Hebrews 1:1-3

We are gonna be in the book of Hebrews.

Maybe you remember that um song from the 80s.

How many of you are old enough to remember that song?

There's a couple of you.

Come on.

Who's who sang that song?

No.

That was Janet Jackson.

What have you done for me lately, right?

You remember that phrase?

Janet Jackson, 1986, that song was released.

And uh I looked it up.

I entitled this uh sermon uh this morning as I was trying to figure out something uh fun to name it.

But I read the um the background on this story.

She she wrote this song, the lyrics of this song, right after her divorce from James DeBarge.

Um and she was going through a period where she just felt like the people that she had trusted failed her.

She was actually um kind of accosted on the street by a group of men, and her manager and her um kind of her team didn't come to her aid, and she just kind of stood up to them on her own.

And um while she was she so she was writing this song, What Have You Done For Me Lately, from this position of just angst and frustration.

And that is how many um people, that that is kind of the human experience that people fail us, and and there's that disappointment that oftentimes comes as we go through relationships or we go enter into a new job or we start a new school year, there's a sense of like, man, of just disappointment.

This didn't live up to its expectations.

But that's not the God of the Bible.

The God of the Bible is not somebody who has left us or forsaken us.

The God of the Bible is the one who didn't just speak once and then um uh withdraw, but he's the one who continues to speak and continues to work and continues to move.

We started the book of Hebrews last week, and there's a few things that we said about Hebrews.

One was who the author is.

Do you remember who the author is?

It's unknown, the Holy Spirit, right?

The Holy Spirit is the one who led some unknown character in the first century to write the book of Hebrews.

It seems like that person was related to Paul or was kind of swimming in the same circles theologically as Paul, um, but it's unlikely that it was Paul, the more you kind of look at the um the way that the arguments are made, it just doesn't read like a Paul letter.

And it was sent to who?

This one's easy because it's named after who it's sent to.

To the Hebrews.

It was sent to the Hebrews who were probably going through some season of persecution or had gone through a season of persecution, and were tempted to kind of leave Jesus the Messiah and just return back to Judaism.

And so the book of Hebrews has a number, about five different warnings that come up to people that are considering leaving Jesus and returning back to their Jewish roots.

We're going to look this morning at the first three verses, so let's read those together.

This is verse one.

It says this long ago, God spoke to our ancestors by the prophets at different times and in different ways.

In these last days, he is spoken to us by his son.

God has appointed him the heir of all things and made the universe through him.

The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact expression of his nature, sustaining all things by his powerful word.

After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high.

Now, there's some of you that are just learning how to read the Bible.

And so I just want to show you one key about my slides.

When I'm teaching on Sundays, there's these three little letters right here in the right-hand corner.

Do you see those, Bryce?

You see the little letters right there?

See those letters?

Yes, I know.

It's hiding behind the pole.

Those letters right there.

That's the this stands for the uh Christian Standard Bible version.

You sit back right down there.

The Bible you have is probably like the NIV or the NIV Junior Bible.

So the Bible was originally written, the New Testament was written in Greek, and then people who went to school and learned Greek translated it over to English so we can understand it.

So when Marvin was reading a minute ago and we were sitting and we were kind of following along, it wasn't word for word, but it was close.

So there's some really good English translations out there.

Right now, in this season of life, I'm reading the Christian Standard Bible version, which is like a modernization of the Hallman Christian Standard Bible or Christ uh Christian Standard Bible, I think that's what it was.

The NIV is a good translation that's out there.

The King James Version, if you like the old King James and the poetry of it, it's so poetic and beautiful, but sometimes it's hard to understand.

Um and then you have the new King James and the NASB.

Um, all of those go are moving us from the um original language into the Greek.

Is that a bird or is it is there, is there really like a bird in here, or is that like a text?

Or is that a no?

Oh, it's a it's a that's fine.

It's like I feel like I'm in a garden.

It's fine.

Yeah, Garden of Eden, yes.

