“God, after He spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the world. And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power.” NASB
“In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe. The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word.” NIV
Before we come to look closely at the opening verses of this letter, let’s get to know some foundational information to build upon.
The letter is written to Jewish believers in Christ, hence the name, The Epistle to the Hebrews. We don’t know where this particular church was located, but as there are some statements in it indicating that the human author knows something of a particular group, we can infer that it was originally sent to one specific congregation of believers. In fact, at least one commentator suggests because of some of the wording in various places, that it may originally have been preached as a sermon.
Scholars place the time of writing before A.D. 70, prior to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, but probably very close. Most agree it would date between A.D. 65-68.
As to its authorship, that has been a source of debate for many years but the bottom line is that no one knows for certain.
We do know that its original source is the Holy Spirit, and for our purposes in this study that is all sufficient.
The purpose of the letter is undeniably to set forth the preeminence of Christ. In fact, some writers have chosen as the key word of the epistle, the word, ‘better’; the reason being that Christ is shown to be better than everything and everyone. He is better than the prophets, better than the angels, He brings a better hope, a better promise, a better sacrifice, promise of a better (heavenly) country, speaks of a better resurrection, a better priesthood, and that is not a complete listing of the ways in which this letter shows Christ to be preeminent over all.
The key verse, since it encapsulates the message of the entire epistle, is chapter 8 verse 1.
“Now the main point in what has been said is this: we have such a high priest, who has taken His seat at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens”
I want to give you the final introductory statements from two prolific teachers of the Bible as they entered into their studies on HEBREWS.
The first is from William R. Newell.
“The great object of HEBREWS, then, is to set before these believers’ eyes, CHRIST, the Son of God; the Son of Man; the Great High Priest in Heaven; and to cause them constantly to occupy their thought and worship with God, into Whose presence Christ by His blood has brought them: without the camp: WITHIN THE VEIL!” W.R. Newell, HEBREWS Verse by Verse, Moody Press, Chicago, 1947
The second, from Ray C. Steadman
“These are the ‘things that accompany salvation’ to which he (the writer) refers in Hebrews 6:9. They must all become our daily concern if we are to lay full hold of the ‘better things’ which Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem’s manger introduced. The central thrust of this great letter is summed up in the words of an old hymn:
Rise up, O church of God
Have done with lesser things;
Give heart and mind and soul and strength
To serve the King of Kings.”
R.C. Steadman, The IVP New Testament Commentary Series, HEBREWS, InterVarsity Press, 1992, (parenthesis mine)
With the same conviction as these men and so many through the centuries who have devoted themselves to magnifying the excellence of Christ to the world, let’s go into this great epistle and ask God to take us higher up and deeper in than we’ve been before.
THE OLD LANGUAGE
The author just jumps right into his narrative here, unlike other epistles to the churches that make some claim to authorship, offer greetings, often invoking the Lord’s grace and blessing on the recipients; a fact which could be cited in an argument for HEBREWS being a sermon that was first preached; in any case, we can get the sense that the writer is focused on his subject and wants to get right to it with no frills.
He wants to say that God has now spoken to man in His Son, but there is a contrast that must be made. Long ago and from the beginning, God has spoken. That is an important truth for us to stop and ponder as we begin this study.
As I began to contemplate it in my own study, a picture came to my mind from my own memory. I remembered a day when I was 15 years old, standing in the kitchen of our house and looking down at the April 8, 1966 cover of Time magazine. My dad had brought it home and he was discussing it with my mother. The cover had an all black background, with the name of the periodical in white at the top, but the rest of the cover, in large red letters, asked, “IS GOD DEAD?” Isn’t it funny, what snapshots of memories will stay vivid in your head?
Well, I went away thinking that God might be very shocked to learn of His demise, but it took me 42 years to get around to reading the article. I found it on the web, of course, {and by the way, I don’t know why you would want it, but the cover in a frame can be purchased for 16 dollars} and I printed the article out and sat down to read.
