Hebrews
Lesson 9 April
14, 2005
NKJ Colossians 2:9 For in Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead
bodily;
We concluded last week looking at
the Sonships of Jesus Christ.
Hebrews 1:2
God who at various times and in
various ways spoke in time past through the fathers by means of prophets has in
these last days spoken to us by means of His Son.
We came to the word Son and we were
trying to identify the Sonship in view.
So we will do a quick review of the Sonships of Christ.
Hebrews 1:1-4 sets the stage for the
whole book of Hebrews. We have to
think our way through these four verses.
They are loaded. This is
one of the most profound statements in all of the New Testament. We have to think about each clause and
each word. It is just loaded with
implications about the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ. All of this is designed to lay the
foundation and set the stage for what the Lord is doing through Church Age
believers in this dispensation.
One of the difficulties that we run into as we get into all of this is
that these terms are so pregnant with meaning and most believers today are so
biblically ignorant that they read through this and do not get the impact of
what the writer is saying. We
don’t “feel” the impact of them.
These are extremely powerful statements being made here. They lay the foundation for everything
that is said in subsequent verses.
Corrected translation:
Vs. 1 After God spoke in various forms and in variety of
ways in time past to the fathers by means of the prophets
Vs. 2 has in these last days has spoken to us by means of
His Son
A temporal adverbial participle
begins the phrase. So it is
not “God spoke” because it is not the finite verb. It is a participle.
This is written to the Jewish
fathers by means of the prophets.
So there is a parallelism between what happened in times past in
contrast to today, these last days.
These last days covers the entire Church Age dispensation on into the
Tribulation and the Millennial Kingdom. There is a finality of revelation here indicated in
the culminative aorist.
The term “last days” does not just
refer to the final period or the end times when Jesus is about to return. It covers the whole period of the
Church Age because the return of Jesus at any moment is imminent. It could happen at any moment. We are always in the last days.
We are always in the final
generation. In fact Satan has no more clue than you or I as to when the Lord
will come back. What does
that mean? It means that in every
generation Satan has to have a man on the scene that could be the anti-Christ
and someone who could be the False Prophet. He has got to be ready to pull if off in every generation
because he doesn’t know when it is going to happen. That means there is some legitimacy to the speculation that
it could have been Charlemagne, Napoleon, Bismarck, Hitler, or Saddam Hussein. Any of these could have been a
potential anti-Christ. Satan
always had to be ready with somebody.
It wasn’t foolishness for Christians to look out and say that it was
so-and-so. We do not know and we won’t know. We are always in the last days. There is a finality of
revelation given to us. When we
looked at the exegesis of this last time we saw that the timing of this is in
the last days. That is in the
Church Age. Everything from the ascension of Christ on is covered in this
phrase, the last times or the last days.
The main verb “has spoken” is the
aorist active indicative of laleo. The culminative aorist emphasizes the
completion of the act or culmination of the act. His speaking is finished. God does the action of the verb. It is an indicative mood of reality.
The instrumental dative of huios is by means of Son. The word “His” is not in the
original. It is by means of
Son. There is no article. It is
anartharous meaning without the article.
The emphasis is on the quality or the nature of something. The emphasis is on the superior quality
of Son. We would say “the Son” and
make it extremely definite to communicate the quality and uniqueness of the
Son. We recognize that it has been
the role of the Son throughout history to reveal God the Father.
Note the order of these verses. They are in logical order to build a
case.
NKJ 1 Timothy 6:16 who alone has immortality, dwelling in unapproachable
light, whom no man has seen or can see, to whom be honor and everlasting power. Amen.
No one has ever seen God the
Father. No one saw Him in the Old
Testament. Adam did not see God
the Father. Enoch did not see God
the Father. Noah didn’t see God the
Father. Moses didn’t see God the
Father. No Old Testament person
ever saw God the Father. No human
being has ever seen God the Father.