So um this is one of those mornings I'm gonna get way off track.

I can already tell it.

Okay, so the um this is the Christian standard Bible version of the text.

Now, in the past, he says that God spoke through the prophet, he spoke to our ancestors.

Now, this is written to Jew Jews, right?

They're listening to this and they're reading.

It's like, oh, in the past, God spoke to our great great grandfathers by the prophets at different times in different ways.

So you think of like Isaac, or you think of Abraham, or you think of um Adam and Eve, and how God was speaking to these characters way back at the beginning.

God is a God who's been speaking to um humans for a long time, right?

From the very beginning.

And then he decided to speak specifically to Abraham and his descendants, and Israel was unique and special because they were the ones that had this relationship with God where God was giving them his word.

And so God spoke through the years through the prophets, but then he says this, it's it's changed.

Are you stuck?

Do you need help?

I know that's because it's a different version.

Can I explain that to you when we get home later on?

I'll show you, I'll show it to you in the Greek, and we'll we'll I'll explain it to you.

Just just read up the this one for right now.

So this one, it says, in these last days, so remember this is written in that first century.

In these last days, he's spoken to us by his son.

Who's he talking about when it's the son?

Who's that?

That's Jesus, right?

So the writer of Hebrews is saying, we have this beautiful history of God speaking to us as a people, but recently God has spoken to us by his son.

So the answer to Janet Jackson's song, What Have You Done for Me recently, is like, look, I spoke to you by my son.

I spoke to you by my son.

And so what we want to look at this morning is I want to give you seven things, seven things that are said in the text here about the Son.

Seven things.

First, he's the heir, he's the maker of the universe, he's the radiance of God's glory, he's the exact expression of God's nature, the sustainer by verbal command, he's the purifier of sins, and he's the one that ascended to the throne.

You ready?

So when we go into verse two, we begin to see that he's the heir and he's the maker.

He's the heir and he's the maker.

In these last days, he's spoken to us by his son, God, who's God the Father, has appointed him, being the Son, Jesus, heir of all things.

Now, how many things is that?

That's everything, right?

So this is the first quality that the writer of Hebrews wants us to see about Jesus, that he is the heir of all things.

Now, if you're Jewish, right?

Now put yourself now, not all you are Jewish, many of us are not Jewish, I'm not Jewish, but put yourself in the shoes of the Jewish reader.

Would you have a sense of lineage and heritage?

Some of us have like really strong, like, do any of you have like a family crest?

That's not many hands, so I'm taking that as a no.

I don't have a family crest either.

No.

But there is some people like you go over to Ireland and there's this like rich, like, I have a heritage, right?

I have this strong heritage that I'm proud of.

And the Jews, if anybody has a heritage to be proud of, it is the Jews because they received this special treatment from God, didn't they?

Like, we can't argue with it.

Like, God treated the Jewish people in a special way.

He gave them a promised land, he gave them the prophets, he gave them the Torah.

God wanted not to just rip off the rest of humanity, but he's like, I want to work in the world, and I'm gonna work through the Jewish people, and it's gonna be, it was supposed to be this like just overflowing work that you're gonna see my glory through through Israel.

So, um, if you are Jewish, you had this sense of like, look at all that God has done for us over the years.

Look at this wealthy heritage that we have.

But then he takes that language and he translates it over and he says that Jesus doesn't just inherit what the Jews inherit, but he inherits all things.

So there's this wonderful thing that you'd get if you're Jewish because you're inheriting this all the work that God's done in the past, and you're able to say, like, like Israel, this is my land that was given to us by God.

These are my commands, these are my prophecies.

But then Jesus comes and he just like steps onto the scene and he embodies that concept of inheritance.

And he's like, Yeah, maybe the Jews got this, which was pretty mind-blowing, and I'm kind of like envious of it.

But he's like, No, I'm the inheritor of all things.

It's this beautiful concept that was teased out through the nation of Israel.

