and that God’s grace might have its fullest exercise. His present place is in heaven, in no way the subjection of the habitable earth, which is “to come” as the scripture itself says; still less is His seat on the Father’s throne the assumption of His own throne. It is God straightway glorifying in Himself the Son of man Who glorified Him as to sin in death. For the rest we await, as He does, the times and seasons the Father has set within His own authority. He is Himself, and as man, in the highest; and we seeing it by faith bear witness to Him, to His sufferings and the glories that should follow. His immeasurable superiority to angels as man is not to be doubted, though the time is not yet for seeing all things subjected to Him. From 1 Cor. 15 we learn that it awaits the resurrection at His coming. So absolute and universal is the supremacy over the universe He had created as God that it seems good to the Holy Spirit in the Epistle to the Corinthians to except Him Who subjected all to Christ; as here it is affirmed that He left nothing that is not put under Him.
How blessed and precise the appended words “that He by God’s grace should taste death for everything"! This last rather than “man,” appears best to suit the bearing of the context. It is the sphere not merely as a universe but including “everything” brought under the reconciling power of His death. The following brings in persons and different language is used.
What gives peculiar force to “the habitable earth to come” is the undeniable fact that the main object of the Epistle is to develop and maintain the present glory of Christ as He sits, on the accomplishment of redemption, at the right hand of God on high. From first to last this is obvious and all-important. The Jewish Christian, disposed to abide in or glide away into earthly hopes with the Messiah on His throne for their center, needed to be continually recalled to his actual relationship with Christ in heaven. At the same time there is no lack of testimony throughout, to the rest of God that remaineth for His people (chap. 4.), to the age to come, of which the powers vouchsafed in apostolic era were a sample and pledge (chap. 6.), to the new covenant to be made with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah (chap. 8.), of which we have now only the principle, not the letter but spiritually, in the blood shed which is its basis, to the appearing of Christ a second time (chap. 9.), to the day approaching (chap. 10.), to the blessing concerning the things to come when the promise shall be received in fact, instead of in faith (chap. 11.), to the full and ordered scene of glory in heaven and earth (chap. 12.), when the Lord shakes not earth only but also heaven, and to the city actually come and continuing (chap. 13.).
Here we have the most distinct evidence that, whatever may be the displayed glory of the heavens in that day, (and no one intelligent in Ephesians 1, Colossians 1, and other scriptures, would enfeeble but insist on it for Christ and the risen saints), yet it is an irreparable blank to leave out of that day’s blessedness “the habitable earth.” Abundant strains of the prophets anticipate it with assurance, joy, and praise, as the law had of old, and the Psalms afterward. Nor does the fullest light of the N. T. omit the earth in the proclamation of the coming kingdom, though the opening of heaven as the characteristic faith and hope made the higher naturally predominant. If the Lord taught His disciples to pray that the Father’s kingdom should come, He did not fail to add as the next petition, “Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth.” The revelation of new things does not blot out the old; as indeed Christ will be the center and head of both in that day to the glory of God the Father. So His outpouring in John 17 He asks what assuredly will be fully answered in connection with His giving to the saints the glory which the Father gave Him (not of course what was personally intrinsic and eternal), “that they may be one, even as we [are] one; I in them and Thou in Me, that they may be perfected into one; that the world may know that Thou didst send Me, and lovedst them even as Thou lovedst Me.” In the day of glory it will be a question of “knowing,” not as now an appeal to “faith” (cf. ver. 20, 21). But there is undeniably “the world” to know when they see those truly divine counsels of grace fulfilled in the manifested glory of Christ and His own. There are earthly things no less than heavenly in the kingdom (John 3); which is as different from the present time of the gospel as from the still more remote eternity with its conditions of total and fixed change.
And how suitable is it that “the habitable earth” where the Lord was born, where He labored, suffered, and died on the cross, should be subjected to His government, and behold His glory, and experience more blessedness under His scepter than it groaned in misery and corruption under rebellions man misled by a mightier rebel than himself! It is His due, not only as Creator of it all, but as Redeemer. There He was put to shame, there He will triumph. There man and Satan brought in death and the curse; there God and His Son will fill the earth with peace and glory. How sad the blank if this were not to be!
In vain do ancients and moderns err from the word and pervert this scripture to the state of the church under the gospel. On the face of it “to come” distinguishes the world into which God brought in the Firstborn (Hebrews 1:66And again, when he bringeth in the firstbegotten into the world, he saith, And let all the angels of God worship him. (Hebrews 1:6)). Such is its state in the future; as no mystification or argument can make it legitimately mean a heavenly and spiritual system such as our condition of gospel and church privilege. Nor is there any difficulty in the clause that follows, “whereof we speak.” For the matter treated of is the future subjection of this habitable world to the Second man, and not to angels. Undoubtedly it is not the eternal state when He shall deliver up the kingdom to Him Who is God and Father. It is His reign till He has put all His enemies under His feet, death last of all. It is not the time when He ministers as the High-Priest in heaven for those who on earth suffer and need His succor and sympathy. It is not the gospel state, but the millennial kingdom which intervenes between the gospel as now and the eternity which closes all. It is the world or habitable earth under the manifested power and kingdom of the Lord Jesus, the rejected Messiah but Son of man exalted to reign over all peoples, nations, and languages.