Hebrews Lesson 14
May 26, 2005
NKJ Psalm 119:11 Your word I have hidden in
my heart, That I might not sin against You!
We are running
through these tremendous clauses that the writer of Hebrews packs one on top of
the other to talk about the unique person of the universe, the Lord Jesus
Christ.
Vs 1 After God spoke in a
variety of fragments in a variety of 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 whom He has appointed heir of all things through whom
also He made the ages
Right after he
says “His Son” we have noted that there is a shift. The first four verses
are one sentence. It has one subject, God. What happens after His Son is
the subject of the last 2 ½ verses from 2b-4. We have a shift with a
series of relative clauses, the subject of which is His Son. This is one
of the most significant passages on the person of the Lord Jesus Christ in all
of Scripture along with John 1 and Colossians 1. There are three passages
that related to Christology - Hebrews 1, Colossians 1 and John 1. This is
one of the most significant passages describing who Jesus is as fully God and
fully man.
The Son is
represented to us as the Son in hypostatic union. That is the thrust
here. It is not looking at Christ as simply the Son of God. But he is
looking at Him as the Son in hypostatic union because it was the Son in
hypostatic union after the incarnation who as part of His objective during the
First Advent was to reveal God the Father to man. That is always the
mission of the second person of the trinity.
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.
That includes
all of the Old Testament appearances. Those were
the pre-incarnate Son of God.
At the incarnation
we got the final word. It is the greatest possible revelation of God the
Father and His character to man.
He goes to the
end and then back to the beginning. The focus
here is on where we are headed in terms of our destiny. Our destiny in the
Church Age is inseparably linked to the Lord Jesus Christ. That is one
reason we study prophecy.
There are three
legitimate reasons to study prophecy.
had the invasion of
the Assyrians. What was going on when Jeremiah was prophesying? Now you have the Southern Kingdom was being assaulted by Nebuchadnezzer.
God was about to take them out under the fifth cycle of discipline. What
was happening in Ezekiel? He was a contemporary of Jeremiah and
Daniel. It was the same situation. Nebuchadnezzer
was on the horizon. A major conquest is about to take place. The people in
the land, God’s chosen people, are about to be taken into captivity. In
the midst of incredible adversity, where their whole world was about to be
wiped out and destroyed and when they were about to lose everything near and
dear to them, God is telling them about the future. Why? God is
saying that He has it under control. In the midst of an unstable world
that completely shatters around you, you need to understand that He is still in
control, that He is still going to bring about His plans and purposes for Israel
and for My chosen people and there is a future destiny
for you. So when we study prophecy it gives us tremendous comfort that when
thing are not going well in our own day-to-day life, we know how things are
going to end. We know that God is still in control and that His plan is
still being worked out. Prophecy gives us that understanding.
The Lord
through the Holy Spirit inspiring the writer of Hebrews says that He made the
ages. The idea is that He made the dispensations. It is the Lord
Jesus Christ who made the ages.
Last time we
got into the first couple of clauses that emphasize the deity of Christ.
Verse 3 Who being
the (brightness, flashing forth) radiance 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.
In the first
two phrases we get a nutshell Christology that emphasizes the full deity of
Lord Jesus Christ. He’s not a derivative deity. He’s not created
deity. He is full deity and is equal to God the Father.
We looked at
the structure of these four verses last time and I pointed out that they are in
the form of a chiasm. One reason that writers use a chiasm (They are used
very frequently in Scripture.) is to emphasize what is in the middle. In a
chiasm you have a mirror image between the first few lines and the last few
lines. There is a parallelism between the initial statements and the last
statements. What the writer is doing is using this structure to focus the
reader’s attention on what is in the middle.
A The Son contrasted
with the Old Testament prophets 1:1-2a
B The Son as Messianic Heir 1:2b
C The Son’s creative work 1:2c
D The Son’s three-fold mediatorial
relationship to God 1:3a b
C’ The Son’s redemptive work 1:3c
B’ The Son as Messianic King 1:3d
A’ The Son is
contrasted with angels 1:4
D is the
centerpiece.
The Son’s
redemptive work mirrors His creative work.
The Son as
Messianic King is contrasted to the Son as Messianic heir.
The Son
contrasted with angels is parallel to the Son contrasted with the prophets in
the first statement.
That focuses on
the first part of verse 3 and why it’s important.
