- CHAPTER 2: Jesus, God’s Final Revelation

It does not speak too well for our Christian testimony when God tells us that He has sent His Son to be His final revelation in this world—and we act bored about it! What a gracious gesture it was on God’s part. And the living God and Creator continues to speak to the men and women of a lost race:
In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son. (Hebrews 1:1-2)
But it leaves us with some questions to answer. Why is Christianity so boring to so many in our day? Is Jesus Christ still dead?
“Oh, no,” we are quick to reply. “He is a risen Savior.” Perhaps, then He has lost His power and His authority?
“Of course not,” we respond. “He ascended to the right hand of the Majesty on high.” Then that means He has left us to our own devices? Are we now on our own?
“Not exactly,” we answer with caution. “We really have not been in very close touch with Him lately, but He is supposed to be our great High Priest at the heavenly throne.”
The key to our boredom
That must be the key to our boredom with Christianity: we have not been keeping in very close touch with our Man in glory. We have been doing in our churches all those churchly things that we do. We have done them with our own understanding and in our own energy. But without a bright and conscious confirmation of God’s presence, a church service can be very deadly and dull.
We go to church and we look bored—even when we are supposed to be singing God’s praises. We look bored because we are bored. If the truth were known, we are bored with God, but we are too pious to admit it. I think God would love it if some honest soul would begin his or her prayer by admitting, “God, I am praying because I know I should, but the truth is I do not want to pray. I am bored with the whole thing!”
I doubt if the Lord would be angry at such candor. Rather, I believe He would think, “Well, there is hope for that person. That person is being truthful with Me. Most people are bored with Me and will not admit it.”
Some people believe we are living in a kind of vacuum. They see this as an age in which God is not revealing Himself. They think this is an interval between the time when God spoke to mankind and the time future when He will again be a speaking God. Do you suppose they think God has become tired and is resting for a while?
No, the God who spoke in the past is speaking yet. He is speaking through the revelation of the risen and ascended Christ, the eternal Son. In all the history of God’s dealings with man, there has never been an utter blackout of God’s voice.
We should be thankful for this inspired letter to the Hebrews. It indicates that what God is now saying to mankind through His Son far surpasses anything in the world’s great varieties of human philosophies. God’s Word is not an appeal to the reasoning mind of man. It is a matter to be taken into the heart and soul.
Hebrews is a book and a message and a revelation. It stands high and lofty in its own strength because it is a fitting, forceful portrait of the eternal Son, the great High Priest of God forever and forever. I am sad because a large number of professing Christians who have tried to study the letter have finally given up. They have turned away with the very human comment, “This is too deep, too hard to understand.”
We must approach the Word expectantly
I have always felt that when we read and study the Word of God we should have great expectations. We should ask the Holy Spirit to reveal the Person, the glory and the eternal ministry of our Lord Jesus Christ. Perhaps our problem is in our approach. Perhaps we have simply read our Bibles as we might read a piece of literature or a textbook.
In today’s society, great numbers of people seem unable to deal with God’s revelation in Christ. They run and hide, just as Adam and Eve did. Today, however, they do not hide behind trees but behind such things as philosophy and reason and even theology—believe it or not! This attitude is hard to understand.
In Jesus’ death for our sins, God is offering far more than escape from a much-deserved hell. God is promising us an amazing future, an eternal future. We do not see it and understand it as we should because so much is wrong with our world. The effects o fsin are all around us. The eternal purposes of God lie out yonder. I often wonder if we are making it plain enough to our generation that there will be no other revelation from God except as He speaks it through our Lord Jesus Christ.
If we have ever confessed that we need a Savior, this letter to the Hebrews should be an arresting, compelling book for us. It is a great book of redemption with an emphasis that all things in our lives must begin and end in God. As we study God’s character and attributes, we will discover an important fact. Time and space, matter and motion, life and law, form and order, all purpose and all plan, all succession and all procession begin and end with God. All things move out from God and return to Him again.
I pray that God may open our eyes to see and understand that whatever does not begin in God and end in God is not worthy of any attention from man made in the image of God. We were made for God, to worship and admire and enjoy and serve Him forever.
God has always spoken to us
When the author of Hebrews wrote to declare that “in these last days” God was speaking through His Son, he reminded us that for thousands of years God had been speaking in many ways. Actually, there had been some 4,000 years of human history during which God had been speaking to the human race. It was a race that had separated itself from God, hiding in the Garden of Eden and holding itself incognito ever since.
For most people in the first century of the Christian era, God was only a tradition. Some fondled their man-made gods. Some had ideas of worship and even built altars. Some mumbled incantations and said prayers. But they were alienated from the true God. Although they were made in the image of God, they had rejected their Creator, casting in their lot with mortality.
That situation might have continued until man or nature or both failed and were no more. But God in love and wisdom came once more. He came to speak, revealing Himself this time through His eternal Son. It is because of the coming of Jesus into the world that we now look back on the revelation in the Old Testament as fragmentary and incomplete. We could say that the Old Testament is like a house without doors and windows. Not until the carpenters cut in doors and windows can that house become a worthy, satisfying residence.
Years ago my family and I enjoyed Christian fellowship with a Jewish medical doctor who had come to personal faith in Jesus, the Savior and Messiah. He gladly discussed with me his previous participation in Sabbath services in the synagogue. Often he had been asked to read from the Old Testament Scriptures.
“I often think back on those years of reading from the Old Testament,” he told me. “I had the haunting sense that it was good and true. I knew it explained the history of my people. But I had the feeling that something was missing.” Then, with a beautiful, radiant smile he added, “When I found Jesus as my personal Savior and Messiah, I found Him to be the One to whom the Old Testament was in fact pointing. I found Him to be the answer to my completion as a Jew, as a person and as a believer.”