I won’t bore you with too many details, but I was amazed at the silliness of men and women interviewed and quoted for this article, who the world would deem intelligent and highly esteemed for their position in life, several of them supposed theologians, yet could not think critically on the subject of God and who He is and where mankind fits into the scheme of things, and realize that just the fact that they don’t have Him figured out does not diminish Him in any way, but only proves their ignorance.
C.S. Lewis wrote: “A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell.”
The title of the article inside this Time issue is “Toward a Hidden God”, and the premise of the article is that if God ever was, He must be dead because if God was alive He would certainly intervene in the calamities around the world which seem to go unchallenged and unchecked. There was also the very wise and clever observation made that the development of society from ignorant to enlightened has rendered God pretty much unnecessary. Remember now, this was 1966. Many people were still in awe of color television.
This is what the Bible says.
God has spoken. God is not and never has been hidden from men, except in the sense of their unwillingness to see and the deception of their own heart.
God has spoken from long ago, and because He is God who wants to be heard, He has spoken often and through many.
He spoke through His prophets and He said exactly what He wanted to say in every case, perfectly. He used human instruments, but the message was divine and the communication was without error.
He had them write, He had them shout in the streets, He had them act out symbolic drama, He performed miracles through them, He sang through them, He even made the events of their lives represent His love and His yearning for His people.
At times God acted entirely independently of any man, demonstrating His absolute power over nature and the elements and over the heavenly bodies both in the daytime and at night.
God has spoken in every way imaginable and in some ways the mind of man never would have imagined. He has never been silent, never been hidden, He has always been concerned, He has always reached out and bent down to make Himself known, and from the creation of the first man to now and to the end of the world, God speaks.
THE NEW LANGUAGE
Now, in these last days, which began with the pronouncement by John the Baptist that the Lamb of God had arrived on the scene to take away the sins of the world, God speaks most perfectly and most directly in that whereas He once spoke through nature and through His prophets He now has spoken in His Son.
This is a whole new ‘language’, if you will. The old language of God used many portions and many ways. Many writings and many vehicles. The new language is more direct. He now bypasses the imperfect and speaks directly through the perfect.
Newell points out that the literal language of the old manuscripts says “God did speak to us in Son” and the commentator writes as a footnote on his page, “If we say over and over to ourselves the very words, God did speak unto us in Son, our hearts will feel the meaning, though our words cannot translate it.” “Hebrews Verse by Verse” William R. Newell, Moody Press, 1947
The old language came in pieces and cloaked in mystery. It gave us vague references to One who would crush the serpent’s head. It spoke of One who would be a blessing to all the nations as a descendant of the patriarchs.
It told us that this One would come out of Bethlehem and it spoke of a virgin birth and an unending Kingdom.
This new language though, revealed the mystery, completed the picture, unfolded the full and final revelation of God.
Here we come to our first ‘better’. Christ is better than the prophets. Their message was progressive and often veiled, His was final and clear and complete. He was able to say to Philip, ‘If you have seen Me you have seen the Father’.
The prophets often did not know what they were saying or what it meant for the future, but He spoke as One with ultimate authority. People said in awe of Him that no man ever spoke as this one. When the Temple Guard were sent to arrest Him they came back empty-handed citing His unique oratory as the reason for their delinquency of duty.
The world would make Jesus out to be as one of the prophets. They would even call Him a great prophet, but they would relegate Him to a standing with Moses and even Muhammad. But Jesus Christ is to the prophets as the Author is to the book.
C.S. Lewis said in regards to his salvation that he could not have possibly had any part in it. He said that if Shakespeare and Hamlet were ever to meet it would have to be Shakespeare’s doing.
God, in these last days, has spoken in Son, but despite my usage of the idea of a language being spoken, He is infinitely more than that.
MORE THAN A LANGUAGE
He is Heir of all things and He is Creator of the universe. That is a lot to try to absorb, isn’t it?
In the third chapter of his book, ‘The Divine Conspiracy”, author Dallas Willard makes the point with a subtitle toward the end of the chapter, that Jesus was “The Smartest Man in the World”.