NKJ Luke 10:22 "All things have been delivered to Me by My
Father, and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, and who the Father
is except the Son, and the one to
whom the Son wills to reveal Him."
No one knows who the Father is
except the Son. That is a profound
statement because what Jesus is saying is that the knowledge that the Father
has of Himself is on the same level as the knowledge He has of the Father. He has complete and exhaustive
knowledge of the Father just as the Father has complete and exhaustive
knowledge about Himself. It is a
profound and subtle claim to undiminished deity. He knows God the Father as
well as God the Father knows Him.
The point is that it is the Son’s
role to reveal the Father. The
point here is that the way we know the Father is by knowing the Son. Let me say that again. It is crucial to
understanding the whole aspect of the deity of Christ, a doctrine under such
assault today. You know God
because you know the Son. If you
know the Son, you know the Father.
If the Son isn’t fully God, then you don’t know God. If you don’t know the Son, you do not
know the Father. We are left in a
guessing game.
NKJ John 1:18 No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten
Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him.
The word for “declare” is Greek verb
exegeo. You know the English form as exegesis. The Son has exegeted the Father for
us. No one has seen God at any
time. It is affirmed again and
again in the Scripture. The only
way we can know God is to look at His Son. The Son is the complete representation of the Father.
NKJ John 5:37 "And the Father Himself, who sent Me, has testified of Me. You have neither heard His voice at
any time, nor seen His form.
This reaffirms once again the
principle that no one has seen God at any time. God is behind the scenes totally. It was pre-incarnate Christ that walked in the Garden of
Eden. It was the pre-incarnate
Christ that walked with Enoch. It
was the pre-incarnate Christ who gave the blueprint of the ark to Noah. It was
the pre-incarnate Christ who came to eat dinner with Abram in Genesis. It was pre-incarnate Christ who
appeared to Moses in the burning bush.
It was the pre-incarnate Christ who writes with His finger the Ten
Commandments. It was pre-incarnate Christ that appeared as the angel of the
Lord. It was the pre-incarnate
Christ that appeared as the Lord of Hosts. That means the Lord of the Armies. It was always the pre-incarnate
Christ. He absolutely exterminated
the armies of Sennacherib as they stood outside the walls of Jerusalem. God the Father does not appear in the
Old Testament. The Son appears
because it is His role in the trinity to reveal the Father.
NKJ John 12:45 "And he who sees Me sees
Him who sent Me.
Do you understand the impact of what
Jesus says? If you see Him, you
don’t need anything else to inform you about the Father. That is a profound
statement. Flip the statements. If Christ is not fully God, then we do
not know anything about God. We are
still in the dark. That is one
reason that the deity of Christ is so crucial. This was not something that later Christians decided was a
good idea. They didn’t gradually
grow and evolve in their worship of this man Jesus and end up at the Council of
Nicaea and attach deity to Jesus.
The deity of Christ is embedded profoundly in the New Testament and
grows out of the Old Testament.
NAS Isaiah 9:6 For a child will be born to us, a son will be given
to us; And the government will rest on His shoulders; And His name will be
called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace.
He is the one who comes forth from
the everlasting.
NAS Micah 5:2 " But as for you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, Too little to be among the clans of
Judah, From you One will go forth for Me to be ruler
in Israel. His goings forth are from long ago, From
the days of eternity."
So the Messiah is attributed in the
Old Testament with full deity.
As we get into that we have to
understand the importance of the deity of Christ. The early church recognized the principle that if you tamper
at all with the deity of Christ, then you destroy our ability to know God. If knowing Jesus is not the same as
knowing God, then we don’t know God.
The Son is no more significant a revelation of God than any other
prophet. You reduce Him.
This is what happens in Islam.
If Jesus is just another prophet like Mohammad, then we do not know God. God becomes unknowable.
