NKJ Isaiah 41:10 Fear not, for I am
with you; Be not dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you, Yes,
I will help you, I will uphold you with My righteous
right hand.'
Open your Bibles to Hebrews 1. These first four verses of Hebrews have
got to be one of the most significant passages and elevated terminology in all
of the New Testament. The theology
that is here is overwhelming.
Every clause is loaded with meaning. It is sad today as I reflected on the world around us that
very few Christians and very few churches today take the time to comprehend all
that is going on in these first four verses. It demands a huge frame of reference of doctrine to be able
to appreciate the sublime message of this passage.
Corrected Translation: After God spoke in various forms and in
a variety of ways in time past to the fathers by means of the prophets,
The key idea here is that God spoke
in the Old Testament. The main
verb of the first two verses is in the second verse. God has spoken. This is the crucial idea to understanding
the whole framework of the author of Hebrews as he begins. The culminative
aorist indicates that the finality to the action. It is over with. God has
completed His revelation.
Unfortunately, the church throughout history has failed to truly
appreciate that, even though they understood that the canon was closed. The canon was not officially closed by
a church council until the Council of Trent that was a Catholic anti-Reformational council in the 16th century. They recognized that certain books were
canonical, but there never was a church council that said it was closed until
the counterreformation.
So down through church history there
has been a “leakage” of human viewpoint ideas into Christianity. The worst part of that took place in
the period from about 600 AD.
History gives us perspective about what is going on today. Things just aren’t new. Solomon said that there was nothing new
under the sun and that was 900 years before Christ. So we have had another 3,000 years of nothing new under the
sun. We have to have an
understanding of ideas. This is
one thing that I learned years ago in the study of the history of ideas. Ideas don’t just pop up. They may be new ideas to you, but these
ideas that suddenly gain popularity today are often wrapped in new guises or
new clothes and are not much different from something done 100 years ago or 200
years ago or 1,000 years ago. Studying these ideas gives us an understanding of
what is involved. Satan in his
subtly wraps these things up in very attractive garments. These ideas seem to
be very workable and positive. They attract a lot of people. So it is important
to understand the history of certain ideas and how they impacted the
generations. In the early
church, from 500 or 600 AD down to the reformation which began in 1517, you had
the dominance of the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic Church merged the Bible with church
tradition so that in Roman Catholic theology the Bible is a living
document. It sounds so
contemporary, doesn’t it with regard to the Constitution? It is always changing with the
interpretations of the popes and their theologians. The assault of Satan continues with ideas that come from the
outside. The tendency of almost every theological tradition down through church
history is to eventually lose integrity of the Scripture and begin to
assimilate Biblical truth with cultural ideas. This is how Satan perverts and dilutes the truth of
Scripture so that people give up the sufficiency of the faith. They begin to hear theses other
ideas. They sound good and become
popular. In many cases they
represent the heartbeat of the culture, but they are not Biblical. They may even get wrapped in Biblical
terminology. In American history
because we are so grounded in Puritan theology and Christianity, everyone wants
to claim Bible verses to support their position and to give themselves
legitimacy. Politicians on the extreme left quote Bible verses in context and
out of context. You wonder when it
was that they ever picked up a Bible.
It makes them popular. They
are trying to make themselves sound like they are in line with American
tradition. So you always have this
kind of leakage going on.
It is important to understand this
because we all deal with it at different levels all the time. Even if you have been a believer for a
long time, we often have to face it with our families and friends and
coworkers. People ask you
questions so you need a good framework.
If you are trying to witness to a
Roman Catholic, you must be sure that they understand the phrase “faith alone
in Christ ALONE”. That is the real issue. If they have understood what is taught
in Roman Catholicism, it is hard for them to understand that. I say that with experience. When I was working on my masters at St.
Thomas we had some very engaging conversations with some very well-trained
Catholic priests. We would try to
get them to understand justification by faith alone. When you talk to someone from a Roman Catholic background,
they are taught to trust the church, the sacraments, and various works because
it is an ongoing process, and to trust in Christ. You see Christ is not alone. To get them to understand that sometimes takes a lot of
work. You can ask them if they
believe that Christ is the one who will get them into heaven. They will say yes. But they have been
indoctrinated with Christ plus something else. You have to take some time on this issue. It may bother you. You may have trouble with it. But they have to understand that. They would say that they believe in
Christ died for their sins. Do
they believe that if they never take the sacraments they are still saved? Do they believe that if they never do
good works they are still saved?
That is where the rubber meets the road. So, we have to understand what is going on in the world
around us. That is just one example.
