Hebrews Lesson 13 May 19, 2005
NKJ Acts
We continue our study in
Hebrews 1. We will briefly review the
first 3 verses.
Corrected translation of
Hebrews 1
Vs 1 After God spoke in a variety of fragments and in
various forms in time past to the fathers by means of the prophets
Vs 2 He has in these last days spoken to us by means of
His Son who He has appointed the heir of all things; through whom also He made
the ages
Vs. 3 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 our sins, sat down at the right hand of the majesty on
high
Vs. 4 having become so much better than the angels as He
has by inheritance obtained a name more excellent name than they.
The first verse focuses on
Old Testament revelation that was partial and inferior to that which comes
during the Church Age.
The second verse teaches the
superiority of the revelation through the incarnate second person of the
trinity.
That is all one sentence in
the Greek and we have to take it apart.
If you look at it grammatically and syntactically, the main verb is in
verse 2. The main clause is “He has
spoken to us by His Son.” There is a
break that takes place in verse 2 after the dative of Son. Everything else in the rest of verse 2 down
through verse 4 talks about the Son. Verses 2b – 4 are subordinate to the main
verb but they all deal with the same subject.
So the subject shifts. In verses 1-2b the subject is God speaking to us
by His Son. From 2b-4 the focus is on
the Son and the quality of the Son and what the Son is doing in His present
ministry, His qualification for His present ministry, and what He is doing in
His present session. As I pointed out
when we began our study of Hebrews, the main theme focuses on the present
session of the Son and its significance for the believer in the present Church
Age in terms of your experiential spiritual growth and your future destiny. It
is unpacking the significance of the session.
This is something that I find is too often limited in theologies or
Bible teaching or in exploration of the book of Hebrews. People focus on the priesthood of Christ.
That is correct but we must pursue it.
Various writers have done some quality work in this area in recent years
(“Reign of the Servant Kings” by Joseph Dillow), but there is so much more that
we can uncover related to what is happening in terms of the present
session.
The ascension and session of
Christ is the foundation for understanding this passage. The more you think about what happens in
Hebrews and how heavily the writer of Hebrews relies upon certain Old Testament
passages like Psalm 110.
NKJ Psalm 110:1 A
Psalm of David. The LORD said to my Lord, "Sit at My right hand, Till I
make Your enemies Your footstool."
In Psalm 2:8 the Son is to
wait for His inheritance.
NKJ Psalm 2:8 Ask
of Me, and I will give You The nations for Your inheritance, And
the ends of the earth for Your possession.
Then we have Daniel 7 that
pictures the successive kingdoms that will dominate Gentile history from the
Babylonian kingdom to the
Someone asked me an
interesting question the other day. They
had apparently not paid attention in Bible class. It is easy to miss the point. Sometimes people have missed the point that
the hypostatic union is a permanent, present and future status for the Lord
Jesus Christ. It began at the
incarnation. He never stops being true
humanity. This is related to the fact
that when He returns at the Second Advent to take ownership of the inheritance
and to rule the nations with the rod of iron according to Psalm 2:7 and
Revelation 2 where He comes to rule with a rod of iron that He comes as the Son
of Man, not as the Son of God. The term
Son of Man clearly designates humanity.
When He comes to reign, He comes as the Son of David. So He is still human. He is the Son of David, sitting on David’s
throne ruling as part of David’s family.
The prophecies of the Old Testament say that this is forever. He
guaranteed that someone from David would sit on David’s throne and would rule
forever. This indicates that this isn’t
something that just extends through the
The
We will be doing a basic
doctrine series that we will be able to use in witnessing and challenging new
believers. The preparation of the people
here is far beyond most churches. The
study that you have had and the preparation that you have had is far beyond
what you get in 99.9% of the churches.
At the top of its game Dallas Seminary was producing the highest
qualified men in all of church history.
I am convinced of that. Sometimes
we don’t realize the quality we have until years later. After years of being in the ministry I
realize that 99.9% of the other pastors in this country don’t even have a clue
as to the education that was being provided at Dallas Seminary in terms of the
intensification that we had. If you were
to put it into a military analogy you would have to say that Dallas Seminary
was cranking out Special Forces. They
cranked out the cream of the cream of the crop.
Others can build a church in a year and go from 50 to 500 people but
people out of
The thing is that we live in
a culture of constant degradation of education.
We are in tremendous decline.
