Hebrews 1:1-2 | Listen to the Son

This sermon was recorded at Faith Evangelical Free Church in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

Good morning.

Wonderful fall day to join together in opening the Word of God.

If you have a Bible with you this morning, or if you want to use the Pew Bible, I encourage you to open it to the Book of Hebrews, New Testament Book of Hebrews.

I heard a pastor describe the book of Hebrews one time as a sort of interactive sermon, where the whole point of the sermon is that the best thing is Jesus.

And so throughout the sermon of the book of Hebrews, the preacher would be saying something, and the implication would be, Jesus is better.

So the congregation would respond with Jesus.

Who's better?

The prophets or Jesus?

Jesus.

You get the point.

So all the way through the sermon, this idea would be heightened until at the very end the congregation is literally standing and shouting, Jesus! Because there's nothing better.

We're going to work our way, probably through the next year or so, in the book of Hebrews.

This morning I want to begin together with you in verses 1 and 2, just to set the stage for us.

Because this morning we're also working towards participating together, eating together the bread and the cup that reminds us of Christ's death, burial, and resurrection.

So we're building towards that this morning.

If you are our guest, we encourage you to participate in that with us if you are a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Because it's for those who believe.

We do that every second Sunday of the month.

If you're just not sure of where you stand with Christ, then as we get to that point, just let those elements pass by, and that's okay.

This morning, though, I want to focus on Hebrews chapter 1, verses 1 and 2.

Hebrews 1:1

And I need to make that clear because when the original writer, we don't know who he was.

Could have been Paul, could have been Luke, could have been Apollos.

I was talking with our pastoral staff this week and just deciding, you know what, I have to, I was convinced that it was Jude.

But I have to throw that out.

I can no longer believe that it was Jude.

I don't think it was Jude.

But that's beside the point.

That's just a freebie.

We don't know who wrote it.

But whoever wrote it, verses 1, 2, 3, and 4 are one long sentence.

So we're only going to cover a half of his sentence this morning.

But it is pivotal and foundational for everything that's going to come from it.

But before we look at the text, I want you to think about your home.

Maybe you own your home, maybe you live in an apartment.

But wherever you live, your location is filled with noise.

Even if you live alone, with no pets, your home is filled with noise.

There's the noise of the air conditioner, or maybe you turned on the furnace this morning.

There's the noise of water running or dripping.

There's your refrigerator cycling on and off.

Our homes are filled with kind of a constant hum of just ordinary activity.

Sometimes we notice it and our ears and minds take it in, but most of the time it doesn't even register, does it?

We're used to it.

It's ordinary, it's normal.

You notice it mostly when it stops.

And even then, it may take you a while to figure out what?

What's going on?

Something's not right, but I'm not quite sure what it is.

And you know, that's not a hearing problem necessarily.

You might need hearing aids, I don't know.

I do, but it's not necessarily a hearing problem if something in the humming background of your life shuts down and you don't notice it.

More likely, it's an attention problem.

And attention is more often a spiritual issue as well.

More than we care to admit.

Because it's easy for God's word and his spirit's work in our life to become background noise that we don't even register on a moment by moment or day-by-day basis.

As we begin the New Testament book of Hebrews this morning, it was written to people just like that.

Later on, the preacher who's preach writing this sermon and preaching it, most likely, kind of points his finger right in the face of his listeners and he says it very directly.

He says in Hebrews chapter 5, verse 11, listen, I have a lot to say to you.

Hebrews 5:11

But you've become dull of hearing.

That doesn't mean that they have problems hearing with their ears.

That means they're not attentive anymore.

They're not paying attention.

He doesn't say they've stopped believing.

He doesn't say they've become sinful and rebellious.

He says they've become inattentive, dull of hearing.

He says, you've stopped paying attention.

Imagine someone writing you a letter and saying, you've stopped paying attention to me.

That's what's happening here.

Again, we don't know who wrote the letter, but it was somebody who was highly trained in rhetoric and how to speak in a public way to gain attention and have people with him.

Hebrews was most likely written as a sermon to be preached at a gathering.

In fact, near the end of the book in Hebrews 13, verse 22, the author asks his readers to bear with him in a short, short, short exhortation.

Hebrews 13:22

It would probably be about an hour long.

The first hearers of this sermon were becoming inattentive.

In fact, some of them in chapter 10 had stopped coming to church.

So as a result, the preacher exhorts them to listen.

Now look at your Bible with me.

Hebrews chapter 1, beginning in verse 1.

Hebrews 1 · chapter mention

Long ago, long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to the fathers by the prophets.

But in these last days, he has spoken to us by his son, whom he appointed to be the heir of all things, and through whom he also created the world.

