Awesome Words
Posted by pastorjoe55 on September 23, 2011
God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the worlds; 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, – Hebrews 1:1-3
Those of us who have been born Gentiles and have lived in cultures that are informed by Christian ideals and assumptions will find it difficult to understand the incredible magnitude of the words being put forward by the writer of the Sermon to the Hebrews.
No Old Testament writer would ever refer to any ancient hero as “being the brightness of His glory.” There no figures in the Old Testament that any Jew would call “the express image of His person.” Such a thought would be considered blasphemy. Words like this, spoken about another human, could get you killed.
Yet, the Hebrews writer begins his sermon with words reserved for God alone. He gets right to the point. This man Jesus is the incarnate God; the God-man. He uses words that no Jew would ever speak about another, not about Abraham, nor any of the prophets, not even Moses.
The declaration of Jesus as Christ is the continental divide in all spiritual thought. There is no middle position. There is no compromise. You must come down on one side or the other. The Jewish-Christian congregation of Hebrews faced a stark choice. If they don’t recant their faith in Christ, they will be put out of the Temple. They will no longer be allowed to participate in the rituals, and ceremonies that they have known from childhood. Moreover, they will be shunned by family and friends. If they choose to recant, they loose their salvation.
We face a similar choice.
The choice we face is not whether we will return to Judaism. I can’t return to something I have never been.
The writer of Hebrews demonstrates that the laws, worship forms and ceremonies of the Old Testament are fulfilled in Christ. The book of Hebrews is an argument to forsake tradition. However, it is not an argument to forsake tradition in favor of something more contemporary, it is an argument to forsake tradition in favor of orthodoxy.
This is the exact choice the church faces today.
