The Sufficiency of Christ

Waiting on a Word

On Friday morning, news broke that Donald Trump was found guilty in a criminal case. Regardless of whether you think it was a stitch up, or if you think Donald Trump has finally met justice, I think we can all agree, we’re looking at a big mess. Where do things go from here?

It’s often in times when things get chaotic and uncertain that we we want to hear from God.

What is God trying to tell us in this situation?

Will God give us a way forward?

There’s perhaps been a lot of times recently when we just want to ask - what are you trying to tell us God?

We ask the same question when we look at the situation with our Aboriginal brothers and sisters.

We look at a situation where the outcomes of Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals in Australia have such vastly different outcomes in many areas of life. It can get frustrating to think why these gaps are so persistent.

We had the referendum last year, and I know people have their reasons for voting the way they did, but the reality is, the feeling among many Aboriginal people is one of rejection.

What is God saying in all of this? What is his word to us? Is he going to show us a way forward?

This desire to want to hear from God is not a new phenomenon for our time. We might be more aware of what is happening throughout the world at any point in time, but people throughout history have always faced times when they want to cry out to God for answers.

Question from Early church

It was the same in the early church which is what we find when we read the book of Hebrews.

The early Christians faced a tough time and it would seem that they wanted to hear from God.

God, tells us what is happening. Tell us the way to get through this. What should we expect?

What we’re going to find is the author of this letter is actually going to give them quite a different perspective - a perspective that is going to worth us listening to.

Hebrews context

But as this is our first in the series on this book of Hebrews, it’s perhaps worth pausing on trying to get some of the background of the book.

Now, let’s state up front, we actually don’t know much about this letter.

The letter ends how you might expect a letter to end, but the letter is completely absent of the typical type of opening that we see in all of the other letters in our Bible.

Who wrote it?

If you’ve read any of these letters, you’ll know that the author usually says who they are in the opening line. So we can easily tell which are the letters of Paul, which come from Peter and James and John and so forth.

But we are left completely in the dark about Hebrews.

If you have a King James Version of the Bible, you might note that it gives the heading, “The epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Hebrew”.

But this is actually a much later addition. Even the early church fathers, those in the first few centuries that wrote stuff down for us, they actually didn’t know who to attribute this letter to.

This shouldn’t bother us from the perspective of determining whether it is authoritative or not. You see, though these early church fathers might not have known who wrote it, they did recognise it as part of the authoritative word of God.

So really we’re guessing. It seems to be quite a different style to Paul, but then again, sometimes people can write in different styles. I’ve even heard it suggested that perhaps a woman wrote the book, but there isn’t a huge amount of evidence to support that claim.

But it’s okay to say we don’t know - after all, large sections of the Old Testament we are completely in the dark with regards to who was the author.

Who was it written to?

Well, then we can ask, who was the letter written to, and the reality is, we don’t have a lot of clues here either. It is sometimes suggested that a Jewish audience is in mind, on the basis that there are a lot of different references to the Old Testament passage - something we see even in this first chapter.

But even this isn’t entirely certain, as early Christians would have become quickly acquainted with what we call the Old Testament, but at this time would still just have been the Scriptures, even to Gentile believers.

What is clear throughout the book is that there is quite a bit of encouraging these believers to hang on... to cling tight to Jesus… to keep persevering. It would seem quite clear that they are facing considerable troubles.

Certainly, we know that at particular times, Christians during this first century after Jesus faced persecution.

We’re specifically aware of two distinct time periods where this persecution was most notable.

Firstly, during the time when Nero was the emperor. There are some quite disturbing stories about the way he treated Christians.

The other main time was when Domitian was emperor, which was the early 90’s AD.

Even if it wasn’t one of these two specific times, by the way the Author to the Hebrews trying to encourage the readers to persevere, it does seem clear that they were facing a tough time.

Which is why I was imagining before these believers wanting some sort of message from God. Something to tell them what they are meant to do.

Hearing from God

With that in mind, let’s turn to the opening verses of this letter.

In the past...

Well, it’s interesting that the first three words throw the readers back to understanding how things were in the past.