A couple of weeks ago there was a
man in Atlanta who was up on rape charges. He assaulted and killed the deputy sheriff that was guarding
him and then he escaped. He killed
several other people. He was
holding hostage this young woman.
It made the news that she was reading Rick Warren’s book “The Purpose
Driven Life.” This mentality has
gotten into Christianity. He is
one of the fathers of the church growth movement today. That church growth
movement has generated a number of methodologies for building churches that
have become very popular. One of
them is called the Seeker Service.
They take the Sunday morning service and move it to a more evangelistic
oriented service. The idea is to
make it friendly and comfortable so unbelievers can come and not be challenged
by doctrines like sin and judgment or anything like that. All you do is teach positive
things. You usually have contemporary
music. They have drums and
guitars. It is more entertainment
than it is worship. Why do you
need to know this? Because this sweeps everywhere.
There are three major Bible churches
in the Houston area that are fairly large. They have been strong centers of
Biblical teaching, but they have seen pastoral shifts in the last five
years. The pastors who have been
anchors for years have left. New
men have come in and compromised on methodology. As a result all of these congregations are in turmoil. The pressure comes in how to grow,
build and market a church.
Marketing and sales dominate.
You have seen the billboards.
Where did it come from?
This is rooted in trends that have gone on for 150 years.
There are three ideas I want to
emphasize. One is the power of
positive thinking. Everyone likes people who are positive and never talk
critically about anything.
Consequently you don’t learn to think. Then came a movement coined possibility thinking. Another movement is the positive confession
movement.
Most of you have been exposed to
this over the years. The positive
thinking movement was put forth in a book “The Power of Positive Thinking” by
Norman Vincent Peale. I think
Peale retired back in the 60’s. He
said his greatest spiritual moment was in a Shinto temple in Japan. It tells you that all religions go the
same way. That was Peale’s
orientation. You can’t ever say
that someone is wrong or that Jesus Christ is the exclusive way to heaven.
Peale’s most famous disciple is a
man named Robert Schuler. He has
the Crystal Cathedral and a lot of people know him. He wrote a book called “The Self Image, the New
Reformation”. He mailed a copy to
every pastor in America. He said
that the new reformation would take place if we realized that the issues had
changed. He said that talking
about sin offends people. So he
said that Christ died for one’s self-image. He died so that you can have a positive self-image. He said to tell people how wonderful
they are and their wonderful potential.
He said to always talk about how God loves you. He never talks about sin. So you get
the influence of the self-image thing.
From Peale you get the idea that if you think positively enough about
things you can channel energies and that will create your own reality. All of this stuff sort of merges.
The extreme is the positive
confession movement that if I make a positive confession and I really believe
it, then it will come true. They
have faith in faith. If I believe
it strong enough then it is going to happen. This has come down as the health and wealth gospel movement
or prosperity theology. Most of
this is what you find on the Christian television shows that you don’t
watch. This is how Satan always
changes a culture negatively.
Satan is the architect of what the Bible calls the world system. Worldliness is made up of the human
viewpoint ideas that dominate in a culture. They start off in some obscure group or someone has some
revelation or someone teaches something in the halls of academia. No one hears about it. It goes along for about a generation
and then it begins to catch on.
The next generation of academics or leaders picks it up on the idea and
teaches it as truth. Now it is
being taught at the seminary level or the undergraduate level by various
professors. They influence people and pastors. Then these men go out into the pulpits of the nation. They promulgate these ideas. People hear them and it sounds
good. They are not very
discerning. It may have some
common sense in it. It may
work. Satan cloaks these ideas to
sound appealing. And they work! Satan promotes things that work. He wants success. He is the original success man. These ideas float down.
About three days after the incident
with the man in Atlanta, Larry King had Robert Schuler on. Robert Schuler was
talking about one of his favorite students, a man he had mentored for
years. The man he had mentored for
years was Rick Warren. It plays
out in the purpose driven life.
There is one statement of committing you life to Christ. That is as close as he gets to the
gospel. There is no mention of
sin. There is no understanding of
any of the dynamics of the spiritual life whatsoever. So we have to teach discernment.
I learned this after Robert Schuler’s
book came out. I made some
comments without mentioning anyone’s name. Then some little old lady comes up and says I should be more
like Robert Schuler. We need to
mention names today because sheep are dumb. They can’t connect the dots.
Joel Osteen also claims Robert
Schuler mentored him and his father as well.
Where did these ideas come
from? Back around 1850 there was a
man named Finias Parker Quinby. He had a famous disciple by the name of
Mary Baker Patterson Glover Eddy.
She founded the Christian Science movement. It was the idea that bad health or sickness was all in your
mind. You just had to believe that
you were well and you would be.