When many of us were growing up we still lived in an environment,
especially if you were in the Bible belt, where there was at least a loose
understanding of the Bible. I remember
one time when I was in junior high that the teacher expressed astonishment at
the fact that she told the Christmas story. It didn’t have anything to do with
the Bible but she mentioned Jesus. One
of the students didn’t know who Jesus was.
She was just astonished. My wife teaches third grade and she says half
of her students have never heard of Jesus.
She runs into this all the time.
We live in a civilization and culture today that is Biblically
ignorant. If you ask about Genesis or the
Gospel of John, they don’t know what you are talking about. They don’t know that these are individual
books of the Bible. They don’t know who
Jesus is. On the one hand we have a good
core group in this church that we are starting that has a college level
education in Bible doctrine yet we have a community to reach with the Word
where most people do not know basic Biblical terminology like redemption or
salvation. Young people coming up have
had no input from anything spiritual.
They are a blank slate. They
don’t have bad information; they have no information. It is like an old one room school house were
you have 14 or 15 year old kids at one level and you bring in kindergarteners
and first graders and you have to teach both at the same time.
So we will go back and do a
basic study. I suspect that there will
be a few things that some of the old hands are going to discover as new. Another reason I want to do it is that it
will also be an explanation of our doctrinal statement. When people come and want to be a member of
the church we can say that this is what we believe. Most people don’t know how to read a
doctrinal statement. They look at it and
say that they don’t find anything offensive.
The next thing you know some issue comes up in the congregation and
everyone is upset. Then one day they
realize what a doctrinal statement means.
So I will go through the doctrinal statement as I go through this basic
series. I will try to tie it into a
little more cultural relevancy so that it will be something we can all use in
witnessing and challenging new believers to an understanding that there is a
higher level of teaching with more spiritual nourishment than what they may be
used to.
Let’s look at the context in
verse 3. To do that, we have to look at
the structure. Structure in Scriptural
studies often tells us what the writer is emphasizing. What we have in this structure is what we
call a chiasm. In the Latin the word is chiasmus.
This is a way of structuring your topic so that you emphasize certain
things. Remember in the ancient world
they didn’t have boldface type or italics or a lot of things we use to bring
out emphasis. They did it all through
grammar and literary arrangement. A concept of chiasm comes from the Greek
letter chi. It looks like an X. If you
have five points, they are arranged as follow.
A
B
C
B’
A’
C is followed by B’. B’ mirrors B.
Then you have A’ that mirrors A.
It looks like one side of the letter X.
That is a chiasmus. If you think
of that one side of an X, what is it pointing to? It is pointing to the center, C. That is what the author is emphasizing. The center of the chiasmus construction is
emphasized. Whatever is in the center of
the chiasmus construction. This construction is used frequently. We have that construction in Hebrews 1:1-4
C’ This mirrors C. The Son’s redemptive work. 1:3c He purged or purified our .
sins. This is the Son’s
redemptive work
B’ This mirrors B as the Son as Messianic
King. He sits down and waits to be
given . His Kingdom. 1:3d He is decreed the Son but He doesn’t have the
kingdom yet.
A’ The Son is contrasted with the angels.
1:4 This mirrors the first statement.
This is the chiastic
structure of the first four verses of Hebrews. What is the centerpiece? The centerpiece is the Son’s three-fold
mediatorial relationship to God. This
foreshadows the theme of the whole book.
The whole book is going to unpack for us the significance of Christ’s
role as mediator and as high priest.
That is what He is doing right now at the session and why it is
significant for our spiritual life.
What is He doing? He is not just
our defender. He is doing that and that
is important. I am not diminishing
that. At the right hand of God He is our
defender. He prays for us. He is our High priest. There are many facets related to that, but
there is something else that He is doing.
He is also preparing us for that future position to rule and reign with
Him in the
Vs. 3 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 our sins, sat
down at the right hand of the Majesty on high
Beginning in the middle of
verse 2 we get into a series of 7 relative clauses that are going to define
Jesus Christ. In verse two we start with
an accusative relative. Then we have a
through whom. There we have an
instrumental case. But when we get into
verse 3, it shifts to a nominative case for the relative. The subject is now Jesus Christ. He is now the subject. That is what we are
talking about in verse 3 and verse 4. So
seven things are said about the Lord Jesus Christ beginning in the middle of
verse 2.
The first thing is that He is
the appointed heir. This focuses on the
future destiny. He is the appointed
heir.
The second thing that is
emphasized is that Jesus Christ made the ages. He designed and He upholds the
dispensations. The Greeks used the word
cosmos to indicate the physical material world.