Our first reaction to that is probably something like, ‘Well, of course, He is God’. But Willard makes a good point when he says,
“…can we seriously imagine that Jesus could be Lord if he were not smart? If he were divine, would he be dumb? Or uninformed? Once you stop to think about it, how could he be what we take him to be in all other respects and not be the best-informed and most intelligent person of all, the smartest person who ever lived?”
But I gave you all that so I could share this next statement of Willard’s with you in the context of this sermon.
“The biblical and continuing vision of Jesus was of one who made all of created reality and kept it working, literally ‘holding it together’ (Col 1:17). And today we think people are smart who make light bulbs and computer chips and rockets out of ‘stuff’ already provided! He made the ‘stuff’!” Dallas Willard, “THE DIVINE CONSPIRACY”, Harper Collins Pub. 1998, pg 94
By now, thanks to the ‘forward’ prompt in all email programs, we’ve probably all read or heard the joke about the scientist who is bragging to God that He is no longer needed since science can now create life.
God challenges the scientist to a sort of ‘creation competition’ which the scientist accepts, but as he bends to gather dirt God says, ‘Oh, no! Go make your own dirt!’
Cute, but it makes its point. John opened his Gospel with the declaration that the Word was with God and was in fact God, and that all things came into being by His power and apart from His power nothing exists. Then we skip down to verse 14 of that chapter and learn that the Word spoken of in verse 1 became flesh and tabernacled with His creation, and although a great deal is said in the next 3 verses we only need to scan down to the end of verse 17 to have confirmed that John, from verse 1, has been talking about Jesus Christ, Son of the Father, full of grace and truth.
This is the One the author of HEBREWS praises as Creator and Heir, again, in contrast to the prophets whose message He completes, not only in the sense of being the end of the message of the prophets but in the sense that He is both the author and the object of the message of the prophets.
Now we mustn’t be thrown by this usage of the word heir. We hear it and think of it in human terms and we think of a child or a spouse taking possession of that which is left behind by a loved one who has died.
In another setting we may get the picture of a prince who is heir to a throne, but who will not take possession until his father, the king, either dies or is otherwise incapacitated.
Christ is Heir of all things by virtue of the fact that He created all things.
The author uses the word ‘heir’, in anticipation of Christ’s future reign of which much is said throughout this epistle, highlighted by the multiple instances of reference to Psalm 110 where through the psalmist the Father speaks prophetically of the Messiah, saying,
“Sit at My right hand, until I make Thine enemies a footstool for Thy feet”
How can men err so badly as to think of Him as on the same plane with great historical men, even God’s inspired prophets, who as the architect and builder of the universe condescended to human existence, submitted Himself to the hands of evil men, rose bodily from the grave having avoided any decay, but came up in the splendor of glorification, ascended triumphantly back to His place at the Father’s right hand to take back up His royal position, now reigning supreme as Head of His Church?
God speaks through His Son and the mystery of the ages is unveiled. His preeminent Christ has fought the fight and crushed the enemy and provided the way to God and Heaven, as Owner and Heir of all that is or ever shall be, and it is He who calls us ‘brethren’ and ‘children’ and ‘joint-heirs’!
Before moving on I want to give you a paragraph from W.R. Newell’s commentary. The language is slightly antiquated, but it is powerful stuff nonetheless:
“Men have struck gold, heaped it up, and left it – to be paupers eternally! Men have labored and with genius to ‘accumulate’, as they say, and have left it forever – paupers. Xerxes of Persia had no limit to his earthly possessions, but dying without Christ, to what was he heir? An eternity with nothing! For Christ has been appointed Heir of all things! The proud millionaire, yea they say the billionaire, is with us today. For a few years he is rich and then leaves it all and is poor forever! While some humble servant of his, who had Christ, dying, steps out into an unspeakably glorious eternity, rich beyond all imagination. Why? He is an ‘heir of God, and joint-heir with Christ’, who was appointed Heir of all things.” W.R. Newell, HEBREWS, Moody Press, 1947
Are you rich in this world? Oh, maybe not with money, but with anything that makes you proud? Do not fix your hope on that which is passing away; that which you cannot take with you. Fix your hope on God who is supplier of all that is good. (1 Tim 6:17) Rather, cast that which would hinder your spiritual walk away from your heart and set your affections on things that are eternal, for you, if you are a Christ-follower, are destined to inherit jointly with Him in His glory.