The relative
pronoun that begins the sentence shifts to the nominative case indicating that
Christ is now the subject of the sentence.
“Being”
translates a present active participle from the verb eimi and indicates ongoing existence, the eternality of the Lord Jesus
Christ.
Two key words
are used at the beginning of this verse, brightness and the word charakter
translated express image. They are hapoxlagomina
in the New Testament. That means it is used one time and used very rarely
outside of the New Testament.
The word translated brightness in the NKJ should be
translated radiance or flashing forth. The word for glory is the word is doxes meaning
weight or glory. That word represents the essence of God.
Literal translation: Jesus Christ continues to be the flashing forth or radiance of
His essence.
That is as far
as we got last time.
The next clause
says that He is the express image of His person. The New American Standard
translates it the exact representation of His nature. It is the Greek word charakter (where
we get our word character) meaning an impression or a stamp. The word
itself refers to an engraved character or impress made by a dye or a
seal. It came to mean a characteristic trait or a distinctive mark.
It was used with reference to a special distinguishing peculiarity. It
has the idea of an exact reproduction. The use of this word emphasizes that
Jesus Christ is identical in essence to God the Father. The word was used
for a dye stamp used by the Greeks and Romans to imprint coins with an image on
a coin as they were minted. What was imprinted was an exact representation
of the dye itself. The point here could not be made any stronger in human
language that Jesus Christ is the exact representation of His nature. I
like the way the New American Standard translates that. The New King James
uses the word person. I don’t like that because when we talk about the
trinity we say the triune God exists as three persons in one essence. What
we are talking about here is that there is an identity of essence between the
Father and the Son, not the identity of person. They are distinct in their
person. They are personality. They are individuals.
The word translated nature is the familiar Greek word hupostasis from
which we get the word hypostatic. This is where the early church fathers
derived their vocabulary for explaining the union of humanity and deity in the
Lord Jesus Christ. The word hupostasis refers the
essence, substance or underlying nature of something. It’s essential or
basic structure. It is what makes something what it is as opposed to
something else. The statement is that Jesus is the exact representation of
the essence of deity. It talks about Him in the incarnation. The
writer is saying that the Son in incarnation is the flashing forth or
expression of the glory or essence of God. Then he comes back and says
almost the same thing again but in a slightly different way.
There can’t be
a stronger way to express the fact that the Lord Jesus Christ is undiminished
deity. This was not something that was manufactured by 300 theologians
that gathered together in 325 at the Council of Nicea
as acclaimed and popularized in recent years. The group of theologians
that met at Nicea was meeting to work on how they
articulated and how they understood what the Bible said about the deity and
humanity of Jesus Christ. They weren’t inventing this at the Council of Nicea. It is very clear from early church fathers like
Clement and Tertullian made clear statements that they believed in the full and
undiminished deity of the Lord Jesus Christ. So this was nothing
new.
The issue at Nicea was that if Jesus was full deity, how does He relate
to the Father? We say that we believe in one God. How are we going
to express this? It looks like we have two gods. That was one of the criticisms from the
pagan world at that time. It sounded like two gods to them. How do we put them
together?
So they wrestled
with this over the years. As they wrestled through this in the 2nd
and 3rd centuries, they came up with some screwball
interpretations. One was brought forth by a presbyter
from Alexandria, Egypt by the name of Arius. Arius said that God the Father
created Jesus Christ at some point in eternity past. He said that there
was a time when the Son was not. That was his famous catch phrase. We have
the same thing going on today. Every time some with a New World
translation comes and knocks on the front door of your house and it’s a Jehovah
Witness, that is the exact view that they hold.
They believe that at some point in eternity past God created Christ. He is God
but He is not the same as God the Father. That is the difference. We say that
the Son has same identical essence as God the Father. This is what the writer
of Hebrews is developing here.
The definition
of the hypostatic union came out of the Council of Nicea.
Definition: The hypostatic union describes the union of two natures, divine
and human, in the one person of Jesus Christ. These natures are
inseparably united without loss or mixture of separate identity, without loss
or transfer of properties or attributes, the union being personal and
eternal. Jesus is the undiminished deity and true humanity in one person
forever.