But not only that, he says, Look, I'm the inheritor.

Like Jesus is the inheritor of all things, and then that beautiful phrase of being in Christ is what's given to us.

So when we become a follower of Jesus, we're hidden in Christ.

We we we are like joined to him, and what he gets, we get because we're a part of his family.

And so Jesus is the heir of all things.

We're gonna come back to these seven themes throughout the book.

So that's the first quality.

He's the heir of all things.

But not only is he the heir of all things, he made the universe.

The whole universe was made through him.

So the origin, the agent of creation was the Son.

Jesus created all things.

And so he's gonna get everything he made, in other words, right?

He is the one that wraps it up in the end.

The the uh third and fourth thing that we have, or first before we jump over the third and fourth thing, this theme picks up here, just the inheritance idea.

Remember when Jesus told this parable about um the uh the man who owned a farm and then lent it out to the tenants that would care for the farm, and they kept killing the the messengers.

It was uh it was a kind of a metaphor of the prophets that were coming to to speak to the the tenders and the caretakers of the farm.

And then they uh the owner of the farm sends his son, and the caretakers say, Um, look, this this is the heir.

Come, let's kill him and take his inheritance.

Jesus told through this parable and leaned heavily into he he understood this theme in a very real way.

Um let's go to the next one, which is radiance and expression.

This is the third and fourth um way that Jesus describes his role, or or that the writer of Hebrews describes his role.

The Son is the radiance of God's glory, the act exact expression of his nature, sustaining all things by his powerful word.

Let's just stop right there.

Radiance of God's glory.

In John 1.14, it says this the word became flesh, dwelt among us, we observed his glory, the glory as of the only Son, uh the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

Jesus is like the shining of God's glory, the radiance of God's glory.

Jesus embodied the glory of the Father.

Now again, who what is what is if you're Jewish, like and you think of glory, what are you thinking of?

You go back, go back to um early on in the story of Israel.

What is what would the glory of God mean?

You've got like the temple, right?

You've got even before the tabernacle, you have Sinai, where God's presence comes down on the top of the mountain, and you've got this like just shining out.

It's so shiny that Moses comes down from the mountain and his face is glowing.

Then you have the tabernacle that's set up, and the Levites build it and put it together, and then God's glory comes down upon that.

Uh, when the temple is built, Solomon dedicates the temple.

It says that a cloud fills the temple so much so that there's this sense that uh that you can't even, they can't even be present.

The priests fall down because of the glory that's there.

So in the Jewish mind, the glory of God has in a very real way been something that could be seen and felt in the past.

And yet Jesus comes on the scene and he is the embodiment of the glory of God.

He is, we observed, John says, we observed his glory, but it's the glory as of the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

But he's not just the glory of God, Jesus is also the exact expression of his nature.

The exact expression of his nature.

This idea comes from, have you ever, did you, when you were a kid, or I'll just tell you my experience, when I was a kid, somehow we ended up with this um uh set of wax and stamps.

And you could kind of seal, you could melt the wax onto an envelope and then steal it, seal it with a stamp.

Did any of you do that?

They still make them.

It's kind of fun.

It's a different kind of wax than a candle wax.

It's really hard, it adheres to the paper really well, and it looks kind of cool and old-fashioned, like I have a seal on my paper.

When you take that stamp and stick it into the melted wax and it hardens, and then you pull away the stamp, that what's left there is the exact expression of your stamp.

And that is where this word comes from, the exact expression of his nature.

Jesus, when we look at Jesus, when we hear about Jesus' works and his words during his time on earth and his second coming, it is the exact expression of God the Father.

In John 14, right after Jesus washes the disciples' feet, just hours before he's crucified, he says, um, Jesus said to uh Philip, who has just asked him to say, Philip has said, show us the Father, and Jesus responds and says, Have I been among you all this time?

Right?

For the last three years, have I not been doing all this ministry and you do not know me, Philip?

The one who has seen me has seen the Father.

