I’m foregoing the intro to Hebrews and diving right in to chapter 1. If you would like to read Daniel’s intro post, you can find that here, and just as I did with 1 John, I have created a page on my blog where I will link all of our Hebrews posts. Also just as with 1 John, we are basing our study out of Scot McKnight’s The Second Testament.
Hebrews opens up with an introduction to who God is and how he has revealed Himself. The Hebrew Christians are told that though God used the patriarchs and the prophets in the past, He has now sent us a piece of Himself - His Son. Listen to this description of the Son in verses 2-4:
“whom he placed heir of all, through whom also he made the Eras, who, being the Splendor’s radiance and his Reality’s representation, and carrying all things by his Power’s utterance, making a cleansing from sins, sat on the right on the Majesty in the heights, becoming so much better than the envoys as the Name he has inherited carries so much more weight than theirs.”
This Son is Jesus. He radiates God’s glory and expresses the very character of God. He is the One through whom God created the world and everything in it. He’s greater than the angels. And He is how God chose to reveal Himself to us. He is righteous and holy.
He is the means of our cleansing from sin. It was God’s plan from the beginning to show His love for us by sending Jesus. He knew when He gave us free will that we would be imperfect and planned our redemption in advance (1 Peter 1:20, Ephesians 1:4, Acts 2:23). As we learned in 1 John 2, in Him we have an Advocate and an Illuminator, lighting our way to and pleading our case before the Father.
Through Him all things were made and all things are sustained. John tells us at the very beginning of his gospel account that the Logos, or Word (who is Christ) has always been with God, and was God. He says in John 1:3, “All things were through him, and apart from him there was not one thing.” Nothing is apart from Him. Above, the writer of Hebrews writes that He “[carries] all things by his Power’s utterance.” Everything is under His command. He sits at the right hand of the Father, over everything. Even the angels bow before Him. He is the embodiment of God’s righteousness, truth, mercy, and love.