If you are a Christian, the very name means that you belong to Christ, that Christ is not only your Savior, He is your Lord.
He is the one you adore, you worship, you serve, you obey. And so every Christian has to be hungry for a book that focuses on the identity of Christ. And that book is the book of Hebrews. It's good to have you with us for this Wednesday edition of Renewing Your Mind.
Until tomorrow, you're hearing messages from R.C. Sproul's Themes from Hebrews series. Twelve messages to help you dig into this pivotal book that, in the words of Dr. Sproul, is so rich and covers the whole scope of the history of redemption. Don't forget that you can study Hebrews with Dr. Sproul when you request his entire 12-message series with your donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org. Or when you call us at 800-435-4343. But be quick, as this offer ends tomorrow. So according to the book of Hebrews, who is Jesus and what are His qualities?
Here's Dr. Sproul. We continue our study now of the book of Hebrews by turning to the very first chapter, to the first verse. We read in chapter 1 these words, God, who at various times and in different ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the world, semicolon.
Let me just stop there and take a breath. The book of Hebrews begins with an assertion that's very important for us as Christians. And that assertion is this, that the God of Christianity, the God of Judaism, Old Testament Judaism, is a God who speaks. That the God of the Christian faith is a God who reveals Himself verbally. And the Scriptures tell us here that in times past that God revealed Himself in all sorts of different ways. He revealed Himself to the Jewish people through dreams, through a pillar of clouds, through history, and so on. And most significantly in the Old Testament through these primary vehicles of revelation who were the prophets.
But we see here a statement of comparison which is at the same time a statement of contrast. In the former days God did it one way, but now in these last days we get the zenith of God's self-disclosure. We reach the pinnacle, the apex of divine revelation where now the revelation comes to us not through dreams, not through pillars of cloud, not through burning bushes, not even through prophets, but through one who is superior to all of these former means of revelation. That revelation now comes through His Son. Now what we have here is clearly the concept of what we call in theology progressive revelation. Progressive revelation.
Now we have to be very, very careful with that concept. There are those Christians and Christian bodies who believe that revelation, divine revelation of a special kind, has continued since the completion of the New Testament and continues even down to this day so that certain writings or certain sayings of people can be deemed to be inspired and as infallible as the Scriptures themselves. There are groups who believe that.
Orthodox Protestantism, of course, does not believe that. They believe that verbal revelation stopped with the writing of the New Testament. Now, the point is that orthodox Christianity sees all of the Bible as being revelation, but there is a progress, a movement of that revelation.
Now again, let's be careful. When we say that revelation is progressive, something can progress in different ways. We could have development or progress in the scientific realm.
How do scientific enterprises tend to progress? I just was at Disney World, and one of the things that I saw was this trip to Mars, and they used real photographs that were taken from some of these space exploration projects that took close-up photographs of the surface of Mars, and it showed all of these rifts on the surface of Mars that were vast cavernous rifts that went on for miles and miles and miles, and they talked about how it used to be that people thought from more distant photographs and telescopic studies that the idea was that there were canals on Mars. But now we know there aren't any canals on Mars. They got a little closer, and they saw that what they were guessing were canals were not canals. So there are no canals on Mars. And while I watched that, I was immediately taken back to grade school, where we studied, you know, sixth and seventh and eighth grade science, and we were taught that there were canals on Mars. But now the science books aren't going to tell you that anymore.
Why? Because with more precision, with more sophisticated experimentation and observation, science has progressed. It has new knowledge, which has not only made the old knowledge out of date, but the new knowledge corrects the old theory.
That's progress. When new discoveries and new advances, sometimes those new discoveries just take us beyond the former and amplify and improve the former. But usually when we talk about progressive knowledge, we're thinking terms of new information that corrects the old information. That is not what we mean by progressive revelation. We do not believe that the New Testament corrects the Old Testament. Jesus does not challenge the Old Testament. He'll challenge the Pharisees' understanding and interpretation of the Old Testament, but He doesn't correct the Scriptures.