How can you say, show us the Father?

Sounds like Jesus expected his disciples to connect the dots, right?

It sounds like Jesus had some high expectations and Philip is like falling short of those expectations.

He said, he goes on, he says, Don't you believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?

The words I speak to you, I do not speak on my own.

The Father who lives in me does his works.

So the very words that I'm speaking, the works that I'm doing, that is an expression, an exact expression of the Father.

So again, going back just to kind of set the framework and give and seat this within its context.

We're as a church going to study the book of Hebrews.

This is the first three verses in the book of Hebrews.

It's all gonna be about how Jesus is better than the elements of Judaism.

Those things are good.

Jesus is better, right?

Good, good, better, best.

Jesus is the best, right?

And um so the writer here is starting right off the bat with these seven qualities about Jesus the Son.

So far, we've seen that he is the heir, he's the maker of all things, he's the radiance and the expression of the Father.

The next thing that we see is that he is the sustainer by verbal command.

Sustainer by verbal command.

It says this the son is, and then it jumps down further in the verse, he's the sustaining, he's sustaining all things by his powerful word.

Did you hear the repeated phrase as we went through Psalm 29?

The voice of the Lord, the voice of the Lord, the voice of the Lord.

My favorite one of those is um uh Psalm 29, 5.

The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars, the Lord shatters the cedars of Lebanon.

The the Hebrews were very careful with their words.

They taught their kids to be very careful with the things that they would say, um, about honesty, about um being flippant, because as a part as a Jew and understanding the creation story, you saw that God created by commanding things to come into existence.

Let there be what?

Light, let there be a firmament, right?

Or or an expanse.

He commanded that there would be the um animals, right?

That there would be vegetation that would grow up out of the land.

All of this is God speaking and it's taking place.

So the God of the Bible speaks and it comes into being.

And so if you are Jewish, and we inherit, I think we ought to inherit that tradition, the sacredness of speech is rooted in this fact that God speaks and things happen.

God's word is powerful.

And that's why, so that's why as Christian, as followers of Jesus, that's why we don't just spend, you know, a year studying the Bible and then we're like, okay, well, let's move on to Tom Sawyer, and then we're gonna spend a year, you know, going chapter by chapter through Plato.

You know, it's like, no, we look at the Bible as the book that contains God's word, and God's word is more than just information that then we take and we're like, okay, God, I got the facts.

Now I'm going to let it impact my life.

No, we we believe that the word of God is active, right?

That's what we're going to see in a few weeks when we go through Hebrews.

It is living and active, able to do surgery on our hearts, able to deal with the inmost person, our inmost being.

In the prophets, it talks about, in in Hebrews, it talks about how the word of God is like a seed that can spring up and grow into something powerful.

In fact, Jesus riffed on that when he told the parable of the sower, right?

He said the sower sowed his seed out into the ground, and then there's an expectation of growth.

And when Jesus explains, The parable of the sower, what did he say?

He said, the seed is the word of God, right?

The seed is the word of God.

You think of a seed, how much potential is there?

Right?

It's ready to explode given the right environment.

And so God's word, the reason why we read God's word over and over and over again is because it is powerful, not just information like any other story, but it is able to accomplish crazy things.

So I love Psalm 29 and how God speaks, and literally the trees shatter.

The Lord shatters the cedars of Lebanon.

And here in the book of Hebrews, the writer says to this original audience and to us is that Jesus the Son is sustaining all things by his word.

So your body right now is held together by God commanding it to be held together.

The universe, I'm totally nerding out and enjoying the kind of the rolling pictures coming in from the James Webb telescope, which proudly has been built and still managed here in Baltimore, which is awesome.

Those pictures are just this what it does is it's giving us just a window into the universe, right?

And I see those pictures, and it's like God, Jesus' word is holding that together.

It is like that.

It's that cool, it's that big.

There was this one.

I'm totally off track here, but I just gotta say, I I looked at this one, you know, it's like it was named like the image of creation or something like that.

