Online Resource Library
Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadJames Nisbet Commentary - Hebrews 2:3 - 2:3
(Show All Books | Show All Chapters)
This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
‘How shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation?’
Heb_2:3
I. How shall we escape?—‘How’—in what way—‘how shall we escape, if we neglect this great salvation?’
(a) By pleading good works? There is not a living man who is not conscious, painfully conscious, that he has offended God and incurred His just displeasure. Is there anything over and above which can be available to atone for any other wrong of life? How then can one act make amends for another act?
(b) By pleading temptations? Was not there a provision made quite sufficient to overcome it? And did not you know that there was?
(c) By pleading God’s mercy? Will you plead the mercy of God? Is He not just also? Would not His whole empire suffer by a false leniency or favouritism?
II. The way of escape.—Then, where will you run? What exit is there from God’s displeasure and your condign punishment but in the way of His own providing, faith in a Substitute? ‘How can you escape’ but by that one ‘great salvation’? And let me ask, Would God have sent His Son to die for this world if there could be any other way but that one? The coming of Christ has provided for you—
(a) A Brother, in the sympathies of a Man, and the power of God, always at your side.
(b) A Pattern, a Perfect Model, Whom you have nothing else to do but to follow, that you may secure a straight path and a happy life.
(c) A Teacher Whose teachings are the very mind of God.
(d) An Advocate Who both Himself pleads your cause with His Father and makes your poorest prayers and offerings acceptable before the throne.
(e) A Substitute Who has borne, in your stead, all your punishment.
(f) A Representative, the pledge of your own admission into heaven.
(g) A Righteousness in which you, even you, can stand in the presence of a holy God ‘perfect and entire, lacking nothing.’
Rev. James Vaughan.
Illustration‘Thursday, June 22, 1893, will long be marked as a day of mourning in the annals of the British Navy. The tidings of that day sent a thrill of horror and dismay through every English heart. It was in no time of war or tempest, but on summer seas, engaged in peaceful manœuvres with friends—not foes—that suddenly, almost without a warning, the proudest battleship that England owned heeled over, and in one short quarter of an hour entombed herself, and hundreds of her gallant crew, deep down in a watery grave. What did it mean? Was it really possible that the Admiral had blundered—the Admiral, than whom no braver man or more skilful sailor ever trod a deck? To this day a mystery surrounds the fatal order which cost his country, his family, and himself so dear. And yet the reluctant verdict of his peers compels the inference that it was through neglect—neglect to measure duly the distance required for the safe turning of the ships—that the irreparable mistake was made. Neglect! neglect! Who can measure its fatal consequences?’
AN UNANSWERED QUESTION
(a) Of its source.
(b) Of the blessings it confers.
(c) Of the cost at which it was procured.
II. What is it to neglect salvation?—Who are they that neglect it?
(a) Those who live in open sin neglect it.
(b) Those who are not in earnest in seeking it neglect it.
(c) Those who are content to live on without it neglect it.
III. How shall they escape who neglect it?—For the sinner who has neglected the offer of salvation there will be no escape. No escape! ‘How shall we escape?’ It is an unanswered question. The preacher does not answer it, God Himself does not answer it. It cannot be answered. There will be no escape.
Rev. E. W. Moore.