March 24, 2019 “The Word” Hebrews 1:1-4

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A man worked very hard to win a certain lady’s affection. She lived in his neighborhood; and every week for 42 years, the shy, but persistent suitor slipped a love letter under her door.  All was fine until they had had a fight, and then for years she simply refused to talk or acknowledge him.

Afterward he wrote 2,184 love letters without any kind of a reply, the single-hearted old man eventually got up enough courage to go to her in person.  He knocked on her door and when she came to the door he asked for her hand in marriage. To his delight and surprise, she accepted and they were finally married at the age of 74. (Richard Armstrong, Make Your Life Worthwhile)

For centuries, God tried to communicate with His creation: He communicated in dreams and visions; He inscribed 10 commandments on tablets of stone; He spoke through prophets many times and in many ways.

However, not many people responded or obeyed.   Our sin had separated us from God and He came to us in person.  Hebrews 1 describes what God did to restore us into a relationship with Himself.

Hebrews 1:1-2 “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;”

God disclosed His love for mankind in the past through many ways, but forever more, God has spoken to us through His Son. He came to us in person. That’s what the incarnation or Christmas is all about – God came in a way we could not ignore, for it was for our eternal relationship with Him.

Literally, Hebrews says that God spoke to us by His Son – in Mary’s Son, which was His Own Son, conceived by His Holy Spirit.  Now, when we think about the baby Jesus in a manger, He seems so weak and frail, but it is important to know who He really is!

JESUS OWNS EVERYTHING (J.O.E).

God “appointed Him the heir of all things”, vs.2 says.  That is to say He has inherited the universe! Everything belongs to Him. That includes your house, your car, and your bank account. That includes your children, your friends, and even your own body.

Ed Young took his family to a high school football game, where during the third quarter, his daughter Landra said, “Dad, can I have some money to buy some candy?” He gave her a 5-dollar-bill and told her, “Go and buy some candy.” She came back with a bag of Skittles. And as her dad watched her eat them, he asked her for some Skittles. She told him, “No.” So her dad said, “Landra, just give me a couple.” She said, “They’re mine.”

Now, there were several things his daughter failed to grasp. Number 1, He had bought the Skittles for her. Number 2, He was strong enough to take the Skittles from her and eat every one of them if he wanted to. And number 3, He could have bought 300 packages of Skittles and given her so many Skittles that she couldn’t have eaten them all in a year.

Sometimes, we fail to grasp the same thing when it comes to Jesus. Everything we have, He bought for us. It’s all actually His, and He could take it all from us if He wanted to. But He could also give us so much, we wouldn’t know what to do with it all.  (Ed Young, from “Skittles,” a sermon given at Fellowship Church, Dallas, Texas, 11-13-04; www.PreachingToday.com)

Jesus owns it all, because…

JESUS MADE IT ALL.

He created everything there is. Verse 2 says, “Through [Him], [God] created the world.” Literally, Jesus created all we know. That is to say, Jesus not only made the physical universe; He created time, as well.

It’s all summarized in the first verse of the Bible, Genesis 1:1. In the beginning – that’s the creation of time; God created the heavens – that’s the creation of space; and the earth – that’s the creation of matter. We live in a time, space, matter continuum, and Jesus Christ made it!

Antony Flew was a well-known atheist in the world… until he shocked the intellectual world in back in 2004 by publicly announcing that he had changed his mind.  Then he began professing faith in God, a faith that he professed right up until the day he died in 2010.  As a philosopher, Flew was always prepared to go wherever the evidence led him, which toward the last six years of his life led him to believe that atheism is not logical.

In his book There Is a God, Flew reflects on the naturalistic argument for life on planet earth. The argument runs like this: given enough time and chance, life on planet earth couldn’t have just happened without God’s design. Researchers tried to provide an example of this “time + chance = life” theory with a well-known experiment that posed the following question: How long would it take for an infinite number of monkeys pounding on an infinite number of typewriters to compose a sonnet by Shakespeare?

A computer was placed in a cage with six monkeys, and after one month of hammering away at the keys… the monkeys produced fifty typed pages – but not one single word. This is amazing, considering that the shortest word in English could be a one-letter word such as the letter “A” or “I”. But a one-letter word is only a word if there is a space on either side of it. (an actual experiment conducted by the British National Council of the Arts.)

Flew pointed out that if these attempts, could not even result in one one-letter word, then the possibility of getting just the first line of one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, let alone a whole sonnet, is next to impossible.

For Flew, the entire universe (which of course is infinitely more complex than a Shakespearian sonnet) couldn’t have just happened. You will never get a sonnet – or the entire works of Shakespeare, or the entire universe, for that matter – by just allowing enough time + chance.  And yet, Flew (quoting a contemporary scientist) said, “Some people still contend that the monkeys can do it every time.” (Ravi Zacharias, Has Christianity Failed You? Zondervan, 2010, pp. 52-53; www.PreachingToday.com)

No they can’t! It takes more faith to believe in time + chance creating life than it does to believe the simple yet profound declaration of Scripture: “In the beginning, God (Elohim) created the heavens and the earth.” God created it all through His Son, Jesus Christ.

