JESUS CHRIST, THE BETTER PROPHET

“JESUS CHRIST, THE BETTER PROPHET”
Hebrews part 1 (1:1-4)
Rev. Grady Davidson 091111
We start a new study this morning in the Epistle to the Hebrews. I begin with a question: Who do you tend to listen to? What voices of hope, or of instruction, or correction, or inspiration do you listen to, and how is that working for you?
Most of us listen to our friends, because after all, they love us and would never intentionally lead us astray.
Some people trust the experts. If the talk show host or the commentator on the news says it, then it must be true, because they’re on TV!
People who are lost listen to the metallic voice of their GPS giving directions.
Politicians listen to the polls; romantics listen to their hearts; insecure teens listen to the voices of stars of the stage and heroes of the silver screen; scholars and academics listen to other scholars and academics; while most of us are just flitting up and down the radio dial in search of a catchy country song with decent lyrics and perfect 4/4 time. Who do you like to listen to, and how is that working out for you?
As we open up this beautiful and lofty Epistle the Hebrews, the author implicitly asks us the question: Christian friends, are we listening to Jesus Christ the Son of God? In our reading from the gospel, God the Father spoke to us of Jesus: “This is my beloved Son. Listen to Him!” (Mark 9.2-8). The Hebrew Christians had begun well, by listening to Jesus Christ. They had started out well. They had received Christ. They had accepted that Jesus is the fulfillment of the words of the Old Testament prophets. They had grasped the truth and confessed with their lips that Jesus is Savior and Lord. (We will talk much more about “where they were at” spiritually.) But suffice it to say today that they had “stalled out” in their faith. They had quit moving forward with Christ. But as we all know, we can never just hold our place. When we aren’t moving forward with the Lord Jesus, we are in fact drifting backwards. As an older generation would say, we “backslide.” For these Hebrew Christians, it meant that they were sliding back into what was familiar and comfortable, known religion – the words of the Old Testament Prophets (Moses, and David and Isaiah, Ezekiel, & Elijah and others). And so the author begins with these words…(v.1-2a).
A key word for the entire 13 chapters of this majestic letter of exhortation is the word “better.” I sum up the author’s message here in the prologue (these 4 verses) with this statement: Jesus, God’s Son, is better even than the prophets. The prophets had come speaking words of truth and hope and inspiration and correction; but as great and wonderful as the OT prophets were, Jesus is superior, Jesus is better – therefore we must listen to Him!
First of all, notice the comparison, that there were many prophets who spoke to our forefathers in the faith – but there is but one Son of God. Second, notice that God spoke to our forefathers in the faith in many ways (through dreams, through visions, through symbolic events, through audibly hearing the voice of the LORD, etc.), but when God spoke to us by His Son, Jesus Christ, God spoke with completion and finality. What God has to say to us, He has said through Jesus Christ and there is nothing more which we need to know about God and His will for our lives which remains to be said! God has spoken “in these last days” (v. 2) by His Son. The life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ inaugurated the Last Days of planet Earth. God has nothing more to say; there is no additional unfolding revelation from God until the trumpet blast which will herald the return of King Jesus to this earth. God has spoken with finality by His son. Whose voice do you listen to?
Everything about this book is Jewish. The author is writing from a Jewish viewpoint, and writing to the Jewish heart and Jewish mind. Most of us are gentile, with gentile sentiments and an American, Western way of thinking about things. For those reasons there are scores of important details in this book that we will fly right over and miss if we’re not careful.
One of those details is right here in the first couple of verses. The author makes his claim that God’s Son is superior to the prophets with the implied message that we must listen to Jesus, and stay ever focused upon the words of Jesus. And then the author proves his point in a distinctly Jewish way. He makes seven sub-points, seven claims about Jesus to prove that He’s superior to the prophets. Why seven? Because his readers are Jewish, and his Jewish readers would have instinctively looked for a set of seven… 7 means perfection, completion, case closed, there’s nothing more to be said.
Notice them with me.
1. (v. 2) The Son is “appointed heir of all things.” Why is Jesus God’s sole heir, God’s sole inheritor of the universe, and what’s more glorious and beautiful, the inheritor of us, the people the Father is giving to the Son? Why is He the sole heir? Because He’s the only Son.
2. (v. 2) “Through whom He made the universe.” Jesus is God’s agent of creation. God created all things visible and invisible through Jesus Christ. God’s Son is not a created being. Jesus precedes all of creation.
3. (v. 3) “The Son is the radiance of God’s glory.” This is one of the most awesome statements about how Jesus Christ relates to God the Father that you’ll find anywhere in Scripture. Can you conceive of the sun without thinking of the sun’s brightness and its rays? (No.) Jesus is to God the Father, what rays of sunshine are to the sun. The sun’s rays make the sun visible to us; the rays show us what the sun is like – and yet you cannot have the one without the other.
4. (v. 3) “The exact representation of his being.” (Gk: “character”) Jesus is the exact imprint of the Father. Like a signet ring stamped into hot wax. It’s what Jesus was saying when he declared to Philip, “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me, has seen the Father!” (John 14:9) The Son is superior even to Moses and Elijah, the greatest OT prophets, because only Jesus is the exact representation of God’s being.
5. (v. 3) He is “sustaining all things by his powerful word.” The glorified, exalted Son in heaven holds the universe together by his powerful word. The same idea is expressed in Colossians 1, “He is before all things, and in him all things consist.” But the idea here is not simply to hold something up, like Atlas from mythology holding the world on his shoulders. Rather the idea is that Jesus is carrying time and space forward, moving all of creation along to its ultimate conclusion and destination. None of the OT prophets could do that! They could talk about the end of time, but only the Son carries time and space along to its God-appointed destination.
6. “After he had provided purification for sins…” (v. 3) This will be a major theme of the Epistle to the Hebrews – Jesus our Great High Priest who has purified us from sin. The prophets by their preaching in the power of the Holy Spirit could convict sinners of their sin… but they could not atone for sin. Jesus, God’s Son has atoned for your sin! All of it! In Him, you are clean and forgiven and pure in God’s sight! What’s the proof of that? How can you know that for sure? Because of the seventh and final assertion about Christ in our passage.
7. “He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven.” When Jesus finished his work of purging away our sins by the offering of his own body and blood, He went to heaven and sat down. Later in this book there will be so much about the earthly worship house, the tabernacle, and the priests who served there. One thing we’ll see is that the tabernacle had no chairs, and the priests never sat down in the tabernacle. That’s because they could never really remove sin. Jesus removed your sin, and with that work finished, he sat down at God’s right hand.
There you have it-- the prologue to the most majestic book of Scripture, and in the space of a few verses 7 awesome reasons that Jesus is superior to the prophets. You think about the prophets – they were pretty good, pretty impressive people! Moses gave us the Ten Commandments. Elijah called down fire from heaven. Ezekiel saw the vision of God’s chariot, the wheel within the wheel. But Jesus fulfilled the Ten Commandments. Jesus went through the fires of God’s judgment, taking on himself God’s wrath against sin. Jesus ascended into heaven and took his rightful place on God’s throne.
Who are you listening to? God says – “Jesus Christ is my Son. And He is the last word I have to speak. Listen to Him.”
Amen.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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