2-25-2026  Midweek of Lent 1

“THE ROBE OF HUMAN FRAME”

Text: Hebrews 1

Wednesday February 25, 2026 – Lent Midweek 1

Trinity – Creston

       Grace, mercy, and peace is yours from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ!

       Our text for this First Midweek of Lent is from Hebrews 1 that was just proclaimed.

Let Us Pray: Dearest Jesus, send your Holy Spirit to remind us that angels are separate creation from humans that are part of your creation to minister to and to serve and protect us.  Amen.

Dear Fellow Redeemed in Christ:

Tonight, we will continue looking at the ancient hymn “O Love, How Deep” and how to rightly understand the ministry of angels among God’s people and the blessing they are for us.

Angels are a source of endless fascination and speculation in our world. Our hymn for this season was written in the fifteenth century, almost six hundred years ago.

It was a time when it was somehow easier to believe beings like angels and demons exist. But even now, we like to believe that there are spiritual beings whose sole purpose is to serve God and to take care of us.

We first see angels appear in the Bible in Genesis 3. God places an angel with a flaming sword at the entrance to the Garden of Eden.

Angels appear as messengers, warriors, guardians, and worshipers and attendants at the throne of God. These biblical angels are not cute and cuddly.

They are mighty beings who have been present at every significant event in the life of God’s people throughout history.

It should not surprise us, then, that some thought God would send an angel down to be the Messiah. After all, who could be more powerful, more in tune with God’s will than His own created servant, the angels?

The flipside of any discussion of God’s holy angels and how God uses them includes demons. According to the Scriptures, demons are angels who rebelled against God and His divine will.

The leader of these fallen angels is Satan. Satan, which means “accuser,” sits in opposition to everything God stands for. We heard about Satan in last Sunday’s Holy Gospel, Matthew 4:1–11, the account of Jesus being tempted in the wilderness.

Just as the angels have been present for so much of God’s story, Satan has also been there, lurking and slithering and tempting us away from everything that is good and right and true in this world.

So why didn’t God use an angel to oppose Satan and undo his evil reign? We get the answer in our reading from Hebrews 1. The second stanza of “O Love, How Deep” sums it up well:

2. He sent no angel to our race,

Of higher or of lower place,

But wore the robe of human frame,

And to this world Himself He came.

Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the eternal Word (John 1), the heir of all things. It is through Jesus that God created the world (Hebrews 1:2).

Jesus is the very voice of God in creation. The whole world was created through Him.

What’s more, Hebrews tells us that He is “the exact imprint of His nature, and He upholds the universe by the word of His power” (Hebrews 1:3).

In other words, if you want to know the Father, know the Son. We could even go a step further and say that the only way to know the Father is through His Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.

As mighty as God’s created angels are, they cannot redeem us from sin. Only the uncreated Son of God can do that. (and no we do not become angels and “earn our wings” when we die. Our sin was paid for and eternal life given because of Jesus alone.)

So what does it mean, then, that the Son of God became a little child in the womb of the blessed virgin Mary? Why does it matter so much? Why is it in so many ways at the very heart of what it means to be a Christian?

In the words of one early Christian pastor, Gregory Nazianzus, “that which he did not assume, he cannot redeem.”[1] In other words, in order for Jesus to save us, body and soul, He had to become one of us.

We confess this every year on Trinity Sunday in the Athanasian Creed:

Although He is God and man, He is not two, but one Christ: one, however, not by the conversion of the divinity into flesh, but by the assumption of the humanity into God; one altogether, not by confusion of substance, but by unity of person.

We have a Savior who is, as the author of Hebrews puts it, a “little while lower than the angels” (Hebrews 2:7). Yet He is also the One who governs all things.

He is the Lord of all and yet the servant of all. He is both the greatest and the least. He is fully God and fully man. He is the icon, the very image, of God’s love to the world.

What this means for you, dear Christian, is that you have a God who does not simply understand your weaknesses. He does not merely “get us.”(like the the most recent commercials proclaim. 

He is us.

He’s tempted just as we are, yet without sin.

It is at times like this that we thank God for Jesus, who came to earth in the womb of Mary.

We thank God that He took that betrayal into Himself, that He “wore the robe of human frame.” We thank God, and we know that He did it all for us. Amen.

Now the peace of God which passes all human understanding, keep our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior.  Amen.

[1] See Gregory Nazianzus, “Letter 101 to Cledonius,” in On God and Christ, trans. Lionel Wickham (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011), 155–66.