That means that
as they came together in the incarnation and were united, that unity is no
longer separable. It is no longer reversible. It is a permanent
unity. In that unity you have human nature and divine nature. There
is no loss of human characteristics or a loss divine
characteristics. He is not partially human and fully God. He
is not partially God and fully human. There is no loss of individual
attributes. He is fully God. He is fully man. There is no
mixture of the attributes. You haven’t put Him in a blender and mixed
these things up. He is not one nature and two persons. He is one person and two
natures.
His deity
doesn’t pick up human characteristics. They don’t leach in over there so
that deity is somehow diminished by humanity. Neither does humanity leach
over to His deity. We have trouble articulating this. We see Jesus do
certain things. He eats. Sometimes we say He did that in His
humanity. That is a bit difficult. This is not a multiple
personality. The whole person eats but that He hungers shows He is
human. That relates to His humanity. But the whole person hungers. That
is a difficult concept for us to get our mental fingers around. The whole
person suffers. He is one person. So when Jesus thirsts, that one
person thirsts. Deity can’t thirst so it doesn’t indicate anything about
His deity. There is this unity there.
There is the
same thing when we get into the next sentence that talks about Him being seated
at the right hand of God. The fact that He is seated indicates His
humanity. Deity doesn’t sit. It doesn’t have a physical body. That
He is seated at the right hand of the Father relates to His humanity. The
resurrection body is seated at the right hand of the Father. Deity is still
omnipresent. That is where we have difficulty. Our minds can only go
so far. We understand that Jesus was incarnate and that the little baby in
the manger that is crying and making all those little baby noises and is having
to learn how to speak and having to learn how to talk and is developing
physically. But at the same time that is going on with His humanity, that
same person that has now taken on a finite replication in the manger in His
deity He is holding the atoms together and He is holding the universe
together. That is the kind of thing that we can only go so far and we
start losing it. Don’t over think on it. But that is what that next
clause means.
It is a
personal union. He is not an impersonal force that has some how entered
into human history. He is a person. He is the second person of the trinity
that is joined with a human person so that a relationship is possible.
It is
eternal. That means it never stops. A thousand million years from now
Jesus Christ is still going to be in hypostatic union. We will be able to
walk up to the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ in heaven and feel the nail scars
and the scar in His side.
Will there be
anything in heaven from the physical universe? The only thing we know of
fore sure from this universe that will continue into the New Heavens and the
New Earth is going to be those scarred hands and feet and the scar in the
side. That is always going to be there. There will always be that
evidence in heaven of a fallen world even when all else has been erased. He is
united together in one person forever.
This is how the
church fathers at the Council of Nicea articulated
the Nicene Creed.
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.
Notice that
they start with God and not the Lord Jesus Christ. They emphasize first
His sovereignty (He is the father of all governing) and second that He is the
creator. He created all things visible and invisible. It doesn’t
start with Jesus Christ. That is the issue. We believe in one God
– not two gods, not three gods, one God.
Now we have to
define what we mean by the Son of God. The Son of God means that Jesus
Christ comes eternally out of God the Father. There is that eternal
relationship there. He is the eternal radiance or flashing forth of God
the Father.
I pointed out
last time that when we think about the radiance of flashing forth that it is
like the rays of the sun coming out from the sun. You can’t separate it from
the sun. If you cut off the rays you cut of the light. If you cut off
the light you cut of the rays. They are inseparably united. So this
is the image that is behind this phrase. They understood Hebrews
1:3. They distinguished the concept of being begotten from being
birthed. It doesn’t imply a beginning. It implies a relationship and
an eternal procession. He is begotten not created.
They fought
over that terminology. The word translated “same essence” was the word homoousias. The
other word they wanted to use was homoiousias. The difference is the little letter we
call “i”. In the Greek it is iota. Edward Gibbon
who wrote “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”
did not like Christianity. He was very anti-Christian. He said that
all they did was argue about the use of these two words and it did not make an
iota worth of difference. All your life you used this phrase and now you
know where that it came from. Ultimately everything is theological. At
least I like to think so. So they argued about that. It makes a
tremendous difference. Did Jesus have the same essence as the Father or is
He just like the Father – derivative essence? They determined that
He was of the same essence as God the Father. That is what the
Scripture teaches.
That was the
Nicene Creed. If you grew up in an Episcopal Church or some Presbyterian
Church or Roman Catholic Church you may have grown up reciting that on a
regular basis not having any idea what it really meant.
So Jesus is the
radiance, the flashing forth of His glory.