As we noted at the end of verse 2 the word here is aion, the word
for the temporal world that includes the physical universe with an emphasis on
the organized progression through time.
What we are seeing here is the Lord Jesus Christ as the one through whom
He made the ages. He is pictured as the one who supervises the progression of
history through the ages. He is the
agent through whom God the Father created the physical universe as the
courtroom in which the dispensations are worked out as successive evidence in
the angelic trial. That is the implication here. It is like a courtroom scene or up on stage
in a theatre. It is being worked out progressively. If you want to use the theatrical analogy,
you are watching a play from one act to another act. If you think of a courtroom scene, you see
the gradual progressive presentation of evidence from one dispensation to
another ultimately resulting in the final conviction of Satan and the
vindication of God’s righteousness.
In verse 3 we get to the
center of this whole development. Brightness is how the New King James
translates it. I think the New American
Standard translates it radiance. We could
translate this as the radiant flashing forth of His glory.
Verse 3 also shifts in one
other way. Part of this is indicated by
the fact that you have a shift of in the relative pronoun. The grammar brings this out. Why is it that we have this accusative and
dative relative pronoun in verse 2 and then in verse 3 we shift to a
nominative? What happens structurally is
that we move from prose in verses 1 and 2 to poetry. In the middle of a verse
he makes this shift. That isn’t normal, is it?
What is happening is that as his mind is focusing on what God is doing
and who Jesus Christ is, in the midst of this he composes a hymn to express the
work of the Lord Jesus Christ. It moves
from pure prose into the structure of a hymn.
In essence he breaks into song in the midst of this sentence because he
is so overwhelmed with the significance of what God is doing through Jesus
Christ in history. We see that there is
a shift of subject from God in verses 1 and 2 to the Son in verse 3. There is a shift in relative pronoun from the
accusative to the nominative.
He brings in two vocabulary
words that are known as hapaxlegomenan.
It means that the word occurs only one time in the Bible. It is not standard Biblical vocabulary. When you see a verse loaded with “hapax” you
know that something is going on. The
word brightness and the word for express image are hapaxlegomenan. They are only used one time in the New
Testament.
Fourth, the writer at this
stage starts using participles instead of finite verbs. The participles are used without the
article.
Fifth, there is a rhythm of
words and a parallelism of ideas that is typical of songs. You see this also in the Psalms. There is also a structural similarity to
other hymns imbedded and quoted in other New Testament epistles. Verse 3 is virtually a hymn. Hymns are important. They aren’t just something you sing as a
tradition that you tack on to the beginning of a service. They are expressions of praise and theology
to God. If you look at Eph 5:19 which is
part of the sentence structure as Eph 5:18, it is followed by a series of
participles in the next four or five verses.
They express the characteristics of being filled by means of the Holy
Spirit. The verse that is expressed is
singing songs and hymns. This isn’t
something that is secondary that is just tacked on. It is part of the spiritual life of the
believer in being filled by means of God the Holy Spirit as we sing praises to
God. This happens. Paul does it.
Philippians 2, the kenosis passage, is a hymn. He just breaks out into a hymnal structure
when he is expressing this most profound doctrine in Philippians 2. It happens in a number of other places. We have to recognize that this indicates that
the fact that the writer at the time is overwhelmed with the magnificence of
the doctrine that he is expressing.
It begins with the nominative
singular relative pronoun who. In a
nominative case Jesus Christ now becomes the subject of the verse. He is
expressed as being. It is the present
active participle without an article. It emphasizes His present on-going reality. It is not that He became the brightness of
glory, but He is at His very nature.
This ties into John 1. The
participle is stronger for that on-going nature.
Brightness is the word apaugasma
meaning radiance or effulgence. The
passive sense is a simple reflection.
The early church fathers always understood that this word had to be
taken in the active sense. He is the
radiant flashing forth of the Father.
The active meaning of the noun has the idea of emitting brightness. The connotation here is that the Shekinah
glory of God, that visible glory that we see in the presence of God in the Old
Testament, radiated through Jesus Christ.
Just as the sunbeams come from the sun, so Jesus Christ expresses the
very nature of God. The passive idea
that some translations use which is simply reflection is like the sun and the
moon. The moon reflects the light of the
sun but the moon doesn’t tell us anything about the sun. But if it is the
radiation of the sun, the sunlight communicates everything about the sun. We
can learn from studying the sun. It is
not a reflection that would mean that the Son of God is less than God the
Father. But He is the radiation or the
expression or outflow or the radiant flashing forth of God’s glory.