To help us in our appreciation of
this we need to look at some things that happened in the early church. One of the first attempts to try to
explain the relationship of the Son to the Father was called subordinationism
or adoptionism. It is the idea
that Jesus was subordinate in His essence to the Father. He was sort of adopted as deity or
infused with deity. It was the
idea of dynamic monarchianism. Power was infused to Jesus, usually at
the time He was baptized by John the Baptist. It makes the Father God, but the Son and the Holy Spirit are
less that God. They are not fully
God. This is the view of
Arianism The same heresy
pops up throughout church history and is manifested today by Jehovah Witnesses. It is also evident in liberal
protestant theology.
In the period of history we have God
as eternal. Then at some point in time God infuses the human Jesus with
deity. At that point He becomes
the Christ. So He becomes a
derivative God. He is not fully
God. They say that Christ is
generated out of God the Father.
So He is not eternal. Then
sometime later He became incarnate.
That makes Christ just another creature. If He is just a creature, then we don’t know God. That is what came out of these early
discussions in the church. It is
the importance of the deity of Christ.
If we don’t have a fully divine Jesus then we can’t know God at
all. We are just wandering around
in the dark.
A second attempt to explain the
relationship of the Son to the Father is known as modalism. The easiest way to
think of this is masks or different modes of existence. Many have the idea that
He sometimes appears as the Son. Sometimes He appears as the Father. Sometimes He appears as the Holy
Spirit. In real modalism He never
appeared as two of them at the same time.
This becomes a problem in Gethsemane. If there is only one person and
one essence expressing Himself in different modes,
then who was Christ talking to in the garden of Gethsemane? Was He talking to
Himself or was He praying to God the Father? It was a failed attempt to explain the relationship of the
Son to the Father.
It wasn’t until the Council of
Nicaea in 325 that they first clearly articulated a theological definition of
the undiminished deity of Jesus Christ. Today people diminish this by saying
that Constantine ruled it. They say that Constantine enforced the decision
saying he was trying to unify his power in the Roman Empire. That betrays an
ignorance of what was going on at that time. He did call the council because there was so much inner
turmoil. Remember that you only had one church. There were no denominations, it
was just Christians. But, they were all fighting over whether Jesus had a
beginning or not. It caused a major disruption in the kingdom. It was worse
than the Democrats in the 1968 Chicago convention. They could not get along at
all. They had a council of all the bishops from all over the Roman Empire. They
got together with 10% followers of Arius, 10% followers of the bishop Alexander
of Alexandria and his student Saponaceous (they were fighting for an orthodox
view of Jesus Christ), and in between 80% of the people who never had a
clue. That is true in almost every
church meeting. This is why they
are called sheep. It never changes.
They articulated on of the finest
doctrinal expressions ever written in history.
We believe in one God the Father all
Governing, creator of all things visible and invisible; And in one Lord Jesus
Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father as only begotten, that is, from
the essence of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true
God, begotten not created, of the same essence as the Father, through whom all
things came into being, both in heaven and on earth; Who for us and for our
salvation came down and was incarnate becoming human. He suffered and on the
third day He rose, and ascended in to the heavens and He will come to judge
both the living and the dead.
And we believe in the Holy Spirit.
Note that it starts with the Father
and creation.
Then we get to the Lord Jesus
Christ.
The idea of begotten isn’t
birthing. It means that one is
always present in the other.
It is an eternal begotten.
That was the terminology they used. At some point human language reaches the boundary of being
able to explain the eternality and infinity of God.
God from God is the key phrase. He is not lesser deity. The Bible clearly affirms His full
deity.
The politicians of the day favored
Arianism because if he was right then it reduced His deity. He is just another
creature and that makes room for other gods. They could make everyone happy and still worship all of the
other gods. Jesus goes on par with
them. There was a political
maneuver at the time. Unbelievers
clearly understood the implications.
That is what they were pushing for. It allowed them to skirt around the
clear statements of the Bible and the exclusivity of the Scriptural
claims.
Arius said that God Himself was
unknowable and unexplainable to man.
That means you can’t know Him.
He makes Christ a mere creature.