See how similar that is to positive thinking? The idea didn’t come from her. She got the idea from E. W. Kinyon. He flourished in the early part of the
20th century. He wrote
a whole bunch of books and had a very popular ministry in Pentecostal churches.
His positive thinking techniques that came from Finias
Parker Quinby and his school of metaphysics in Boston
came into Christianity. E. W. Kinyon rejected Christian Science teaching because there
wasn’t enough of the blood of Christ.
He meant that it didn’t have enough Christian terminology or Bible
verses. So he took Christian
Science teaching and cloaked it in more Biblical sounding terminology to create
this whole system. Kenneth Hagen
plagiarized E. W. Kinyon. Some of you have heard of him. He was out of Tulsa.
He influenced all of the major Pentecostal thinkers. As a congregation you need some idea of
where these things come from. They
borrowed ideas from outside of Scripture and cloaked them with Biblical
terminology and then inserted them into the Scripture as part of how to
interpret and understand the text and the Christian life. All of these ideas of human potential
entered in through these major movements.
They have impacted the church growth movement. They have impacted people like Rick Warren. They have impacted people like Joel
Osteen. This is the framework they are coming from. You won’t read any mention of sin in their books.
This is what happens when you don’t
believe clearly in the cessation of revelation. It is not just a matter of sitting out there like you
do. It is a matter of putting it
in seminaries and colleges. Ideas
just seep in. We haven’t created
leak proof institutions that can keep this out. Today people are more interested in a church that
operates on this mentality. This
is worldliness. It is the message
of the world. It assuages their
guilt complex about what they are doing.
They feel like it is Biblical.
We will feel this pressure as a local church. Many of the younger men have been influenced by this
thinking today. People want to be
told how great they are and that God loves them and have entertainment. They don’t want to think and read their
Bibles. They don’t want to realize
that they are sinners and that God has a gracious plan of salvation and a
gracious plan of recovery. The
goal is growth. He wants to take
you somewhere. He wants to
prepare you to rule and reign with Him.
I don’t know how anyone could teach
this in the shallow mentality that is around today. This is such rich language telling us all about what God is
doing in these days.
NKJ Hebrews 1:2 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;
We need to correct the translation
on this so let’s go through some exegesis. The phrase “in these last days” tells us that the Church Age
is understood overall as a period called the last days. The Jews had a threefold understanding
of history. This term referred to
the last stage of God’s outworking of history. It was a rudimentary dispensational view. It includes the Church Age as well as
the Tribulation. It is everything
between the cross and the realization of the kingdom of Christ when He
establishes it at the Second Coming.
There is a contrast between how God revealed Himself. In the last days it has come by the
Son. It is not ongoing. The timeframe is parallel to the
previous verse. We are now talking
about these times.
The main verb of the whole sentence
from 1:1 to 1:4 is the verb has spoken.
God is the subject. The
verb here is the aorist active indicative of the verb laleo. The verb means to speak. It is usually has to do with an overt speaking. It is vocalization not just something
that is thought. It is an overt
speaking. That God has
spoken. The consumative
aorist refers to a finished act.
It looks at an event in the past as being completed and finished. The idea of God speaking through His
Son is viewed as a completed and finished act. It is being completed by the
apostles. The Son never wrote
anything down. He did not have
someone recording for Him or keep a diary. He didn’t have someone taking notes. It was all handled through the doctrine
of inspiration of Scripture as God the Holy Spirit wrote through them after the
Son ascended to heaven.
“To us” refers to church age
believers.
“His” should not be there. Draw a line through it. There is no article with the noun. “By means of Son” is en plus the dative huios. It is the
instrumental of means. It is by
means of Son. There is no article
associated with the noun. The
writer emphasizes the quality of the noun, the superiority of Jesus
Christ. Without the article it
emphasizes the quality of the Son in contrast to the prophets. You have to understand something about
who the Son is.
When we come to a passage like
Hebrews 1:2 we have to ask which sonship is in view
here? What we are seeing is that
this is a messianic concept emphasizing His relationship. Remember he is
writing Jews and the fulfillment of the Son in light of these Old Testament
verses. Psalm 2 is the first verse
quoted. It is tremendous to see how
all of this ties together and lays a foundation for what Jesus Christ is doing
in the church today.
The use of the title without the
definite article emphasized the quality of the Son. Then we have a series of relative clauses that follow this
telling us about the Son and why He is so significant. We see why it is that everything that
preceded the Son is viewed as a lesser category. Once the Son is on the scene,
what is revealed through Him surpasses and supercedes
everything and is therefore an ending to revelation.