When we read “in the past”, of course that means for us, in the Old Testament times.

You see, we get a reminder about how God used to speak into the various situations that they found themselves in.

And the author tells us that it was through prophets, and it was during many different times and in many different ways.

We of course have the written account of many of the prophets that God sent to them.

We can go back to Moses and see him speaking as if face-to-face with God.

We see Elijah and Elisha, two men who really turned things around at one of the lowest points in the history of Israel. They did various miracles and spoke up to show the people that God could be trusted to come through.

We see Jonah being told to preach to the Ninevites.

Amos tells the cows of Bashan (his words, not mine) that they can say goodbye to their luxury summer houses.

Ezekiel uses some of his acting skills to act out a siege on a small scale model of Jerusalem - it does get a bit weird at times.

These prophets were effectively more-or-less all these people in the Old Testament times had to hear God speak into a situation.

In the last days...

But, in the last days, something is very different.

Now, just a quick bit of clarification, we often use the phrase, “the last days” to refer to the period just before Jesus comes back. When the bible uses the phrase, however, it usually refers to the time after the time of Jesus’ ministry. In other words, they were in the last days when this letter was written.

So, in these last days, we, along with the people who would have originally heard this letter, have something very special. Something even greater than the prophets.

We have a message spoken directly by the Son.

You want a prophetic message? I’ll give you something better. I’ll give you the message directly from Jesus.

Now, it might be easy at this point to think - well, yeah, okay, of course we’ve got Jesus, but I want something a bit more spectacular. I want something that is going to be really specific and speak into the very situation I’m in.

Well, hold that thought. I will come back to that. But let’s just think what we’ve done there. Because sometimes in our desire to have something spectacular, we miss the enormity of what is directly before us.

We forget how longed for Jesus was. We forget how all encompassing the work of Jesus was.

The Nature of Jesus

Thankfully, the author of Hebrews has been very helpful in reminding us of this.

He lists off a whole number of different attributes about Jesus. I’m going to quickly go over them each, but the reality is we could spend a long time on each of these points.

Appointed Heir of All Things

Firstly, Jesus has been appointed heir of all things. In other words, everything belongs to Jesus. You know, sometimes we do a bit of a sacred - secular split. I understand why we do this for practical reasons, but it’s really a false dichotomy. Because even the things we designate as secular belong to Jesus as well.

Nothing is outside of his sights.

He Made the Universe

The end of verse 2 then reminds us that he made the universe.

Now, we tend to think of God the Father as the creator. That’s not incorrect. But this passage reminds us that it would be wrong to separate God out of this process. Jesus did not come into existence when Mary gave birth to a child some 2000 odd years ago. That was when he chose to live as one of us - the incarnated God. But Jesus the Son was present when the universe was created and he was involved in the process.

There should be a reminder here. If Jesus can create the whole universe, then whatever problem you have, even if its the ever stubborn problem of closing the gap in the Aboriginal community, well, perhaps its not so impossible.

Jesus = God

Now, verse 3 is one of those important verses when understanding the Trinity. The Trinity is of course one of those very difficult things to get our head around. It’s the concept that there are three distinct members, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Each have their own purpose and are distinct from the other. But there is also only one God.

But what we get from the first half of verse 3 is first, that he is the radiance of God’s glory - well that part could be interpreted in a few ways. But what’s less ambiguous is the next part which says he is the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word.

This is perhaps one of the clearest verses in the entire Bible that I believe tells us without a doubt, that Jesus is God.

When we say that the message we receive is spoken to us by Jesus, for the first time, we’re not just talking about the word of God being filtered through a prophet, we’re talking about the very words of God given directly to us.

Purified sin

Verse 3 continues by reminding us that he provided purification for sins.

This is our biggest problem. In fact, if you look at all of the problems that plague our world, you generally don’t need to scratch too far to see the root problem is actually sin - that is, the turning away from God’s good design for us.

He dealt with this problem by dying on the cross.

There’s obviously a lot more we could say about this - but at this point, it should just serve as a reminder that Jesus solves the problem that is at the root of all other problems.