This Son, he says, is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power.

After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs.

Now, our focus this morning is on the first two verses.

Everything in this book, everything that it says over the next 13 chapters rests on what is said in verses 1 and 2.

And it's all very simple.

God has spoken.

So listen.

God has spoken.

So listen.

I want you to consider with me four characteristics of God speaking from these two verses.

And as we do it, I want to take you back first to the Gospels.

Remember that time that Jesus told a parable about a landowner who rented out his vineyard to a bunch of workers, and they would work the vineyard and they would grow the grapes and they would harvest the grapes and then they would probably crush the grapes into juice and they would sell that.

And the owner of the vineyard would then get his portion of the profit.

And so when it came time for the harvest, he sent his representative to the workers and they beat him.

They beat the messengers.

And then he sent another one, then another one.

And finally he says, I'm gonna send my son.

Maybe they'll listen to him.

Keep that in your mind as we work through this.

Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to the fathers.

The first attribute or characteristic of God speaking that we need to notice here is that God, God's people needed to listen to him when he spoke in the past.

Everything in these two verses hinges on a repeated verb.

God spoke.

If we don't get that, we don't get the rest of Hebrews.

God spoke.

And there's going to be a lot of Old Testament in the book of Hebrews.

Why is that?

Because in the Old Testament, God spoke.

In the New Testament, God spoke.

This sermon letter talks about many things.

It talks about angels, it talks about priests, it talks about covenants, it talks about people who lived a long time ago.

But before getting to any of that, the preacher here wants us to know something else.

He wants us to know God has spoken.

And he spoke many times and in many ways.

Now one element of God's speaking is explained here.

But another isn't spoken of much at all.

We're not told how God spoke.

Now we know that answer, or at least we can come up with some of the answers.

So, for example, Genesis tells us that God spoke in person with Adam and Eve in the garden.

He walked and talked with Adam in the garden, it says.

We know that God spoke directly to Moses on the mountaintop.

He spoke with Moses through a burning bush.

God communicated through dreams and visions.

We know many of the ways in which God spoke.

He spoke in all kinds of ways, but how God spoke is less important now than the people through whom he spoke.

We're told that God spoke to our fathers.

Now it doesn't say your fathers.

It doesn't say the fathers.

It says our fathers.

Right?

That's why it has that title to the Hebrews.

So these are Jewish background Christians.

But that doesn't mean that there aren't non-Jewish background Christians hearing this book.

That includes most of us.

What's happening here is that history and ethnic background are being set aside.

And the preacher is addressing the whole congregation.

It doesn't matter what kind of ethnic background you come from.

He says, these ancestors are your ancestors too.

He brings those who belong to Christ's church into the history of revelation and tells us, this is your history too.

You may not descend biologically from the fathers that he's talking about, but spiritually you do if you belong to Christ.

So it's to the prophets and it's, I'm sorry, it's to the fathers and by the prophets.

And those Old Testament prophets weren't merely tools that God used.

He was uniquely in them as he spoke, so that the prophets spoke as God spoke.

You can see this all throughout the book of Hebrews.

So for example, you'll see as we go on that God says in verse 7, of the angels he said.

Who said?

Well, look back at verse 5.

To the angels, God said.

And so you'll see sometimes in the book of Hebrews that it says, the Spirit says.

That is, he's saying now, God speaks through the scriptures.

All throughout the book of Hebrews, you see God being given voice, and that voice is coming through the scriptures that we read.

God is actively speaking through the prophets in the Old Testament.

It says he spoke.

Period.

Imagine, imagine a box with sides, and that box encompasses everything that God said through the prophets.

So it has a beginning and it has an end, and everything's in there.

That's the idea of God spoke.

So it's not keeping speaking, it's that he spoke and it's done.

It's all encapsulated right there.

And his people needed to listen.

When God spoke to the fathers through the prophets, they needed to listen, but often they didn't.

Do you remember when Israel stood at the foot of the mountain and Moses was up on top talking with God and the mountain thundered and there was lightning and crashing noises?

And when Moses came down, the people said to him, Would you please ask God to be quiet?

We're afraid he's going to kill us.

They didn't want to hear God speak.

They wanted the King of kings and the Lord of Lords to stop speaking.

Kings later would turn away from God's prophets, even taking the words that prophets wrote from God and burning them.

The preacher will spend most of chapter 3 here on one line from Psalm 95.

Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.

In the Old Testament, the wilderness generation, that's the people that came out of Egypt, that God redeemed out of Egypt.

He brought them across the Red Sea and through the desert.

That wilderness generation spent 40 years trudging through sand because they refused to listen.