But what God does is He gives a piece of the puzzle, another piece of the puzzle. How much did Abraham understand of the person and work of Jesus? His understanding of the future promises of God was at best vague, shadowy, dim. But God just kept giving more and more information through the prophets about the identity of this Messiah who would come. And that expansion of revelation grew and grew until the decisive dimension of God's revelation came in the person of Jesus. Now, after having introduced the book of Hebrews by this statement of progressive revelation, now the author wants to tell us who is this Jesus who is the apex of revelation, who goes way beyond the prophets and Moses and angels and everybody else.
Who is He? This is what makes the book of Hebrews so vitally important for the Christian. If you are a Christian, the very name means that you belong to Christ, that Christ is not only your Savior, He is your Lord. He is the one you adore, you worship, you serve, you obey.
And so every Christian has to be hungry for a book that focuses on the identity of Christ. Who is this one who is the apex of revelation? Right here in these first three verses, let me just read verses two and three. Has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the worlds, who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had by Himself purged their sins, sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high. This is the introduction we get to Jesus. He's called the Son, and then after He's called the Son, just in these two verses, the author of Hebrews tells us seven crucial things about the Son.
Let me just mention them and then spend some time in more detail on some of the highlights. First of all, He is the heir of all things. Second of all, He is the one through whom the world was made. Third of all, He's called the brightness of God's glory. Fourth of all, the image of the divine person. Fifthly, that He is the one who upholds all things by the word of His power. Sixth of all, He made purification or purged our sins.
And seventh of all, He sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high. That's the gospel in a nutshell. There's enough contained in those two verses to keep you busy for the rest of your Christian life, trying to delve into all that is involved in those dimensions of the person and work of Christ. Those who speculate that Hebrews was written as an extended exposition on Psalm 110 can see it right here when Jesus is introduced, first of all, as the heir of all things. We will see it throughout the book how the Messiah, the Son of God, is sent, and the Father is well pleased with the Son.
This is my beloved Son. The Lord said to my Lord, sit thou at my right hand. And He gives to His Son what?
Dominion and power and honor and glory. And He makes Him as the Son of the Father, the heir of God. Do we find this elsewhere in the New Testament, beloved, that we rejoice in what?
That we are heirs of God, joint heirs with Christ. The only reason we receive any benefit at the hands of God is because God is pleased to give an inheritance to His Son, and He adopts us into that family with His Son, and the Son shares that inheritance with us. But He wouldn't have an inheritance to share with us unless, first of all, God designates His Son as the heir of all things.
And, of course, the author is going to labor. He doesn't give that to the angels. He doesn't give it to Moses.
He doesn't give it to the prophets. But the Son is made the heir of all things, second of all. The theme that we find frequently in the New Testament is that it is the Son through whom also God made the worlds. Isn't it interesting that the author of Hebrews begins his book by talking about Jesus as the creator of the world?
Who else does that? In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. In Him was life, and so on, and there's nothing made except that which was made through Him.
Does the Apostle Paul talk about Christ as the one in whom, by whom, and what? For whom all things are made? This is a theme that's central to the New Testament portrait of Jesus. Jesus Christ is the creator of the world. He is the instrument through whom God created the world. We spend so much time thinking about Jesus as Redeemer that we often overlook the fact that the one who redeems us is the one who created us, that the creator and the Redeemer are one and the same, that it's through the divine logos, through the second person of the Trinity, that God acts to create the world. So Jesus is not a johnny come lately to redemptive history. He was there in the beginning with the Father.
But that's just skating over the surface of those concepts so that I can spend a little more time on the next two that could occupy us for the next twelve weeks. Who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person. The Son of God is here described as the brightness of God's glory, the express image of His person. Here we have as high a Christology as we will find anywhere in the entire New Testament. It's interesting to me that if you look at the scholarship of the virgin Christian church in the first two centuries of Christian study, the theologians of the early centuries focused their attention on the opening verses of John's gospel. That concept of the logos just grasped their minds. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
Oh, can you imagine what that would do to philosophers and professional theologians? What do you mean, the Word was with God? And then the next statements say that the Word was God. When you say with, you're making a distinction between the logos and God.