The work is finished

Verse 3 then ends with the words… “he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven”.

Now, there is actually something very significant for us to recognise here.

That is, the work of Jesus is complete.

We might look at our problems… we might look at the complete mess that the world is in and think - well, it doesn’t seem like the work of Jesus is complete - but let me make an argument that it is.

The mess that we see around us is not because of any deficiency in what Jesus has done. It is because in God’s patience, he’s waiting for the full number of people to come in.

You see, because the work of Jesus is complete, he could have put a stop to all of the messes around the world straight away. But this would put an end to free choice. Jesus is allowing the mess to give us time to respond. The work however, has already been completed. It is done.

Listening to Jesus

Let me just pause here before I briefly touch on the remainder of the chapter.

I’ve painted the picture that the people receiving this message were people who were going through a tough time and were most likely wanting to hear some spectacular message to help them get them through.

The author of the letter, however, has said, well, it used to be that the message would come through prophets in some interesting ways, but you’ve got Jesus.

You’ve got the one that owns everything, created everything, in fact, is God in his very being and in what he does. You’ve got the one who can deal with the root of the problem, and that has already won the victory.

You want some personalised message, but what you actually need is just Jesus.

What about today’s prophets

But this raises an interesting question - what about those with the gift of prophecy today?

I actually do believe that this is a gift God gives people today. Some people are able to give specific messages that speak the word of God into specific situations.

That being said, I think we should also be careful when people today say they are speaking on God’s behalf. Sometimes, in the name of prophecy, people are actually speaking their own mind rather than the mind of God.

So the gift of prophecy does exist today. But… (and this is the big message for today)… any prophetic message we receive today should be held underneath the fact that we have Jesus - the one who is everything we need.

The answer is there - we just need to open our eyes and see Jesus.

Angels

That being said, let me do a really quick look at the rest of the chapter.

You see, while the author of Hebrews is telling the readers that they should just focus on Jesus, the reality is, there are also angels.

Actually, the author introduces angels by reminding us that Jesus is superior to these angels.

For us, it can be easy to lose sight of angels. We’re often not quite sure what to think about them. To be honest, I think it is almost more easy to accept the existence of demons then it is angels.

Usually, when angels come into focus throughout the bible, it’s as a messenger telling the hearer some very important thing they need to hear.

However, if we jump right to the last verse of this chapter, we read the words: “are not all angels ministering spirits sent to serve those who will inherit salvation?”

The author is pointing to the fact that angels do exist and they are there to minister and help us.

Now to be honest, the bible only gives us little glimpses like this one, so it is difficult to paint a really detailed picture of what this looks like. But angels do exist and they do minister and help us.

As I mentioned before, the main thrust of this passage is actually to remind us that even though these angels exist, we need to focus on the fact that we have something even greater - we have Jesus with us.

I’m going to run out of time to go through all of the bible verses that are quoted here, but the point is clear. The Old Testament spoke of Jesus who would effectively be all in all. Angels had a place to, but nothing in comparison with who the Messiah was to be.

Conclusion

So let’s get back to where I started with all of this.

I mentioned two big messes, although I don’t really like putting them together because they are so diffferent.

I mentioned the mess we have surrounding Donald Trump - and we ask God: what do we make of it all?

I also talked about the ongoing issue of the gap that exists with our Aboriginal brothers and sisters. And we ask: how do we find a path forward?

We want a message. We want someone to speak a message that will help us see things clearly.

And I don’t want to suggest that there aren’t people out there that might be able to speak God’s truth into those situations. In fact, there are godly men and women who speak truth into them.

However, I want us to see today that the most powerful voice has already spoken.

A voice that is over all things. A voice that controls all things.

When we listen to that voice, we recognise that even though there might be more pain to follow, we can also recognise that God is going to take us through.

This doesn’t mean we don’t take practical steps to work through these issues. In fact, particularly on the issue of reconciliation, I believe there is a lot of work we need to do.

But we need to see that Jesus is there, and he is powerful to make change.

Let me pray...