He is not the same in essence.
He is not equal to the Father.
If the Father is invisible to the Son then you can’t know the
Father. You can only know the Son
but He is just a creature. Hebrews
1 argues that we start off with fragmentary revelation of the Old Testament,
but in the New Testament the Son gives full and complete revelation of
God. This is so powerful!
Jesus is to us a full, sufficient,
and complete revelation of who God is.
The Bible clearly affirms His deity.
NKJ Romans 9:5 of whom are the
fathers and from whom, according to the flesh, Christ came, who is over all, the eternally
blessed God. Amen.
NKJ 1 John 5:20 And we know that the Son of God has come and has given
us an understanding, that we may know Him who is true; and we are in Him who is
true, in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life.
“This” should be translated He. Jesus is fully God.
NKJ Colossians 2:9 For in Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead
bodily;
These are important verses. In the course of the next year you will
have the opportunity to witness.
Unbelievers will ask you how you know that Jesus is God. You can use these passages to show how
the Bible claims that He is fully God.
NKJ John 14:7 " If you had known Me, you would have known My
Father also; and from now on you know Him and have seen Him." 8 Philip
said to Him, "Lord, show us the Father, and it is sufficient for us. Jesus said to him, "Have I been with
you so long, and yet you have not known Me, Philip? He who has seen Me has seen the Father; so how can you say, “Show us the
Father”?
He has a conversation with Phillip
the night before He goes to the cross.
Phillip asks Him how to know the Father.
Jesus viewed Himself as completely
interchangeable with the Father.
Phillip is a little dense here.
It shows that you can be saved and
not know God. Most evangelicals
run around ask if we know Jesus.
They think they are asking if you are saved. The Bible recognizes that you can be saved just like Phillip
was and not know God. John says
that if you know the Father you keep His commandments. Lordship salvation people come along
and say that if you do not keep His commandments you are not saved. That is not what he is saying. If you don’t keep His commandments, you
don’t know God. They had met God.
NKJ Philippians
2:10 that at the name of Jesus every knee
should bow, of those in heaven, and of those on earth, and of those under the
earth,
NKJ Isaiah
45:22 "Look to Me, and be saved, All you ends
of the earth! For I am God, and there is no other. 23 I have
sworn by Myself; The word has gone out of My mouth in righteousness, And shall not return, That to Me every knee shall
bow, Every tongue shall take an oath.
That is what Paul is talking about
in Phil 2:10. He didn’t generate
that phrase out of thin air. He
relates the worship of Jesus to the worship of YHWH in the Old
Testament.
We also see that the titles given to
Christ are titles of God. One example is given to us in John 18:5. The Pharisees came to take Jesus to the
cross. The temple guards came out
and the Pharisees will arrest Him in the Garden of Gethsemane. They are confronted by the guards.
NKJ John 18:5 They
answered Him, "Jesus of Nazareth." Jesus said to them, "I am He." And Judas, who betrayed Him,
also stood with them. 6 Now when He said to them, "I am He," they drew back and fell to the
ground.
“He” should not be there. His answer I AM is a statement
of being God. YHWH is from the Hebrew verb hajah
which means I AM
THAT I AM. God was known by His name, I AM. He claims full deity. He says it with the authority of
deity. It was not loud or jarring
but it had the voice of the throne of God. In knocked them all to the ground. This
was tremendous expression of His deity.
No one spends any time talking about this. There was a whole cohort of Roman guards. Jesus utters these two words and they
are knocked out flat on their faces.
They must have wondered what happened. Then they dust themselves off and
move to arrest Him. It must have
been a phenomenal situation. He clearly claims to be God.
In the trinity the Son is equal to
the Father. There is an equality of essence, but there is also within the Godhead
a subordination of role. The Son says He can do nothing unless the Father gives
it to Him. So He is under the position
of authority. This gives a framework for understanding two divine institutions in
Scripture – the divine institution of marriage and the divine institution
of family. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are not a family. You don’t
have the Father and a Mother god. You have the Father, the Son and the Holy
Spirit. Within that framework there is an equality of person and a distinction
of role.