Upholding by
the Word of His power is the third thing that is said about Jesus at the center
or third part of the chiasm.
The word
translated upholding doesn’t simply mean sustaining it. That is the idea
in Col 1:16-17. Jesus Christ sustains the universe. Right now He is
holding everything together. That means that nothing mankind can do can
destroy the planet. We can’t pump enough hydro-fluoride carbons into the
atmosphere to destroy the planet. Jesus Christ is holding everything together. We
don’t have to worry about global warming. Jesus Christ controls the atmosphere
and the environment. But that is not what this is saying.
This is the
present active participle of the Greek verb phero. It doesn’t mean
simply to hold something as you might hold a heavy weight or hold something
together as if it might fall apart. It isn’t holding two or three
components together so that everything will continue to function. It has
the idea of carrying it along to its conclusion. So the concept is a
dynamic concept and not a static concept. He isn’t standing there holding
things together in one place. It has the idea of movement. The Son’s work
of upholding involves not only support but also movement. He is the one
who carries all things forward on their appointed course to their ultimate
destiny. It is another way to of talking about the fact that Jesus Christ
controls history. It is therefore parallel to the idea stated at the end of
verse 2 that He made the ages. He made the dispensations. It expands
on that idea saying that not only did He make the dispensations, but He is the one who is moving things progressively through
the dispensations to their ultimate and final resolution. There is not
only intelligent design in the universe but that intelligent design has a plan
and a purpose. The intelligent designer has created everything with a
destiny in mind. So we are going somewhere. It is not just random
events and random chance. When you encounter problems and difficulties and
adversity in life, it isn’t random. There is a plan and a
purpose. There is an intelligence. There is
a loving wisdom behind everything in history moving it in a particular direction
toward its resolution. The Jesus Christ is the one who is directly
involved as the second member of the trinity. He moves all things along by
the word of His power.
We have two
different words in Greek that are translated by the English term “word”.
The first is a word you may be more familiar with, logos, from which we get the word logic. It has the idea of a
thought, word, or reason. All of that is part of the meaning of logos. It
talks about the word as an abstract concept.
The word we
have here is rhema
speaks of a spoken or articulated word. It is not a word in the abstract
but it is a word that is spoken. It is the idea that we have in Genesis 1
that God spoke and things came into existence. He said, “Let there be
light,” and there was light.
Psalm 33:9 For He spoke, and it was done; He
commanded, and it stood fast.
Jesus Christ
carries things forward by His spoken word. He is directly involved in the
creation and the on-going maintenance of creation. This isn’t the picture
of the god of deism that is pictured as the watchmaker who builds the watch,
winds it, and sets it over on the shelf and goes to do something else as things
unwind. He is personally involved in the ongoing progression through time of
the creation. He is controlling it and directing it by the word of His
power.
The Greek word
for power is dunamis. It
indicates His power, His ability or His capacity. When God is the subject
of this noun, the focus is divine omnipotence. What actuates the power of
God is the spoken word, the spoken command of the Lord Jesus Christ. So we see
here that in this three-fold statement that is at the heart of the structure of
Hebrews 1:1-4 that Jesus is the one who is the radiance of God’s glory. He
is the exact representation of His character. And He is the one who is
upholding everything by the Word of His power. All of
that talks about His function as deity.
That is the
idea of the Day of Atonement. You don’t have to get three or four years of
Hebrew to figure that out.
NKJ 1 John 1:7 But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we
have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son
cleanses us from all sin.
NKJ 1 John 1:9 If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to
forgive us our sins and to cleanse us
from all unrighteousness.
What do those
two verses have in common? The idea of cleansing.
Now most of you
remember that a few years back a pastor came out that began to teach that you
didn’t have to confess your sins with I John 1:9. That isn’t an unusual
position. Among Christians there basically developed over the centuries 6
or 7 different models of sanctification. The problem is that six of those basic
approaches to the spiritual life are all based on the idea that you grow by
doing the right things and not doing the wrong things. Follow the
positive mandates of the Scripture and avoid the prohibitions and you’ll grow
as a Christian. But that is nothing more than pulling
yourself up by your own bootstraps. That is trying to mature by the flesh
– doing it by your own effort.
Paul slammed
the Galatians for this.
NKJ Galatians 3:3 Are you so foolish? Having begun in the Spirit, are
you now being made perfect by the flesh?
