Redeemer and King

Introduction

(The three-fold office of Christ?)

The Author of Hebrews makes seven points describing who the Son is to prove to us that He is the One we should listen to as the one who delivers God’s Word to us perfectly. They are:

He is the appointed heir of all things.

He is the means through whom God created the world.

He is the radieance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of God’s nature.

He upholds the universe by the word of his power.

These we covered last week, today we are looking at the final 3 characteristics

He made purification for sins.

He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty of God in heaven.

He and his Name are far superior to God’s heavenly messengers.

It is important for us to understand how the author of Hebrews is referring to Jesus as the Son. He is not referring to the relationship of the Son as eternally begotton of the Father, which we affirm in the Nicean Creed. If we look closely at all of this chapter, it is clear that the author of Hebrew’s is referring often to Psalm 2 and Psalm110. In Psalm 2 specifically, the Sonship is attached to the promise God made to King David’s dynasty. Son here is not primarily referring to Christ’s eternal position as the Son, but his covenantal position. What I mean is, when Jesus became a man in the lineage of the Son of David who perfectly obeyed God’s law, God made him the promised Son of the covenant.

We’ve already seen this last week. The fact that he is the heir of all things points to this sonship. This cannot be referring to Jesus’ eternal sonship, since he is fully God and so cannot be made an heir. Likewise, later on in verse 5 the Author will refer to Psalm 2 where God says “You are my son! Today I have become your father.” Of course, there was never a time when Christ became God the Son, but he did become the Son of God in a different way; through the covenant with David.

In other Words, God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, became the human Son of God in his earthly ministry so that God would makeh is promises to David come to pass and bring us salvation through them.

As he first started by showing us that the Son is appointed heir of all things, that he was the agent of God’s Creation. This progressed to arguments that make the Son equal to God in his divine essense and is the source of God’s glory. His word is also the source of the power that holds the universe together. This puts the Son in a place of full authority to speak on God’s behalf, the the author of Hebrews is not done yet.

At the centre of these 4 verses is the fact that Jesus perfectly mediates God’s presence through his own participation in both the Divine nature and, as we’ll see in chapter 2, the human nature. This gives the Son the perfect position for mediating between God and man.

If two distinct and conflicted groups are going to have someone mediate between them, the best person for such a task would ideally be someone who can sympathize with both sides and perhaps belongs to both groups. So it makes great sense that the mediator between God and man should be both fully God and fully man.

Here, the emphasis is on the Divinity of the Son, giving him the best position from which to give us God’s final speech in these last days.

Purification for Sins

The fifth characteristic of the Son which makes him our perfect speaker for God is that he made purification for sins.

The language of purification is steeped in the OT law. Purification could be from various things, from skin diseases to touching a dead body. It was a purification ritual that got the priests ready to serve in the Temple and sanctified the people when they entered into covenant with God at Mount Sinai.

Here, the purification is specifically for sins. We see the real purpose of these so-called cerimonial laws was to show our human need for clensing from sin and guilt. Our sinfulness is pictured as many things, some are faults which we have responsability to obey and yet have disobeyed, other times it is weakness related to being a fallen human being under Adam, which we cannot help any more than an OT Jew could help becoming cerimonially unclean from time to time. The idea was that in order to dwell with a holy God, we need to be clean. Making ourselves clean is as impossible as washing your face with muddy hands, so it is now God who provides a way for his people to become clean. In the OT law he did this through various cerimonies of cleansing that pointed forward to a spiritual reality that would be applied to those who believe upon the Son for salvation.

Why is this important here? Obviously this is central to the Gospel message itself, but why is it important to the author’s point that the Son is the final and complete revelation of God?

Remember that long ago God spoke by the prophets through various ways and in pieces. One of those pieces was the Torah, the law which included laws about cleansing. The centre of God’s communication with humanity since the fall has been around restoring us to God. In the Law, this included cleansing because without cleansing we are unable to approach a Holy God anyway without judgement and death being the result.

So when God speaks, he speaks to bring us near. He speaks because he is interested in establishing a relationship with his image-bearers. He wants to walk with us in the Garden of Eden in the cool of the day once more. That’s what the Temple was, it was the Garden of Eden. But in order to go inside you needed cleansing and God had to provide a way for that to happen or else our relationship with God is dead on the starting line, and so are we.

