- CHAPTER 4: Jesus, God’s Express Image

I WISH I COULD comprehend everything that the inspired Word is trying to reveal in the statement that Jesus, the eternal Son, is the “radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being” (Hebrews 1:3). This much I do know and understand: Jesus Christ is Himself God. As a believer and a disciple, I rejoice that the risen, ascended Christ is now my High Priest and intercessor at the heavenly throne.
The writer to the Hebrews commands our attention with this descriptive, striking language:
In these last days has spoke to us by his Son,… [who is] the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. (Hebrews 1:2-3)
We trust the Scriptures because we believe they are inspired—God-breathed. Because we believe them, we believe and confess that Jesus was very God of very God.
Nothing anywhere in this vast, complex world is as beautiful and as compelling as the record of the Incarnation, the act by which God was made flesh to dwell among us in our own human history. This Jesus, the Christ of God, who made the universe and who sustains all things by his powerful word, was a tiny babe among us. He was comforted to sleep when He whimpered in His mother’s arms. Great, indeed, is the mystery of godliness.
Yet, in this context, some things strange and tragic have been happening in recent years within Christianity. For one, some ministers have advised their congregations not to be greatly concerned if theologians dispute the virgin birth of Jesus. The issue, they say, is not important. For another thing, some professing Christians are saying they do not want to be pinned down as to what they really believe about the uniqueness and reality of the deity of Jesus, the Christ.
We are convinced
We live in a society where we cannot always be sure that traditional definitions still hold. But I stand where I always have stood. And the genuine believer, no matter where he may be found in the world, humbly but surely is convinced about the person and position of Jesus Christ. Such a believer lives with calm and confident assurance that Jesus Christ is truly God and that He is everything the inspired writer said He is. He is “the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being.” This view of Christ in Hebrews harmonizes with and supports what Paul said of Jesus when he described Him as “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation”(Colossians 1:15), in whom “all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form” (Colossians 2:9).
Bible-believing Christians stand together on this. They may have differing opinions about the mode of baptism, church polity or the return of the Lord. But they agree on the deity of the eternal Son. Jesus Christ is of one Substance with the Father—begotten, not created (Nicene Creed). In our defense of this truth we must be very careful and very bold—belligerent, if need be.
The more we study the words of our Lord Jesus Christ when He lived on earth among us, the more certain we are about who He is. Some critics have protested, “Jesus did not claim to be God, you know. He only said He was the Son of Man.”
It is true that Jesus used the term Son of Man frequently. If I can say it reverently, He seemed proud or at least delighted that He was a man, the Son of man. But He testified boldly, even among those who were His sworn enemies, that He was God. He said with great forcefulness that He had come from the Father in heaven and that He was equal with the Father.
We know what we believe. Let no one with soft words and charming persuasion argue us into admission that Jesus Christ is any less than very God of very God.
God became flesh in Jesus Christ
The writer of Hebrews was informing the persecuted, discouraged Jewish Christians concerning God’s final and complete revelation in Jesus Christ. He spoke of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Then he declared that Another had come. Although made flesh, He was none other than this same God. Not the Father, for God the Father was never incarnated and never will be. Rather, He is God the eternal Son, the radiance of the Father’s glory and the exact representation of His being.
Something has happened to the word glory, especially as it relates to the description of deity. Glory is one of those beautiful, awesome words that have been dragged down until they have lost much of their meaning. The old artists may have had something to do with it, depicting the glory of Jesus Christ as a luminous halo—a shining neon hoop around His head. But the glory of Jesus Christ was never a luminous ring around the head. It was never a misty yellow light.
We are inclined to irreverence
I have a difficult time excusing our careless and irreverent attitudes concerning our Lord and Savior. I feel strongly that worshipping Christians should never be guilty of using a theological word or expression in a popular or careless sense unless we explain what we are doing. It is only proper when we speak of the glory of God the Son to actually refer to that uniqueness of His person and character that excites our admiration and wonder.
To those who love this One and serve Him, His glory does not mean yellow light or neon hoops. His true glory is that which causes the heavenly beings to cover their faces in His presence. It brings forth their worshipful praise: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God of hosts!” The glory of the Lord is that forth-shining that gives Him universal praise. It demands love and worship from His created beings. It makes Him known throughout His creation.
It is the character of God that is the glory of God.