This is foundational to any thinking
about society whether the social group is as small as a marriage. The husband and wife are equal in
person. This is why they are enjoined to love one another. But there is also a subordination of
role within the family. The husband is the leader in the home. The wife is the one who is to follow
the leader. She was created to be
an assistant to the man. The
wife’s primary responsibility is to enhance the role of the man in the plan of
God and God’s calling in his life.
She is under the authority of the man. It does not mean that she is
inferior to him or any less capable or mentally insufficient. It just means
that she just has a different role to play than he does. There is an equality
of person because we are in the image and likeness of God.
The same thing may happen in the
family. You may have children that are very smart. You may have children that
are smarter than you are. Unfortunately some children think they are smarter than
you are, but they are not. There is an authority role there. But there is also
an equality of person because we are all created in the image and likeness of
God.
NKJ Genesis 1:26 Then God said, "Let Us make man in Our image,
according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea,
over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over
every creeping thing that creeps on the earth."
So they are both in the likeness of
God. Understanding the
relationship of father and son is a foundation for understanding any social
structure.
In a nation, the people are equal in
freedom. It is the foundation of
this country. We can have equal freedom for every individual. But there is an authority structure in
the nation. You have the authority of government. You have the authority of a
police officer. You have the authority of the courts. You respect the office of authority. It doesn’t mean that
the person on the bench or in the White House is any smarter than anybody else.
We are equally under the law. It
is only on the basis of this Trinitarian framework that we can think in terms
of a representative government and true freedom for the individual.
Think about a map and how the world
is laid out. Then think about all the nations that developed any concept of
freedom of the individual. It wasn’t in the Middle East. It wasn’t in Asia. It
didn’t develop in these countries.
It developed in those countries where there was an emphasis on Christianity
– Greece and in Europe.
Where did it go from there?
It came to the Western Hemisphere.
In pre-Columbian days you did not have that individual freedom for the
average person. Why? There is no basis for it in terms of
ultimate reality. Only the Bible gives us that. As Christianity developed after the Protestant Reformation,
the greatest expression of consistency was in the English speaking countries. The
influence of people like John Knox and other Puritan theologians in England
during the 16th and 17the centuries developed. Out all of this thinking, they laid the
foundation for understanding of individual freedom in the English speaking
countries. Then you go down in history to the American colonies and the War for
Independence. That is why Americans
have the greatest understanding and expression of freedom. Of course it has
eroded. The foundation is based on understanding the trinity. That is something
never taught in American any history classes.
Jesus Christ is fully God. His deity is reinforced by His position
as king.
NKJ Psalm 2:9 You shall
break them with a rod of iron; You shall dash them to pieces like a potter's
vessel.' "
When it is realized is in Ps
2:9. It is the expression of what
happens when Jesus comes back and defeats the rebellious nations at the Second
Coming.
“You” is Jesus Christ.
The rod of iron is His
authority. He will destroy the
nations. That comes from His
deity.
Back to Hebrews 1:2.
Corrected translation: After God spoke in various forms and in
various ways in time past to the fathers by means of the prophets has in these
last days has spoken to us by means of His Son
Now we have a
greater understanding of who the Son is and why He speaks through the Son. He is the complete and full expression of who God is.
It comes with that authority. It
is not a derivative authority. The subject of the verb is God. The verb is the
culminative aorist active indicative of tithemi.
The action of appointing Him occurred in the past. There is a difference
between an appointment and a realization. Just as Prince Charles is the crown
prince but he is not the king. So
Jesus is appointed the heir of all things but He does not take that possession
until His return at the Second Coming. The verb means to set in place, to
assign a place, to establish or to appoint to a position.
So we could translate this as
follows. God has in these last
days spoken to us by means of His Son whom He has established or appointed or
assigned a position as the heir of all things.
