GOD SPOKE OF OLD.
Hebrews 1:1.
As we begin to look at the Epistle to the Hebrews, we are doing exactly what the author encourages us to do: ‘Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith’ (cf. Hebrews 12:2). This book begins with God, who “in many parts and many ways” spoke of old “to the fathers in the prophets” (Hebrews 1:1). Here the writer to the Hebrews himself leads us to understand that all Scripture, Old Testament and New, has its origin in God.
To the Hebrew recipients of this letter, “the fathers” might first be identified with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God spoke to each of these in the book of Genesis, establishing a covenant and promising a land. Following on from there, “the fathers” could refer to the Hebrews’ later ancestors. God spoke to them through all the prophets, from Moses to Malachi.
In the Old Testament, God spoke through dreams and visions, through type and prophecy, and through the sacrifices and ceremonies of a complex cultic ritual. With some, like Abraham and Moses, He spoke (almost) ‘face to face’ - but the fathers were walking in the shadow of the promise, and not in the fullness that we now enjoy. When Jesus came, it was not to abolish all that had gone before, but to bring it to fulfilment (cf. Matthew 5:17).
Whereas God told a pagan king that Abraham was himself a prophet (cf. Genesis 20:7), the first prophet of Israel as such was Moses, the writer of the first five books of the Bible. Moses later reported the LORD as telling him, ‘I will raise them up a Prophet from among their brethren, like unto thee, and will put my words into His mouth’ (cf. Deuteronomy 18:18). That Prophet is Jesus.
In Genesis 1:3, ‘God spoke.’ In John 1:1 we discover that Jesus is ‘the Word.’ In Luke 24:27 and Luke 24:44-45, Jesus showed His disciples ‘the things concerning Himself’ in ‘all the (Old Testament) scriptures.’