So when God speaks, there must be a way to draw near to him. There must be something to cleanse us from the sinfulness that separated us from him in the first place. That is why this is so significant. He himself cleases us from sin so that we are able to recieve the perfect revelation God has given us and so draw near to him.

This is also foreshadowing of one of the most important themes in the Letter to the Hebrews: Christ as the Great High Priest.

King of Heaven

The sixth characteristic of the Son is his heavenly kingship. Already we have seen that the Son has been appointed as the heir of all things, now we see that already he has been seated as King of all things at the right hand of the Majesty of the Father. Again, this is not referring to his inherent rule over all things as God equally with the Father, but rather as the true image bearer of God in his humanity. So while Christ has always been God over all things in his divine nature, in is in his human nature that he now sits on the Throne at the right hand of God in heaven. Some of you have heard me say this before, but the King of all creation is a human being since Christ ascended into heaven. The scene here is what we find in Daniel 7:13-14

Daniel 7:13–14 ESV

“I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed.

Now notice that here it is a son of man that approaches the Ancient of Days (the Father) and that this man recieves his dominion. This is not talking about the Son in his divinity, since co-rule with the Father is something he had from eternity past. No, this is Christ, the second person of the Trinity, stepping into humanity as a Son of David so that David’s dynasty may recieve what was promised and much more.

So in this it is explained how the Son inherits what he has a right to as God’s heir. Jesus sits as God’s perfect image-bearer in heaven as the Son of David and the Son of God. Jesus not only rules the universe as God, but as a perfect human king.

So again, who better to hear the speech of God from than the one God has set so highly in the universe? One who walked up to the Ancient of Days and was given dominion over everything by God? Surely there is no prophet or angel who could better communicate God’s speech than him.

A Better Name

And indeed it is how this Son compares with angels that the author will get into next and will spend the rest of the chapter and a portion of chapter 2 addressing. From reading these first two chapters of Hebrews it is very clear that Jesus is not an angelic being. While the Greek word for angel simply means messenger (hense how the OT divine figure Angel of the LORD is named) here Angels are specifically created heavenly beings who serve as messengers of God.

The NT confirms the Jewish tradition that angels delivered the Law to Moses and were usually the means by which God spoke to prophets. This is confirmed in 2:2 as well as in Acts 7:53 and Galatians 3:19. So we can see that in OT times God’s speech had a few speakers. God would give a message to an angel who would deliver it to a prophet who would deliver it to the people. With the Son, this is all collapsed since he fills all these roles: he is God, the origin of the message; he is the heavenly messenger, and he is the human messenger.

Specifically, it is his Name that is better than those of angels and which measures his position above the angels. This Name has been inherited, so again this cannot be referring to Jesus’ divine nature but rather the position he has as the human king of the universe at the right hand of the Father.

A Name signifies your reputation, what and who you are known as, and the glory that comes with who you are. A Name isn’t just a placeholding title; it is symbolic of your presence, your character, your value, and your reputation. The Name here signifies that position Jesus has as the Son, standing in place of the Davidic dynasty and of humanity itself. The Author of Hebrews is saying that the glory and reputation of the covenantal Lord of God’s people far exceeds that of the angels.

Next week we will get into why this is, and how the one who fills it being God raises the position still higher and yet makes it more useful for us. Angels are themselves unapproachable beings, often causing terror and dread even when they appear in human form. Jesus is much higher than them both because the position he holds as the covenant human Son is higher than theirs, but also because of his own nature as God. Both of these will lead the Author to two conclusions: first, that a message given by the Son is to be taken all the more seriously than those delivered by angels in the OT. Second, that the message is uniquely for human beings to recieve and through which we may know God.

Conclusion

The Son of God took on the unique role as the perfect covenant head for us. There is no one better to listen to in order to recieve God’s Word than him.

He is our perfect prophet, bringing us God’s speech directly.

He is our perfect priest, cleansing us from our sin.

He is our perfect king, who was crowned by the Father over all creation and given a position which itself is high above the angels.

There is nowhere but the Son when you may get such direct access to God and God’s communication with humanity.

By faith, we are united to Christ, cleansed from sin, and promised an eternity seated with him in his exaltation.

Where else will you go but the Son?