Hebrews: greater than angels

He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. (Hebrews 1:3)

This is the first post in our Hebrews read along. You can read the introduction here.

hebrews-outlineI read the entire book twice over the weekend and outlined it briefly. Certainly, one could produce a more detailed outline, but my concern was primarily with mapping the main themes of the book. It’s not exactly artwork, but it is a bit visual. Please feel free to share your own outline in the comments.

The point of the first seven chapters is that Jesus is greater than those who mediated the old covenant. He is greater than those through whom God previously spoke the old covenant, prophets and angels. He is greater than those through whom God administered the old covenant, Moses and Aaron.

Having established this, it is clear that we have greater cause to believe Jesus than did the fathers who believed when God spoke through angels, prophets, and priests. Men of old believed these servants of God, how much more would they believe the Son of God. If we disbelieve the Son, how much more would we have disbelieved the servants?

And so, faith in Christ, as the mediator of a better covenant, is the main point of the entire book.

Here in chapter one, the author is simply establishing Jesus’ identity as the divine Son of God who is greater than the angels. When he says he is the “radiance of the glory of God”, he paints quite a picture for us. Imagine the sun burning brightly in the morning sky. The brightness of the sun’s rays proceeds from the sun’s very core. The two are inseparably bound together, yet one proceeds from the other and makes the whole known to mankind.

So too with Christ. He proceeds from the Father and makes him known, being the very brightness of the glory of God himself. The light of the Son is the fulness of God. All glory and honor are due him. And yet he does not derive his Godhood from himself, but from the Father.

Jesus is the “exact imprint” of God’s nature. This is the language of idolatry. One of the primary commands of the Old Testament was that God’s people were not to fashion for themselves an “image”, or idol, that would represent God. They were not make, nor to worship, such an image or likeness.

Michelangelo’s David, is a block of stone carved into the image of a man, but it is still stone. It represents the likeness of a man, but is not a man. A man may be imaged, but the man is not made of stone.

Man himself is made in the image of God, we represent God as his caretakers, or stewards, here on Earth, but we are not God. We are made of dust, not of divinity.

Jesus however, is the “exact imprint of his nature”. He not only represents God, he is made of the same stuff, for he is God. The two are one. He is the perfect image of God, because in him is all of God. Yet there is still a sense in which he proceeds from the Father as a distinct person. The Father is not the image of the Son.

To make the matter more plain, the author ends his statement by the declaration that all of creation owes its ongoing existence to the sustaining power of Christ’s word. Which returns to the original point, God has spoken to us through the Son and this perfect revelation of himself is so much superior to revelations previously given by angels that our faith should likewise be superior to the faith of those who went before.


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