Let’s remember the
context. What are we talking about in
this section? We have to go back to the
main clause. God has now spoken through His
Son. What are we talking about? We are talking about revelation. The subject here is how God reveals Himself through
the Son. The idea is not what went on in
eternity past. The idea is that in terms
of the Son being the revelation of the Father, He is the radiant flashing forth
of the Father. That is how His
revelatory work in the incarnation is being expressed. When He became incarnate, He is expressing
the glory of God through His very being. The focus is not on Christ in eternity
past as being full deity (of course that is true) but it is on His
communication of that at the incarnation. So this first phrase emphasizes that
the unity of the Son with the Father in His nature or essence as it was
expressed and continues to be expressed through the incarnation.
This word apaugasma with
the “ma” ending in the Greek emphasizes the content or the substance of the
action. So it is emphasizes the content
of that brightness. It refers to the
essence of God. That is what the term
glory relates to. It is the flashing
forth of His glory. The word in the Greek is doxes. It means weight or glory. It translates the Hebrew word kabodh. It has the basic meaning of weight or
something that is heavy. Remember in the
70’s the term “it is heavy”? That sums
it up. It is saying that God is
heavy. This is weighty stuff. It is serious significant matter. The word doxza in classical Greek had
a more shallow idea. It related to
something that was more of human opinion or something that was more
transient. When the translators of the
LXX used it to translate the Hebrew word kabodh, it shifted its meaning
from the vacillation of human conjecture to the certainty of objective reality
grounded in the character and the integrity of God. Doxza became a reference to divine
essence whether visible or invisible. We
tend to think of glory in terms of its visible visual manifestation, but the
glory of God is often expressed in Scripture in non-physical and non-visual
terms. This is part of the whole imagery that Jesus expresses in John 8:12.
NKJ John 8:12 Then
Jesus spoke to them again, saying, "I am the light of the world. He who
follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life."
NKJ John 1:14 And
the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as
of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.
“Word” is the word logos
and is used for the second person of the trinity.
The apostle John is one of
the three key disciples along with Peter and James on the Mt. of
Transfiguration. Jesus Christ was
suddenly transformed from His humanity and His glory was unveiled. All of sudden the flashing forth of His glory
is there. Peter sticks his foot in his
mouth. He sees Elijah and Moses are with
Him and wants to construct an altar to worship them. Jesus tells him to keep
his mouth shut and relax. But that is
the physical glory. But here John was on
the Mt. of Transfiguration and John never mentions it in the whole gospel of
John. When John talks the glory of Jesus
Christ as manifested in his gospel he talks about His character or essence of
God. He never mentions the physical,
visible, flashing forth of visible light.
He is always talking about the invisible essence. That is the core idea of the glory of
God.
NKJ 2 Corinthians 4:6 For it is the God who commanded light to shine out of darkness, who has
shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of
God in the face of Jesus Christ.
“Light out of darkness”
refers to creation. That is Genesis 1.
If Genesis 1 is allegory and
God didn’t command the light to shine out of the darkness, then what does that
do to the second part of the verse that talks about God shining in our
hearts. The second half of the verse is
rendered irrelevant and meaningless if God did not speak in Genesis 1:2. You can’t allegorize Genesis 1 without
destroying and eviscerating the gospel message of the New Testament.
The term Shekinah glory that
we often refer to as a breakdown of two different words – Shekinah and
glory. Shekinah comes from the Hebrew
word shakan that means to dwell.
It came into Greek as the verb skene that means to dwell or
create a temporary dwelling. That’s the
word we have in John 1:14.
NKJ John 1:14 And
the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as
of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.
He tabernacled among us. All of it goes back to Hebrew origin in shakan. The word glory means that which is heavy or
weighty. Shekinah glory means that
physical manifestation of the dwelling presence of God in the Holy of Holies in
the Old Testament. The word glory is the
common Biblical word that describes the theophany of God’s presence on the
earth.
NKJ Leviticus 9:23 And
Moses and Aaron went into the tabernacle of meeting, and came out and blessed
the people. Then the glory of the LORD appeared to all the people,
When they were in the Holy of
Holies there was a white glow on the Ark of the Covenant that indicated the
presence of God. It was there until the
conquest of the Southern Kingdom in 586 when Ezekiel saw the departure of the
Shekinah.
NKJ Numbers 14:10 And
all the congregation said to stone them with stones. Now the glory of the LORD
appeared in the tabernacle of meeting before all the children of Israel.
So they had this physical
manifestation of God over and over again.