A little girl climbed into the lap of her great-grandmother, looked at her white hair and wrinkles, and asked, “Did God make you?”

“Yes,” said the elderly lady.

Then the little girl asked, “Did God make me too?”

And Grandma said, “Yes.”

“Well,” said the little girl, “don’t you think He’s doing a better job now than He used to.” (Bible Illustrator)

I don’t know about that, but the truth is God made us – wrinkles and all – through Jesus Christ, His Son.

In these last days, God spoke to us through His Son! Not just a baby in a manger, not just any Son, but through Jesus, HIS Son. And what a Son He is! Jesus owns it all. Jesus made it all. And…

JESUS IS LORD OF ALL.

He is above all in the place of the highest power. He is over every other authority or ruler in the universe.

Jesus is God Himself!

Hebrews 1:3 He is the radiance of the glory of God –

That is, the outshining of God’s brightness. In other words, Jesus is not a reflection of God’s glory; Jesus is the light of that glory Himself! More than that, according to verse 3…

Hebrews 1:3 [Jesus is also] 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, . That is, the stamp of God’s essence, or the precise representation of God’s being.

I like how Tony Evens states this, Jesus is “God’s selfie.”

The Greek word for “image” is the same word used in Bible days to describe the imprint on coins, and sometimes to describe the instrument itself that stamped out the coins.

The US Mint takes sheets of metal and feeds them into big machines, stamping out pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters by the thousands.

The mint is all automated except, every once in a while, a human inspector will inspect the quality of the coins. The inspector would check to ensure that the image on those coins was an exact imprint of the stamp in the machine. And if there was the slightest variation, they would stop the machines and discarded the coins. Those coins had to be exact, or they were not accepted.

So it is with Christ. He is the exact imprint of God Himself. In fact, He is not the image made by the stamp; He is the stamp Himself of God!

Jesus is Lord of all, because He is God Himself.

More than that, Jesus is Lord of all, because He carries it all. He upholds everything that He created. He sustains the universe with simply a word.

Hebrews 1:3, “He upholds the universe by the word of His power.”

Unlike the marvel’s super hero’s Jesus does NOT strain under the weight of the world. He is carrying the entire universe “by the word of His power.” He speaks a word, and His whole creation is sustained.

Jesus is Lord of all, because He is God Himself. Jesus is Lord of all, because He carries it all.

And Jesus is Lord of all, because He cleanses us from all sin. He purifies the sins that plague us all. He washes them all away by the blood of His cross.

Hebrews 1:3 After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on High”

To sit at the “right hand of majesty” is to sit in the place of all authority. The right hand is a position of honor and even full authority.  So the “right hand of the Majesty on High” is the place of the highest honor. And that’s the place that Jesus occupies. There is no one higher than He.  He alone is in the position of absolute authority over even the angels themselves.

Hebrews 1:4 …having become so much better than the angels, as He has by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they.

His name is higher than any other name! He is Lord of all. And He had provided purification for the sins of the world through His death on the cross.

Philippians 2:5-9 puts it this way: “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross. Therefore God also has highly exalted Him and given Him the name which is above every name,”

Jesus humbled Himself and God exalted Him to the highest place in the Universe, the place of all authority and power. Jesus is Lord of all, and He died for all to cleanse us from all our sins.

An orphaned boy was living with his grandmother when their house caught fire. The grandmother, trying to get upstairs to rescue the boy, perished in the flames. The boy’s cries for help were finally answered by a man who climbed an iron pipe to get to the boy. He came back down that same pipe with the boy clinging tightly to his neck.

Several weeks later, a public hearing was held to determine who would receive custody of the child. A farmer, a teacher, and the town’s wealthiest citizen all gave reasons why they felt they were the best qualified to give the boy a home. But as they talked, the boy’s eyes remained focused on the floor.

Then a man walked to the front and slowly took his hands out of his pockets. They were severely scarred. As the crowd gasped, the boy cried out, recognizing the man who had saved his life. His hands had been burned climbing up and down the hot pipe. The boy leapt out of his seat and threw his arms around the man’s neck and held on for dear life. The other men silently walked away, leaving the boy and his rescuer alone. Those scarred hands had settled the issue. (Leslie B. Flynn)

And for us, Jesus’ scarred hands settle the issue, as well. They prove that He, and He alone, has rightful custody over our lives. He, and He alone, has the right to rule. Since He loved us enough to die for our sins, He can be trusted to direct our steps; He can be trusted to take charge of our lives.

“…In these last days spoken to us by His Son,” and wow, what a Son He is!  He owns it all. He made it all. And He is Lord of all. Trust Him to be YOUR Lord.  That means to obey His Word and honor Jesus as Lord in your life.   Reject anything that is not from Him or for Him.   Move forward with the Son of God with confidence that you are in God’s hands!