And that distinction evaporates in the very next phrase, and the Word was God. The John's prologue both distinguishes the logos from God and identifies the logos with God. Now either the Apostle John has taken leave of his senses and is dabbling now in sheer irrationality and blatant contradictions, or he is revealing something to us about Christ, wherein he is teaching us that from one perspective we must distinguish the Son from the Father, and yet from another perspective we must understand that there is some kind of essential identity between them. Do you see how the early church was moving rapidly towards an irresistible conclusion that we call the Trinity, where we see the three persons of the Godhead, and we say that they are one in one respect, but they are distinctive in another respect. They are one in essence, one in being, one in substance.
They are three in person. And so the New Testament teaches us that we must approach Jesus and understand that there is some distinction between the Son and the Father. The New Testament makes that distinction, and yet at the same time Jesus is God. If he's not, then it would be blasphemous and idolatrous for us to worship him. Now that very clear distinction that we find in John's prologue is found here. He is the brightness of his glory, the express image of his person.
What the author of Hebrews is doing is exactly the same thing that John does. When he says that he's the brightness of the divine glory, he is making a statement that every Jew would understand and may be offended by to say that the Son is the brightness of the divine glory. Can there be any glory without brightness? Here he is making Jesus of the essence of the Father because it is the essence of God's glory to be bright.
Take away the brightness and you take away what? The glory. And for a Jew, the Jew understood Shekinah glory as an essential attribute of God that could not be communicated essentially to any creature. He's saying he's the brightness of his glory, the refulgence of God, God who dwells in light inaccessible, that light that radiates from the core of God's being. The brightness of that light, the brilliance of that light is the Son of God. Here we're seeing the deity of Christ.
Oh, again, what does John say? The Logos, the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth, and we beheld what? His glory. We saw it.
He doesn't say when or where, but I have to read in there. The only place that we know that John saw the glory of God in Jesus was on the Mount of Transfiguration when Jesus' raiment began to shine and His person was transfigured and the deity that had been hidden and concealed and kept under the wraps of His human nature broke through the veil. And those men saw the glory of God on the Mount of Transfiguration. It's the brightness of His glory, the express image of His person. Here they're talking about an indelible stamp that is the chief characteristic of its owner, that represents one. The way this express image of this person can be translated is that He is the exact representation.
Notice not the exact presentation, but the exact re-presentation, representation. That is to say, now this thing we find a distinction between the Father and the Son. The Son is not the Father, but the Son represents the Father. The Son bears the image of the Father perfectly. He is the very stamp of the Father. He's not the Father, but He represents the Father.
Now I have one minute left just to pass over some of these other things. Being the brightness of His glory, the express image of His person upholds all things by the word of His power. That word can also be translated authority. That everything in this universe hangs together by the word of Jesus. We haven't begun to grasp what that means to know that the One who is our Lord is not merely a spectator of the universe, but not one thing can happen in this universe apart from His authority. He just says the word, just as He did to the winds and to the sea, and it is so. These are just a few of the qualities of the Jesus who is set forth to us here in the book of Hebrews. The One who is our Lord is not merely a spectator of the universe.
Not one thing can happen in this universe apart from His authority. That was R.C. Sproul from his series Themes from Hebrews. You're listening to Renewing Your Mind on this Wednesday. I'm your host, Nathan W. Bingham. If you've been helped by Renewing Your Mind, one way you can support us is to leave a review on your preferred podcast platform or like and leave a comment on the Renewing Your Mind YouTube channel. Both of these simple things can have a significant impact on who these platforms show the podcast to. And did you know that when you log in to the free Ligonier app, any resource that you have purchased or donated to receive is available for you to stream and read. You can also add Themes from Hebrews to your personal digital library in the app and Dr. Sproul's overview of the entire Bible, Dust to Glory, when you donate today at renewingyourmind.org or by calling us at 800 435 4343. In addition to those digital resources being available in the app, we'll send you the Dust to Glory DVD set as well. Request this Bible study package when you use the link in the podcast show notes or donate at renewingyourmind.org.
Thank you for fueling this listener-supported outreach through your generosity. When Christians think of the book of Hebrews, we often think of the whole of faith or the roll call of faith. Tomorrow R.C. Sproul will consider these examples of faith and the call for us to endure. That's Thursday, here on Renewing Your Mind. .