God is not glorified until men and women think gloriously of Him. Yet it is not what people think of God that matters. God once dwelt in light which no one could approach. But He desired to speak, to express Himself. So He created the heavens and the earth, filling earth with His creatures, including mankind. He expected man to respond to that in Him which is glorious, admirable and excellent.
That response from His creation in love and worship is His glory. When we say that Christ is the radiance of God’s glory, we are saying that Christ is the shining forth of all that God is. Yes, He is the shining forth, the effulgence. When God expressed Himself, it was in Christ Jesus. Christ was all and in all. He is the exact representation of God’s person.
“Exact representation,” “person”
The word person in this context is difficult of comprehension. Church history testifies to the difficulties theologians have had with it. Sometimes the person of God has been called substance. Sometimes it has been called essence. The Godhead cannot be comprehended by the human mind. But the eternal God sustains, upholds, stands beneath all that composes the vast created universe. And Jesus Christ has been presented to us as the exact representation of God’s person—all that God is.
The words exact representation, of course, have their origin in the pressed-upon-wax seal that authenticated a dignitary’s document or letter. The incarnate Jesus Christ gives visible shape and authenticity to deity. When the invisible God became visible, He was Jesus Christ. When the God who could not be see nor touched came to dwell among us, He was Jesus Christ.
I have not suggested this picture of our Lord Jesus Christ as a kind of theological argument. I am simply trying to state, in the best way I can, what the Holy Spirit has spoken through the consecrated writer of the letter to the Hebrews.
What is God like?
What is God like? Throughout the ages, that question has been asked by more people than any other. Our little children are only a few years old when they come in their innocent simplicity and inquire of us, “What is God like?” Philip the apostle asked it for himself and for all mankind: “`Show us the Father and that will be enough for us’“ (John 14:8). Philosophers repeatedly have asked the question. Religionists and thinkers have wrestled with it for milleniums.
Paul preached at Athens and spoke of mankind’s quest for the “Unknown God.” He declared God’s intention that mankind “`would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. “For in him we live and move and have our being”’“ (Acts 17:27-28). Paul was speaking about the presence of God in the universe—a Presence that becomes the living, vibrant voice of God causing the human heart to reach out after Him. Alas! Man has not known where to reach because of sin. Sin has blinded his eyes, dulled his hearing and made his heart unresponsive.
Sin has made man like a bird without a tongue. It has within itself the instinct and the desire to sing, but not the ability. The poet Keats expressed beautifully, even brilliantly, the fantasy of the nightingale that had lost its tongue. Not being able to express the deep instinct to sing, the bird died of an over-powering suffocation within.
Eternity in our hearts
God made mankind in His own image. He “set eternity in the hearts of men” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). What a graphic picture! How much it explains ourselves to us! We are creatures of time—time in our hands, our feet, our bodies—that causes us to grow old and to die. Yet all the while we have eternity in our hearts!
One of our great woes as fallen people living in a fallen world is the constant warfare between the eternity in our hearts and the time in our bodies. This is why we can never be satisfied without God. This is why the question “What is God like?” continues to spring from every one of us. God has set the values of eternity in the hearts of every person made in His image.
As human beings, we have ever tried to satisfy ourselves by maintaining a quest, a search. We have not forgotten that God was. We have only forgotten what God is like.
Philosophy has tried to give us answers. But the philosophical concepts concerning God have always been contradictory. The philosopher is like a blind person trying to paint someone’s portrait. The blind person can feel the face of his subject and try to put some brush strokes on canvas. But the project is doomed before it is begun. The best that philosophy can do is to feel the face of the universe in some ways, then try to paint God as philosophy sees Him.
Most philosophers confess belief in a “presence” somewhere in the universe. Some call it a “law”—or “energy” or “mind” or” essential virtue.” Thomas Edison said if he lived long enough, he thought he could invent an instrument so sensitive that it could find God. Edison was an acknowledged inventor. He had a great mind and he may have been a philosopher. But Edison knew no more about God or what God is like than the boy or girl who delivers the morning newspaper.
Religions have no answers
The religions of the world have always endeavored to give answers concerning God. The Pharisees, for example, declare that God is light. So they worship the sun and fire and forms of light. Other religions have suggested that God is conscience, or that He may be found in virtue. For some religions, there is solace in the belief that God is a principle upholding the universe.