What does the word heir mean? Kleronomos
is one designated as a possessor or heir. We have to understand this idea of
inheritance. When we think of inheritance we think of someone dying and leaving
something. That does not capture the Biblical concept of inheritance. The
Biblical concept of inheritance has to do with possession or ownership.
When Jesus Christ is appointed heir
of all things, it points to a future reality. He is now appointed but the inheritance is yet future. This builds the idea in the reformation
church. This was one of many passages the Puritans would go to in order to
establish their economic philosophy. Wherever Christianity has gone there is
the concept of preparing for the future.
It always produced a culture that saved. The Puritan ethic of the 17th century England was
to save money. So you build wealth
and pass it on from one generation to another by saving money rather than just
consume. There was an accumulation of wealth that was used to finance inventors
and others that brought on the Industrial Revolution. The fact that the
Industrial Revolution came along at the end of the 1700’s was not
coincidental. Prior to that the
Puritan work ethic developed out of the Bible. The idea was to save for the
future.
The non-Christian idea is to
mortgage the future for the present. You spend today and hopefully somehow
things will take care of themselves in the future. You live for the big now. That
is what is happening in our culture. You can see the influence of this pagan
idea. Just live for the pleasure of the present.
The property of the father was to go to the daughters because he had no
son. Under the Mosaic Law the eldest son inherited. When there was no son, the daughters got the inheritance.
The Hebrew word nahala is the word
for inheritance, heritage, or possession.
The Mosaic Law recognized that if a man dies and he had no sons, the
ownership of the land passed to the daughters. They could not marry outside the
tribe. In this case the daughters had
to marry within the tribe. The idea was imbedded in the Mosaic Law to pass
property from one generation to the next. There was no gift or inheritance tax.
It is how wealth is built so you can build for the future. This is why
Christianity builds a savings oriented community unless they are living like
unbelievers because they don’t know anything about Proverbs or what the Bible
teaches about money. They get themselves in trouble.
NKJ Numbers 18:20 Then the LORD said to Aaron: "You shall have no inheritance in their land, nor
shall you have any portion among them; I am
your portion and your inheritance among the children of Israel.
NKJ Genesis 17:14 "And the uncircumcised male child, who is not circumcised in the
flesh of his foreskin, that person shall be cut off from his people; he has
broken My covenant."
NKJ Numbers 14:24 "But My servant Caleb, because he has a different spirit in him and
has followed Me fully, I will bring into the land
where he went, and his descendants shall inherit it.
NKJ Psalm 73:26 My flesh
and my heart fail; But God is the strength of my heart and my
portion forever.
NKJ Psalm 119:57 You are my portion, O LORD; I have said
that I would keep Your words
NKJ Psalm 142:5 I cried out to You, O LORD: I said, "You are my refuge, My
portion in the land of the living.
NKJ Romans 8:17 and if children, then heirs -- heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ,
if indeed we suffer with Him, that we
may also be glorified together.
The comma coming after Christ makes
it look like being heirs of God and joint heirs of Christ is synonymous. But
that is punctuation. There is no punctuation in the original Greek. Punctuation
is an interpretive decision.
If you are a child of God you will
be an heir of God. That is your guaranteed inheritance. And joint heirs with
Christ if we suffer with Him. Being an heir of God is part of the grace package
at salvation. It is not dependent
on anything. But you are an heir of Christ if you suffer with Him. You see it is conditioned on
something. It is not just belief
in Christ. It is living out your Christian life in the midst of suffering. We
will see why it was necessary for Jesus to suffer in the flesh. It lays the
foundation for what we go through in the Christian life. Suffering doesn’t have
to be cosmic. It can be living in the cosmic system with the sin nature.
We suffer with Him if we apply doctrine in the midst of temptation. This lays the foundation for understanding inheritance. It means possession. Christ becomes the heir of all things. He is designated that but He doesn’t become it yet.