Whether Jew or Gentile, we were made originally in God’s image, and the revelation of God by His Spirit is a necessity. An understanding of the Word of God must come from the same Spirit who provided its inspiration.
The purpose of Hebrews
The letter to the Hebrews was written to confirm the early Jewish Christians in their faith in Jesus, the Messiah-Savior. The writer takes a recurring theme that Jesus Christ is better because He is superior. Jesus Christ is the ultimate Word from God!
This is a reassuring, strengthening message to us in our day. Hebrews lets us know that while our Christian faith surely was foreshadowed in and grew out of Judaism, it was not and is not dependent on Judaism. The words of our Lord Jesus Christ, spoken while He was here on earth, still speak to us with spiritual authority. At one time He reminded His disciples that new wine must never be put in old, unelastic wineskins. The parable was patent: the old religious forms and traditions could never contain the new wine He was introducing.
He was saying that a fixed gulf exists between vital Christianity and the old forms of Judaism. The Judaism of the Old Testament, with its appointed Mosaic order, had indeed mothered Christianity. But just as the child progresses to maturity and independence, so the Christian faith and the Christian evangel were independent of Judaism. Even if Judaism should cease to exist, Christianity as a revelation from God would—and does—stand firmly upon its own solid foundation. It rests upon the same living, speaking God that Judaism rested on.
It is important for us to understand that God, being one in His nature, is always able to say the same thing to everyone who hears Him. He does not have two different messages about grace or love or justice or holiness. Whether it be from the Father or theSon or the Holy Spirit, the revelation will always be the same. It points in the same direction, though using different ways and different means and different persons.
Begin in Genesis and continue through the Old and New Testaments and you will perceive the uniformity. Yet there are ever-widening elements in God’s revelation to mankind. In early Genesis the Lord spoke in terms of a coming Messiah, foretelling a warfare between the serpent and the Seed of the woman. He noted the victorious Champion-Redeemer who was to come.
The Lord told Eve in very plain words of future human pain in childbearing and of woman’s status in the family. He told Adam of the curse upon the ground and of inevitable death as the result of transgression. To Abel and to Cain He revealed a system of sacrifice and through it a plan of forgiveness and acceptance.
God’s message to Noah was of grace and of the order of nature and government. To Abraham He gave the promise of the coming Seed, the Redeemer who would make an atonement for the race. To Moses, He gave the Law and told of the coming Prophet who was to be like Moses and yet superior to him. Those were God’s spoken messages “in the past.”
God’s message to us
Now, what is God saying to His human creation in our day and time? In brief, He is saying, “Jesus Christ is My beloved Son. Hear Him!”
The reason many do not want to hear what God is saying through Jesus to our generation is not hard to guess. God’s message in Jesus is a moral pronouncement. It brings to light such elements as faith and conscience and conduct, obedience and loyalty. Men and women reject this message for the same reason they have rejected all of the Bible. They do not wish to be under the authority of the moral Word of God.
For centuries God spoke in many ways. He inspired holy men to write portions of the message in a Book. People do not like it and try their best to avoid it because God has made it the final test of all morality, the final test of all Christian ethics.
Some are taking issue with the New Testament record. “How can you prove that Jesus actually said that?” they challenge. Perhaps they are taking issue because they have come across the unforgettable words of Jesus in John’s Gospel:
As for the person who hears my words but does not keep them, I do not judge him. For I did not come to judge the world, but to save it. There is a judge for the one who rejects me and does not accept my words; that very word which I spoke will condemn him at the last day. (John 12:47-48)
God is a living God and Jesus Christ, with all power and all authority, is at the control panel, guiding and sustaining all things in the universe. That concept is fundamental to the Christian faith. It is necessary that we really and fully comprehend that our God is indeed the Majesty in the heavens.
Hebrews reassures us
We can get this assurance from Hebrews, read in the context of the total inspired record. And as we are assured of this, we will have discovered a fundamental means of retaining our sanity in a troubled world and in a selfish society.
If we are going to keep our minds restful at all, we will actually think God into His world—not dismiss Him from His world, as many are trying to do. We will allow Him by faith to be in our beings what He actually is in His world.
The idea that God exists and that He is sovereign in the heavens is absolutely fundamental to human morality. Our view of human decency is also involved in this. Decency is that quality which is proper or becoming. Human decency depends upon an adequate and wholesome concept of God.
Those who take the position that there is no God cannot possibly hold a right and proper view of human nature. That is evident in God’s revelation. There is not a man or woman anywhere who can hold an adequate view of our human nature until he or she accepts the fact that we came from God and that we shall return to God again.
We who have admitted Jesus Christ into our lives as Savior and Lord are happy indeed that we did so. In matters of health care, we are familiar with the custom of a “second opinion.” If I go to a doctor and he or she advises me to have surgery, I can leave that office and consult with another specialist about my condition. Concerning our decision to receive Jesus Christ, we surely would have been ill-advised to go out and try to get a second opinion! Jesus Christ is God’s last word to us. There is no other. God has headed up all of our help and forgiveness and blessing in the person of Jesus Christ, the Son.
In our dark day, God has given us Jesus as the Light of the world. Those who refuse Him give themselves over to the outer darkness that will prevail throughout the eternal ages.
We may not like what the Great Physician tells us about ourselves and our sin. But where else can we go? Peter supplied the answer to that question. “`Lord,’ he said, `to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God’.”
This is the Savior whom God is offering. He is the eternal Son, equal to the Father in His Godhead, co-eternal and of one substance with the Father.
He is speaking. We should listen!