People say today that if Christians would trust God we could have
miracles today. In some charismatic
movements, that has been quite popular. They believe that if Christian would
trust God and miracles were restored then more people would believe. Oh really!
That is what we saw with the Exodus generation, right? A people who were moving forward in the
spiritual life, saw miracles, saw the presence of God and heard the voice of
God. It really made a difference in
their spiritual lives, didn’t it? What
about during the time of Jesus? They saw
all kinds of miracles. It really made an impact on the Pharisees, didn’t
it? It is a matter of walking by faith
and not by sight.
NKJ Mark 9:3 His
clothes became shining, exceedingly white, like snow, such as no launderer on
earth can whiten them.
This is the light flashing
forth from His being.
NKJ Luke 2:32 A
light to bring revelation to the Gentiles, And the glory of Your people
Israel."
At the birth of Christ, He is
said to be a light bringing revelation to the gentiles. This reinforces the physical manifestation of
light and the glory of God.
NKJ John 17:5 "And
now, O Father, glorify Me together with Yourself, with the glory which I had
with You before the world was.
That indicates that there is
a shift in the manifestation of His glory.
During the incarnation it is limited and veiled. That’s part of what happened in the
kenosis. Jesus willingly limited the
expression of His divine attributes during the time of the incarnation to
accomplish the purposes of the incarnation.
John comments on the turning
the water into wine.
NKJ John 2:11 This
beginning of signs Jesus did in Cana of Galilee, and manifested His glory; and
His disciples believed in Him.
That is a different kind of
glory, isn’t it? It is not the glory of
His flashing forth. It is the glory of
His caring about people and their situation and meeting the needs of people at
the moment as He rebuked his mother.
Glory also refers to the
future kingdom.
NKJ Matthew 16:27 "For
the Son of Man will come in the glory of His Father with His angels, and then
He will reward each according to his works.
NKJ John 12:40 "He
has blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts, Lest they should see with their
eyes, Lest they should understand with their hearts and turn, So
that I should heal them." 41 These things Isaiah said when he
saw His glory and spoke of Him.
When did Isaiah see the glory
of Jesus Christ? Isaiah lived in the 7th
century BC. In Isaiah 6:3 and following
when he has a vision of the heavenly courtroom and the cherubim are singing
“Holy, Holy, Holy” he saw the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ.
The importance of this in
terms of verse 3 can’t be stressed enough.
Because what this is teaching is that Jesus Christ is the full essence
of God. He is the expression of the full
essence of God. In John 1 we read that
no man has seen the Father at any time. The
only begotten has explained Him. He is
the one who reveals him. This was
understood by the church fathers when they met at the famous Council of Nicaea
in 325 AD when they were wrangling about how to express the relationship of the
Son to the Father before the incarnation.
That was the first big question they had to address in the early
church. What was Christ before He
came? They had the New Testament. They knew He was God. They are not making up new doctrine. What they are trying to do is figure out how
to properly articulate what the Word of God says. If Jesus pre-existed and He is eternal God,
do you have two gods? How to you
articulate this? We understand the
trinity. We have the vocabulary for the
trinity that came out of Nicaea. If you
lived before Nicaea, it wouldn’t that simple.
They didn’t have the vocabulary and definitions.
The main figure was
Athanasious who was the Bishop of Alexandria.
He comments in his encyclical to the bishops of Egypt and Libya.
Who
does not see that brightness cannot be separated from the light, but that is by
nature proper to it and co-existed with it, and it is not produced after
it.
The Son’s brightness is one
with the light. You can’t separate them
into two different persons. This is what
he was driving for in the battle to defend the deity of Christ.
It is co-existent and
co-eternal. The Son must be full equal
deity with the Father. This is what he
was emphasizing.
Ambrose another church father
a little later in the century who was also a teacher of Agustin wrote the
following.
Think
not that there was ever a moment of time when God was without wisdom any more
than that there was ever a time when light was without radiance for where there
is light there is radiance and where there is radiance there is also light;
thus we cannot have a light without radiance nor radiance without light,
because both the light is in the radiance and the radiance is in the
light. Thus the Apostles taught us to
call the Son the “Radiance of the Father’s glory” for the Son is the radiance
of the Father’s light, co-eternal because of eternity of power inseparable by
unity of brightness.
To have the Son means you
have to have the radiation. To have the
radiant light means you have the Son.
They can’t be separated from one another.
The council said He was light
from Light. That is where this
terminology comes from. They are not
just making things up.
So we have made it through
the first phrase.
Literal Translation: He is the radiant flashing forth of His glory.