The verb appointed is the aorist
active indicative of the Greek verb tithemi. It
means to set, place, establish, appoint, assign, or appoint to a position. This
is a technical term. God the
Father is the subject of the verb. He appoints the Son to a particular position
demonstrating the authority of the Father over the Son.
Why is that important? If we are going to understand authority
relationships and if you are going to understand freedom, then you have to
understand the trinity. The
trinity is not just an abstract doctrine.
It represents ultimate reality.
When you back beyond creation and when you go back beyond the angels,
what you have that existed for eternity was a triune God of three distinct
persons of one essence. They are all eternal. They are equal in their essence. The Father is not superior to the Son. The Son is not inferior to the
Father. The Holy Spirit is not
inferior to the others. They are
equal in their essence/person and being but yet there is an authority
structure. It means that the
authority structure doesn’t say anything about the quality or essence of a
person. It means you can work for
a boss who is a loser and it doesn’t mean that he is better or worse than
you. It means that you can be in
the military and be under an officer that is not very qualified for his
position and it doesn’t mean that he is a better person that you are. It means that as a woman you can be in
a marriage and be brighter and smarter and more positive spiritually than your
husband and it doesn’t mean that you are better than him or he is better than
you because he is the one God put in authority. That is what we don’t understand in this country. We want to make the person in authority
better than the others. Failure to
understand this is at the core of the feminist movement. It subverts and reverses the authority
structure within society and lays the groundwork for internal collapse and
internal rot. Families fall apart.
Marriages fall apart.
Churches fall apart because you subvert the basic authority structure
that God designed. The radical
feminist movement says that is you are equal and you can’t be under the
authority of anyone. They think
that you ought to be able to do everything the other person can. Since the parts are interchangeable,
you end up with same sex unions.
All of this goes back to understanding the trinity.
It affects how you understand social
structures. Only on the basis of a
Trinitarian God can you have total equality of the parts where the whole also
has significance and importance.
In a nation you have the importance of the nation as a whole. In a totalitarian government the one is
more important that the parts. Or,
the parts can be more important than the whole. You end up in anarchy and fragmentation. Those are the two extremes. The Trinitarian concept says you can
hold both at the same time. You
can give real value to the significance of each individual citizen without the
state absorbing and taking away power and authority from the parts. On the other hand the parts can give
real authority to a centralized government. The Founding Fathers understood these distinctions. It came out of their understanding of
the trinity. The Puritans had some
great insights.
We see at this juncture an
introduction of the role of the Son within the framework of the trinity. The Father is in authority. He appoints the Son to be the heir of
all things. That is the word kleronomos. The concept of inheritance in the
Scripture going back to the Old Testament is the idea of possession and
ownership. At one time He
appointed Christ as the owner, the possessor. He has the title deed to the universe. He doesn’t have it yet. He has been designated as the owner of
the universe. It is not activated
until He establishes His kingdom at the Second Coming. This is foundational to understanding
what is going on with the church in the Church Age. Not only are we heirs of God but if we advance in the
spiritual life so that we are the over comers and the metachoi, then we are being
prepared to be joint heirs with Christ to rule and reign with Him as priests
and kings in the millennial kingdom.
All of that is embedded in that one phrase. Christ is the heir of all things.
It is through the Son that He made
the worlds. It is not just
worlds. This is dia plus the
genitive of intermediate agency of ainos. God the Father used the Son as an intermediate
agent. The Son constructs
history. The Greek word ainos is in the
plural form so it means ages not worlds.
This is saying that God has spoken to us by His Son. He is the heir of all things. Through Him He laid out the
dispensations.
All of this is part of a magnificent
plan that God has constructed.
With the absolute chaos that entered the universe when sin entered the
universe it was like a massive fragmentation. Adam’s sin disrupted and distorted everything in the
universe. Planet earth is the
centerpiece. When Christ comes and
pays the price for sin on the cross, this lays the foundation for pulling
everything back together. When He
is elevated to the right hand of God the Father at the ascension, He is decreed
to be the Son and is given the title deed to the earth. This is a decree that is made. How do you know this?
In Revelation 4 and 5 there is a
scene in heaven. John sees the
angels who are looking for someone worthy to open a scroll. What is the scroll? The scroll is the title deed to the
earth. Jesus is worthy to open it
and activate it. That brings all
the judgments that culminate in the Second Coming. He returns and establishes the kingdom. It reverberates through the universe. It is the final pulling back
together of everything that fell apart when Adam sinned. It is a magnificent plan. We have to understand the ascension and
session. That is what the writer
is dealing with.
That is a taste of what is coming.