And it's it's the it looks like a cloud with these fingers that are going up.

And um just just type in like uh James Webb telescope images of creation or something like that.

And it's this classic image of it looks like dust, but they're little actual stars that are creating this.

And there's this little star, right, in the picture where it's like it looks like a bigger star than the other stars that are in the picture, but it's a star in a in a big picture.

The that little star is the size of the entire, our entire uh system, uh the Milky Way, the the our system that we're in.

And that's how big that one star is.

Isn't that crazy?

And Jesus is commanding it and holding it all together by his words.

So you'd think like if he had something to say, we would want to um actually uh spend some time reading it.

It's worth it.

I don't know what your experience of reading the Bible is like, but I would encourage you that like if God is able to do that with his word, even if sometimes you don't feel like you understand it or you can't remember what the Bible says or you don't fully understand it, it's like if this is his word, then wouldn't we want to give some time to it?

If it can create the universe, like what can it do in our own lives, right?

So, beautiful picture.

The last two here is that he's the purifier of sins and the one who ascended to the throne.

Purifier of sins and he ascended to the throne.

The Son, after making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high.

We know we know these things, because especially if you've been around the church for any length of time.

We're familiar with these themes.

Purification, it's this idea of being cleansed.

And the Hebrew reader would have read this word here, and they would have thought about the book of Leviticus where it talks about being clean or unclean, and not necessarily morally impure in Leviticus.

It's more of like you've been defiled.

Um, you know, when you go into like a hospital room, especially like an operating room, they have to put on special garments, they have to wash their hands in a special way, they wear masks because it's a sterile environment.

That was the idea in the book of Leviticus was that the um tabernacle was to be this sterile environment to give this idea that this is such a pure place for worshiping God, and anything that was unclean needed to go through a cleaning ceremony.

Um, even the priest, everything that came in had to go through a cleaning process.

And so when the writer here says, after making purification for sins, here he's using that same idea, the cleansing or to make clean.

But for us, it's to be made clean from our sins so that we can go and worship God.

Jesus took it upon himself to make us clean.

And believe me, I know having done enough ministry and had enough conversations, there are some people that struggle with a sense of being unclean, that they cannot come into church or they cannot enjoy a setting like this because for some reason they just think God can't make me clean from what I've done.

I had a conversation with a guy a while back in the Compassion Center and said, Hey, why don't you come and join us on a Sunday morning?

It doesn't matter if you're yet a Christian, you're still welcome to be with us and just hear what the Bible has to say.

And he said, I couldn't be in that setting because you don't know the things that I've done.

He was struggling with a sense of uncleanness.

But the reality is that Jesus, he took upon himself the purification of sins.

He knows our bad attitudes, he knows the thoughts that we've thought this week, he knows the things that we've done in secret, he knows the things that haunt us, and he has made us clean so that we can enter into the presence of God.

This is gonna be a big deal for the book of Hebrews.

This is what Hebrews is about, so that you can enjoy the presence of God.

Like the book of Hebrews is written to people who are thinking, like, well, maybe I'll just go back to Judaism.

You know, Jesus, I don't know about him.

And this guy who's writing Hebrews is like, look, you gotta understand, like, Jesus, he's made it possible for you to get access into the presence of God.

You don't need a priest to advocate on your behalf.

He has made it possible for you to be in the very holiest place in God's presence.

Remember at the end of Hebrews chapter 4, we're gonna be called upon, we're gonna be told to enter boldly into the presence before God, to the throne of his grace, to access grace in our time of need.

Hebrews 4 · chapter mention

You and I can't do that unless we have been made pure from our sins.

The seventh thing, the seventh quality here is this quality that he has sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high.

This is all about the ascension.

Forty days after Jesus is raised from the dead, he's with his disciples, and as he's talking, he just gets elevated like right up through the clouds.

And they're all standing there.

They're like, Where'd he go?