Israel spent 70 years in exile because they did not listen to God's word through the prophets.

So there are consequences to not listening.

Now it's not unusual for God's people to think or to feel or to have some sense that he's silent.

Even David, the great king and poet of Israel, the man after God's own heart, at times wondered and even asked why God was silent.

The preacher to these people, this book that we know is Hebrews, would challenge us to ask whether we have stopped listening or whether God's words and ways have become background noise to us.

Because God has spoken.

In various times, in various ways, and his people needed to listen.

But even in the Old Testament, when God spoke in all those various ways, and all those various times, there is evidence that they became dull of hearing.

They were inattentive.

And it's probably not wise for us to say, yeah, so glad that's not me.

Because it might be us more than we care to admit.

Now, now, think with me now of a second characteristic.

That is that God's people must now listen to him speaking through his son.

In many ways and in various times, he spoke to the fathers through the prophets.

Now, in these last days, he has spoken to us by his son.

Now, I want to make something very clear here, because there's a choice that's been made by our English translations at the beginning of verse 2.

And it's a choice that they made to make your English translation sound smooth.

Most English translations, I think all of them actually, add the word but in verse 2.

He spoke this way in the past, but now he has spoken to us in his son.

Now the preacher here that wrote the book of Hebrews uses that contrasting word often in his letter to set two things apart.

So he knows what he's doing with that word.

But he didn't put it here.

It's not in his original text.

He isn't pushing the prophets to the side or out of the way as if they're no longer relevant and they no longer matter.

He's saying this is the way God did it, and now the culmination, the pinnacle of God speaking is in his own son.

So it's not a contrast that pushes aside, it's something that moves forward to a pinnacle, to a culmination, says, now God's spoken to us in his own son.

Now he says, in these last days he has spoken to us by his son.

Last days is a prophetic phrasing.

But the biblical author adds a word here that makes this very interesting.

He says, these.

These.

Not the last days someday.

These last days.

The days that you're in right now.

So the prophetic horizon that's way out there is now brought to today.

You've probably heard the word eschatology.

That's the term that we apply to the study of the end times.

There's a related term for the end times, and it's called the eschaton.

Just shorten eschatology to eschaton.

That's the time period of the end times.

When we think about eschatology, we we typically think of the far-off future.

Maybe sometimes we feel like it's not so far off as it used to be.

It's getting closer.

But it's not yet.

It's on the horizon.

We're looking out towards it.

But we need to be aware of it because that day is drawing near.

But the writer to the Hebrews says the eschaton, those last days are now.

By the way, that's 2,000 years ago.

Now we are in those days, and the sign that we are in those last days is that God has shifted the way that we hear Him speak.

Notice the pronoun shift.

In many ways, at various times long ago, he spoke to us.

No.

He spoke to the fathers.

Now, in these last days, he has spoken to us.

Who is the us?

It's an interesting question, more interesting than you probably realize, because the preachers' listeners, the people in the congregation that heard this the very first time, were not present when Jesus walked the earth.

Look down at Hebrews chapter 2, verse 3.

Hebrews 2:3

He says, How shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation?

It was declared at first by the Lord, and it was attested to us by those who heard.

Well, God also bore witnesses by signs and wonders.

This is most likely a third generation.

So it's not Jesus.

It's not those who heard Jesus.

It's those who heard from those who heard from Jesus.

That makes sense?

Hopefully you're with me.

That's an encouraging idea, friends.

Because that means that when we open our Bibles and we hear God speaking to the fathers through the prophets, and we open our New Testament and we hear God speaking by His Son, He is speaking to us.

You directly.

And that is a sign that we are in these last days.

Even if you receive it secondhand, third hand, fourth hand, generations down the line, this preacher still writes to the listeners as us.

We are hearing the voice of God in the Son.

And that is incredibly encouraging because God's word remains powerful and effective as it moves from one generation of believers to the next.

That means that God speaks to us today through his son.

He has spoken to generation after generation for thousands of years through the Son.

Now, if you really want to learn more about this, you should come to Anchored Fellowship Group right after the service.

But if you really want to learn more about this, you should go to Jeff and Doug's class because they're studying John chapter 1, where the word became flesh and dwelt among us.

John 1 · chapter mention

Or you could go to Lowell and hear Lowell speak about how God moved through the prophets to communicate the scriptures.

Or you can just be a faithful participant in Faith Evangelical Free Church, where we declare the Word of God to make disciples, to bring you to maturity, so that you're not inattentive.

Friends, a prophet carries a message.

He is not the message.

Does that make sense?

So Isaiah, the prophet, he delivered the word of God.

But he was Isaiah the man.