There are religions that teach that God is all justice. They live in terror. Others say that God is all love. They become arrogant. Like the philosophers, religionists have concepts and views, ideas and theories. In none of them has mankind found satisfaction.
Greek paganism had a pantheon of gods. They saw the sun rising in the east and moving westward in a blaze of fire and called it Apollo. They heard the wind roaring along the sea coast and named her Eos, mother of the winds and the stars. They saw the waters of the ocean churning themselves into foam and named him Neptune. They imagined a goddess hovering over the fruitful fields of grain each year and gave her the name Ceres.
Given such a pagan outlook, there is no end to the fantasies of gods and goddesses. In Romans 1 God has described the human condition that incubates such aberrations. Men and women, intrigued by their sin, did not want the revelation of a living, speaking God. They deliberately ignored the only true God, crowded Him out of their lives. In His place they invented gods of their own: birds and animals and reptiles.
Often enough we have been warned that the morality of any nation or civilization will follow its concepts of God. A parallel truth is less often heard: When a church begins to think impurely and inadequately about God, decline sets in.
We must think nobly and speak worthily of God. Our God is sovereign. We would do well to follow our old-fashioned forebears who knew what it was to kneel in breathless, wondering adoration in the presence of the God who is willing to claim us as His own through grace.
Jesus is what God is like
Some are still asking, “What is God like?” God Himself has given us a final, complete answer. Jesus said, “`Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father,’“ (John 14:9).
For those of us who have put our faith in Jesus Christ, the quest of the ages is over. Jesus Christ, the eternal Son, came to dwell among us, being “the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being.” For us, I say, the quest is over because God has now revealed Himself to us. What Jesus is, the Father is. Whoever looks on the Lord Jesus Christ looks upon all of God. Jesus is God thinking God’s thoughts. Jesus is God feeling the way God feels. Jesus is God now doing what God does.
In John’s Gospel, we have the record of Jesus telling the people of His day that He could do nothing of Himself. He said, “`The Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does’“ (John 5:19). It was on the strength of such testimony that the Jewish leaders wanted to stone Him for blasphemy.
How strange it is that some of the modern cults try to tell us that Jesus Christ never claimed to be God. Yet those who heard Him 2,000 years ago wanted to kill Him on the spot because He claimed to be one with the Father.
In Jesus the revelation is complete
God’s revelation of Himself is complete in Jesus Christ, the Son. No longer need we ask, “What is God like?” Jesus is God. He has translated God into terms we can understand.
We know how He feels toward a fallen woman: “`Neither do I condemn you,’ Jesus declared. `Go now and leave your life of sin’“ (John 8:11).
We know how He feels toward fishermen and workmen and common people: “`Come, follow me,’ Jesus said, `and I will make you fishers of men’“ (Mark 1:17).
We know what God thinks of babies and little children: “Jesus said, `Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these’“(Matthew 19:14).
Jesus has been in our world. He spoke and taught about all these things and about everything that concerns us. The record shows that His listeners were amazed and astonished, almost to the point of being frightened. “The crowds were amazed at his teaching, because he taught as one who had authority” (Matthew 7:28-29). “`No one ever spoke the way this man does’“ (John 7:46).
When you read your New Testament and realize afresh the attitudes and the utterances of our Lord Jesus Christ, you will know exactly how God feels. Where can we look in all the vast creation around us to find anything as beautiful—as utterly, awesomely, deeply beautiful—as the Incarnation? God became flesh to dwell among us, to redeem us, to restore us, to save us completely. Young or old or in between, we join in Lowell Mason’s hymn of praise:
O could I speak the matchless worth,
O could I sound the glories forth
Which in my Savior shine,
I’d soar and touch the heavenly strings,
And vie with Gabriel while he sings
In notes almost divine.
I’d sing the characters He bears,
And all the forms of love He wears,
Exalted on His throne:
In loftiest songs of sweetest praise,
I would to everlasting days
Make all His glories known.
There is a closing stanza which anticipates the welcome we shall receive in heaven and the everlasting career awaiting us there:
Soon the delightful day will come
When my dear Lord will bring me home,
And I shall see His face:
Then with my Savior, Brother, Friend,
A blest eternity I’ll spend,
Triumphant in His grace.
The convinced man who breathed those words was saying that Jesus is God! And the world above and the poorer world beneath join in response: “Amen, amen! Jesus is God!”