What were they
trying to do? They were trying to follow the Mosaic Law in order to
grow. That is what you have in most of the models of sanctification. It
includes Roman Catholic theology, Lutheran theology, Reformed theology,
holiness theology, Pentecostal theology, and dispensational Augustinian view of
sanctification.
In the early
80’s a book was written for seminary students where a different theologian from
each camp wrote on the subject and the other guys critiqued it. It is
great for pastors and theological students who are studying these things
because it helps you see the contrast between the different views. What
irritated me when this controversy went on about ten years ago is that the
people who were dropping confession were ignorant of this book.
Dr. Walvoord wrote an article called The Augustinian Dispensational View of Sanctification. When
that book came out I was in the doctoral program at Dallas Seminary and there
were doctoral students who said they didn’t know there was a distinct
dispensational view of the spiritual life. I don’t blame them because it
wasn’t taught. What distinguished the dispensational view of the spiritual
life from the others is the dynamic of confessing of your sins so that the Holy
Spirit can be recovered in His sanctifying ministry understanding that we need
to walk by the Spirit. But when we sin we walk by the flesh. There
has to be a recovery mechanism other than trusting that God is going to get me
back over there somehow. That’s I John 1:9. But then everyone got
hung up on the word confess. The issue isn’t confession. That’s the
mechanic. The issue is cleansing. That’s what you see that goes through
everything from before the Mosaic Law in the patriarchal period to the Mosaic
Law in the Church Age and even in the future generation in the Millennial
Kingdom when there is a restoration of the temple.
In the
millennium, there is a restoration of animal sacrifice but they are related to
sanctification not salvation. There are going to be people and priests
born in the Millennial Kingdom who have old sin natures. They will be born
in the Millennial Kingdom and will work in the temple. They will need a
process of ceremonial cleansing. That is why they will have ceremonial
sacrifices for ceremonial cleansing in the millennial temple. What is
pictured (I wrote a detailed scholarly article on this for Chafer’s journal to
demonstrate this.) is that in all the dispensations there is always a method of
cleansing from post salvation sins. It is pictured in the tabernacle, the
Mosaic Law, the temple and the future temple through the ceremonial
sacrifices.
The word that
is translated for atonement is the word kaphar. For years it was thought that the basic
idea was to cover. It was the idea of covering sin. When sin is
covered by sacrifice, then God was appeased. There is a correlation
between that concept and the concept of propitiation. The righteousness and
justice of God is satisfied when He looks at the sacrifice of Christ on the
cross. That idea is somewhat present here.
The Jews
translators used the word exilaskamai meaning to appease, propitiate, or to make
atonement. The LXX used the word kaphar. What is interesting is that in Exodus 30:10
where you also have a passage that deals with the Day of Atonement, the word
that they use for atonement is a different Greek word. The predominant
Greek word to translate atonement in the LXX isn’t exilaskamai; it
is katharismos. It
is cleansing. Recent studies have indicated that cognates to the Hebrew
word kaphar
that you find in the Acadian language indicate that the core meaning of kaphar is
cleansing, not covering. That is exactly what we have the writer of
Hebrews referencing here.
He by Himself
had made purification or cleansing for our sins.
There are two
types of cleansing in the Christian life:
What we are
talking about in verse 3 is that when Christ had by Himself made cleansing or
purification for our sins. When He finished it He sat down at the right
hand of the Majesty on high.
That introduces
the Doctrine of the Ascension and Session. I have been reviewing that for
the last four Sundays Country Bible Church in Brenham. We will review them
again. The concept of ascension and session is foundational to the book of
Hebrews. When we started I said that Hebrews was all about unpacking the
significance of the doctrine of the present session of Christ and its
significance for the believer’s future rule and reign with Him. So we’re
going to review the session and ascension. Don’t think that because you
have heard it once or twice that you have a clue. I have taught it 6 times
in two years. Every time I teach it I get new insight. It is an
extremely difficult thing to understand. I try to make it digestible for
folks because it pulls together so many different strands from the Old
Testament and New Testament. But it is so crucial to understand. The
only book in the New Testament that deals with the present session of Christ
and His high priesthood is Hebrews. It is foundational. Most people are lost
when they want to understand the real significance of Hebrews because they
don’t appreciate the significance of the present session of Christ.
We will start
there next time.