God spoke through those men.

But when God spoke in his son, the messenger and the message were one.

In the Son, God's revelation is personal and definitive.

As the Son, Jesus the Christ, embodies the word of God and perfectly reveals the Father.

The word of God took on flesh and dwelt among us, yet God continued to speak, but instead of speaking through a messenger, he now speaks directly through his son, and it's done.

That's why at his transfiguration on the mountaintop, when Peter, James, and John were there trying to figure out what was going on and who was speaking, they heard this loud voice say, This is my beloved son.

Listen to him.

Says, For since since the message declared by angels proved to be reliable, and every transgression or disobedience received a just retribution, how shall we escape if we neglect it?

If God spoke through his son, and he did, what's the consequence for being inattentive?

Now listening to the Son is not just a Bible study.

That's part of it.

Because God spoke through his son, it's a kind of posture towards a person.

So think about what that means for, I don't know, Tuesday morning.

You get up on Tuesday morning and you open your Bible for your daily Bible reading.

If you do that with a posture towards the person who's speaking, it means that you open your Bible to read God's word to meet the reigning Son of God who is ready to speak to you through his word.

Maybe in a different way of thinking, it means if you're facing a temptation or a fear or a decision, or maybe you're wrestling with some kind of resentment or bitterness, you face those things with God's word, with scripture, so that Christ can speak to that situation rather than simply doing what you think is best.

We do that because the preacher of Hebrews says, God has spoken in his son, and we must listen.

Now, what has he spoken?

Yes, he has.

Everything.

God has said everything needed in his son.

The main verb in verse 2 is spoke.

He has spoken.

He doesn't say that God is still speaking or that God will speak again, but that he spoke through the Son.

That's all you need to know.

Everything you need to know is God spoke through the Son.

And so listen.

I think F.F.

Bruce said it well.

He said the story of Scripture is a story of the fulfillment of it in Christ.

There was progress up to Christ and no progress beyond him because he fills it all.

It's done.

So we aren't looking for another word from God or another way of speaking because God has spoken through his son, and that's done.

So if Jesus is God's final word, then stepping away from Christ is a step backward that ignores God and shuts our ears to his speech.

So put yourselves in the shoes, sandals of the first listeners.

They were caught drifting away from God's final word in Christ.

And what was kind of alarming is that they were drifting back past Christ to the religious history of the Jewish religious system.

What made that backward drift dangerous was that it came, what they were drifting back to came from God.

God gave the religious system.

God spoke to the fathers, so following what the fathers did ought to be wise.

Well, that might be wise thinking if God were still speaking in the same way.

But all of that speaking has found its pinnacle of speech not in the prophets, but in the sun.

You know, we don't generally drift towards evil on purpose.

Sometimes we do, but most often it's just we find ourselves there.

We drift towards what feels good and feels right.

So we might today drift into church attendance as a habit rather than something that is vital to our spiritual lives.

We might drift toward a morally good and upright life without Christ.

We might drift into a detached kind of listening where we don't really process what God says.

None of those things are inherently wicked, but that's what makes them dangerous.

Because pretty soon we find ourselves having drifted quite some distance.

Now maybe you're resisting what I'm saying, and you say, Ah, I'm I'm I'm not drifting.

I'm still waiting for God to speak.

Okay.

You've been waiting for God to speak to you for a long time, and it maybe it feels like heaven's been quiet.

You're with David asking, God, when are you gonna say something?

When are you gonna speak?

And so you're you're left discouraged by the silence.

Hear this clearly, my friends.

If you're still waiting for God to speak, you need to realize he already has spoken.

And he has said everything he intends to say.

And he has said it all in his son.

If you're waiting for God to speak, keep praying, keep reading his word, come to meet with Christ as you open your Bible, and don't mistake what feels as silence about what you're seeking as silence about what matters most.

By making the pinnacle of his speech in his son, God tells you everything you need to know.

He tells you who he is, he tells you what he is doing in his world, he tells you what he's doing in your life, he tells you which sins to flee from, he tells you where to place your hope, he tells you how to trust in him and why.

In your waiting, seek out Jesus in the scriptures and listen to what God has already said in his son because he's already spoken.

Now that starts to shift our attention a little bit.

Because at the end of verse 2, we begin this shift from God speaking to directing our attention on the one through whom he has spoken.

His son.

And he tells us that we should listen to his son because he is the promised heir.

Says it very directly.

He has appointed him the heir of all things, through whom he also created the world.

Jesus is the promised heir of everything.

Chapter 1, verse 5, the writer here quotes Psalm 2.

And has the Father saying to the Son, Ask of me, and I will make the nations your inheritance and the ends of the earth your possession.