MORE THAN A VOICE
Well, He is more than a language, and He is more than a voice. The prophets were voices, John the Baptist said of himself, “I am a voice crying in the wilderness”. Those of us who have been given the dreadful and delightful duty of heralding the Word of the Lord to you, are voices.
But the Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of His nature. This cannot be perfectly conveyed in human language. One illustration used, which is apt since it is the terminology of the Greek in verse 3, is of a minted coin which perfectly reflects the design that was on the die that stamped it, or in wax when a seal is placed on it.
He is the exact reproduction of God in time and space. This does not mean that physically Jesus looked like the Father. We know from the Bible that God is Spirit and does not have a body. He does not have a human form, except that which the Messiah has taken for the purpose of redemption and now bears glorified for eternity. But of God the Father we do not say that.
The sense in which the Messiah is the exact representation of the Father is in precisely who He is and what He is in nature, in being. Jesus said, “If you have seen Me you have seen the Father”. He said, “I am in the Father and the Father is in Me”.
When we proclaim Him to be better than the prophets we do not mean to say He is simply smarter or higher in some human ranking system. He is God and He came to us in the perfect radiance of the Father’s glory and as the perfect and exact reproduction of the Father’s being.
But there is more to say about Him before we talk about what He has done; there is something He is doing perpetually from the moment He spoke light into existence.
He upholds all things by the word of His power.
Can we even begin to wrap our puny little brains around this? Nothing has ever existed that He has not called into being, and He continues to maintain it all by the power of His word.
Think about the implications of that and you could meditate on it until you starve to death and still not have scratched the surface.
When I read this verse I think back to one of the books I have read by Max Lucado. I don’t remember which one it was so I won’t try to quote verbatim, but Lucado asked in his narrative, when Mary was holding the infant Jesus to her breast, did she realize He was holding her together? When she made him chicken soup was she aware that He had made the chicken?
It might bring a chuckle to think in those terms, but that is exactly where Hebrews 1:3 takes us!
In Him we live and move and exist, said Paul to the philosophers. In His hand, declared Job, is the life of every living thing and the breath of all mankind.
The inspired psalmist wrote:
“Your faithfulness continues through all generations; you established the earth, and it endures. Your laws endure to this day, for all things serve you. Ps 119:90-91
Oh, the audacity of men to sit down and compose clever words to declare that God is insignificant for modern man; that He is for all intents and purposes, dead since He seems to be absent or at the very best, silent…
…when while the man is writing with his pen or striking the keys of his Royal typewriter and congratulating himself on his cleverness in compiling all these tidbits of conventional wisdom from authors and politicians and religious leaders to substantiate his claims…
…he owes his continued existence to the One who holds him together by the power of His word.
One day, a day fixed and sure on the calendar that only God keeps, He will simply release His word. He will simply and finally hold it back and every atom that makes up the created universe will split simultaneously, and the old things will have passed away with a roar and with intense heat.
The scoffers and the evolutionists will finally get their ‘Big Bang’, but they won’t even hear it.
Who will? All those who have heard the final and the greatest revelation of God in the language that He speaks, the voice that He employs, the Son that He sent.
All who hear that voice and respond in faith to that call; they will be sharers with the appointed Heir, and conformed finally to the very image of the One who is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature.
His purposes will ripen fast,
Unfolding every hour;
The bud may have a bitter taste,
But sweet will be the flower.
Blind unbelief is sure to err,
And scan his work in vain;
God is His own interpreter,
And He will make it plain.
William Cowper