Where's Jesus?

And there's some angels that are like, What are you guys looking up in the clouds for?

He's gonna come back again, just like this, just like he went up, he's gonna come back.

But go into Jerusalem.

You need to wait for the promise of the Father, right?

They wait ten days and then the Holy Spirit's given to the church.

But Jesus, what did he do?

He took his rightful place in heaven.

He ascended up to heaven and took his rightful place of authority.

And we're all like, where'd you go, Jesus?

It was good to have you here, right?

Wouldn't it be nice?

We think, like, wouldn't it be nice if he was here?

But that's what he addressed the night before his crucifixion.

He said, I'm gonna send another in my place, the Holy Spirit.

What does the Holy Spirit do?

It makes it so that the presence of God is with us individually.

Not we it's like we're not in Israel right now.

We're not with, we're not there with um where Jesus is at in Jerusalem.

Like we can have access to God right here in Baltimore because Jesus went up to heaven and he sent the Spirit in his place.

So this seventh picture here, this seventh image is the fact that Jesus is in this position of authority at the right hand of the majesty on high.

So seven things.

Seven qualities.

He's the heir, he's the maker of the universe, the radiance of God's glory, the exact expression of God's nature, the sustainer by verbal command, the purifier of sins, the one who ascended to the throne.

That's who Jesus is.

That's what he has done recently.

I was um studying for this this week, and I went and I needed to walk from the compassion center over here down to get the mail.

And I was meditating on um these images, and they're mind-blowing.

I would encourage you this week, what do you do with this?

Like, so you have this, and it's like this is what Jesus is, but what about me?

Like, that's that's kind of that's how I work in my relationship with the Lord, is like, okay, that's great, but like what does that look like in my life today, on a Tuesday, when I'm walking to the post office?

And my own spiritual experience of meditating on these things was to just look at the cars going by and to look at the little restaurants that are, you know, kind of pop up and go away on the street, and going walking past Lemco and then walking past abandoned buildings, and just the different pieces of the three blocks that you you know have to get to, go across.

And it's like this is all leading to Jesus.

He's gonna inherit all this, he made all of this.

He is the one who just is in love with this place, he loves the people who live here, even with them completely like not think taking Jesus into account, he is absolutely in love with these people, and he's in love with us.

So, what do you do with this?

I would say this if you would spend just a couple minutes just meditating on who Jesus is rather than who you are, you'll find that it has immense wealth as you go through this week.

If you're in school, I I dare you, just sit around, look at your cafeteria, and just sit for a second and realize all everybody in that cafeteria this week is being sustained and held together because Jesus has commanded that they be held together.

They're not like spontaneously exploding in the cafeteria because Jesus has commanded, no, I want your atoms to hold together and for your cells to work and for your heart to keep pumping blood.

And are they gonna think about me?

No, but he's the one that is sustaining that very thing.

You're in your workplace, you're dealing with, we all in in work, you deal with different personalities.

Probably that's saying it very nicely, right?

You're dealing with different personalities, but the people that you're interacting with this week are people that Jesus loves deeply and wants to radiate the glory of God to and wants to be known by them.

He loves them, he wants to purify them from their sins, their bad attitudes.

So will you, with these Hebrew readers that took this passage, will you take and carry the person of Jesus into this week?

Lord, we um thank you for sending your son and a better answer.

Lord, you did amazing things.

We love the stories about um Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, and they're amazing stories, but that led to Jesus, and we're so grateful that we live on this side of history, um, inheriting all of the beautiful work that Jesus did on the cross.

God, you know that our life is mundane, like tomorrow, driving around in the cars and going on buses and going to school and interacting with friends, there's a just a um a normalness, a granular, grainy human nature or humanness to our existence.

And um God, we just give you permission to like break in the midst of that and to speak to us by your spirit.

We ask that um that you would um reveal yourself afresh to us this week.

Um we thank you.

Thank you that we get to take communion now um together as a church family.

Amen.