That's from Psalm 2, verse 8.

Psalms 2:8

So Psalm verse 2 announces that the heir of all those promises, the one that they were pointing to, is here.

You get that sense of culmination?

Psalm says, wait for the air.

The air is coming.

That's what the prophets say.

And the air shows up and says, Here I am.

Listen to me.

And he's the heir of everything.

Nothing is excluded from those all things.

Jesus inherits everything.

But we are also told that he is the one through whom God created the world.

This is fascinating.

It could be a whole sermon by itself.

Our Bibles say that God created the world through Jesus.

That's true.

It's true.

But the word for world here doesn't come from the word that Jeff used in his prayer, cosmos, that is the physical creation.

This is a time word.

So think of think of ages or eras or eons.

Hebrews uses the word for the created world elsewhere, but not here.

So it's telling us that the sun did not just make the earth, the sun, and the stars.

He made the ages.

He made the whole ordered course of history as it unfolds in time.

He is the Lord of history.

He created the ages of history from Genesis through Revelation.

So first Jesus is named the heir, and then he is described as maker.

That may be significant.

That path shows that history is planned so that Jesus will inherit everything.

The path of this world's eras goes right where it intended to go because Jesus will inherit it all.

That means, friends, he owns every era.

Past, present, and future.

That means, friends, that he made your time.

Sometimes we imagine what it would be like to be born into a different age.

Sometimes we feel like we were born into the wrong era.

Friends, he made this era and he designed it with you in it.

You are not living through an accident in the schedule.

He designed you and he designed your time so that it could find its fulfillment in what he is doing, so that everything will find its completion and fulfillment and pinnacle in Jesus and his inheritance of everything.

And you get to be a part of that.

So, what does the preacher want us to do?

Pretty simple.

If you look down at verse 1 of chapter 2, he tells us.

Therefore, we must pay much closer attention to what we've heard, lest we drift away from it.

I remember fishing in a canoe with my dad as a kid on a small North Dakota lake.

It's one of the only small lakes in that region that we could find trout.

Sometimes we were preoccupied, and we ended up being carried by the current in the lake and just our own preoccupation and our own movement past the spot where we needed to land.

Then we had to backtrack, right?

We didn't choose to drift past our landing spot.

We drifted past our landing spot because we weren't paying attention.

We don't wake up one morning and decide we're going to stop listening to Jesus.

Just as my dad and I on that lake, our momentum and the water's current keep you moving until you realize we missed it.

In Hebrews chapter 5, the preacher says his listeners have become dull of hearing.

Hebrews 5 · chapter mention

They ought to know everything they need to know.

They have heard what God said, but their momentum has carried them backwards in inattention.

Is this a safe place to make a confession?

I hope it is.

I sometimes get irritated by the popular idea that churches need a vision for ministry.

I think and I hope that it's a righteous irritation, but I might not.

It might not be sometimes.

At the same time, I get what churches are after when they're when they're vision casting.

But you know, I think if we approach that concept more according to Scripture, most often a church's, or even our own individual perceptions of spirituality is not the problem.

It's not that we need a new vision, it's that we need to correct our inattention.

Because God's already spoken and it's already there.

We don't need something new.

We need to pay much closer attention.

In that case, we don't need a new direction.

We don't need a new goal to excite us.

We need to pay closer attention to what we've already heard.

We need to listen to the Son.

So open your Bible and read a chapter slowly this week.

And as you do, ask yourselves some questions.

Ask, what does this show me about the Father?

What does this show me about the Son?

How is the Son of God speaking?

What does it call me to listen to, to obey, to trust?

Because God has spoken.

In his son, he has given the decisive and sufficient word.

So we don't need to wait for a new word from God because the pinnacle of God's word has come.

So let's expect, friends, to not merely join together to open God's word, but to listen.

Would you pray with me?

Lord Jesus, we confess to you that we have we've sometimes failed to listen.

We've become inattentive or distracted.

Maybe the concerns of this world have overwhelmed us.

We come to you asking for forgiveness, for cleansing, for the purification that comes through your sacrifice on the cross.

We look to you for all of those things.

For you are worthy of all of our honor, all of our praise, and all of our attention.

It's you we desire to worship.

And we ask now that as we begin to think a little bit about your broken body and your shed blood for us, that you would even open our ears to that.

That this would be a special moment where we wouldn't be dull of hearing.

So we can hear you speak.

This we ask because of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Amen.

That concludes this sermon from Faith Evangelical Free Church.

Our mission is to declare the Word of God and disciple believers into mature, devoted followers of Jesus.

You can learn more by visiting our website at faithfree.com.