Hebrews 1

Many, in commenting on this Epistle, have reminded us of the deeper thought which has occurred to them, that Paul is indeed here our example, but was himself following a higher example, even that of him who found us wandering from our duty and our Father’s house, and pleaded for our restoration with his own suffering, and his own most precious blood. But, beyond doubt, the lesson of all others from this Epistle is, that we should carry into the concerns of private life the courtesy and the Christian spirit here shown by the apostle; that we should talk to one another, not as men of the world, but as disciples of Christ; not as Pliny, but as Paul; remembering whose we are, and whom we serve; and that our religion is to be a light shining before men, to show forth the glory of him who hath redeemed us by Christ. A.

1. GOD, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by 2 the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed 3 heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds; who being the brightness of his glory, 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 on the right hand of the Majesty 4 on high; being made so much better than the angels, as he hath by inheritance obtained a 5 more excellent name than they. For unto which of the angels said he at any time, Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee? And again, I will be to him a Father, and he 6 shall be to me a Son? And again, when he bringeth in the first begotten into the world, 7 he saith, And let all the angels of God worship him. And of the angels he saith, Who 8 maketh his angels spirits, and his ministers a flame of fire. But unto the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever: a sceptre of righteousness is the sceptre of thy king- 9 dom. Thou hast loved righteousness, and hated iniquity; therefore God, even thy God, 10 hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows. And, Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth; and the heavens are the works of thine 11 hands: they shall perish; but thou remainest; and they all shall wax old as doth a gar- 12 ment; and as a vesture shalt thou fold them up, and they shall be changed: but thou art 13 the same, and thy years shall not fail. But to which of the angels said he at any time, Sit 14 on my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool? Are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation?

THE Scriptures have a wonderful unity, for all their books give us the one person of our Lord. Human history has no other center of convergence and divergence than the cross on Calvary, and no other prophetic end than the kingdom of Immanuel; and thus is Christ the life of all history. All vital theological systems, as they are based in the Trinity, so do they center in the mediation of Christ. Consciously or unconsciously they pursue that plan which makes the Trinity the foundation, each separate truth a column, each connecting truth an arch, and Christ the dome that crowns the whole, while the work of the Holy Spirit, like the ascending spire, leads us toward heaven. H. B. S.

Now that the end of all the beauty and awfulness of Zion was rapidly approaching, what could take the place of the Temple, and that which was behind the veil, and the Levitical sacrifices, and the Holy City, when they should cease to exist? What compensation could Christianity offer for the loss which was pressing the Hebrew Christian more and more? The writer of this Epistle answers: “Your new faith gives you Christ, and, in Christ, all you seek, all your fathers sought. In Christ, the Son of God, you have an all-sufficient Mediator, nearer than angels to the Father, eminent above Moses as a benefactor, more sympathizing and more prevailing than the high priest as an intercessor: his Sabbath awaits you in heaven; to his covenant the old was intended to be subservient; his atonement is the eternal reality of which sacrifices are but the passing shadow; his city heavenly, not made with hands. Having him, believe in him with all your heart, with a faith in the unseen future, strong as that of the saints of old, patient under present and prepared for coming woe, full of energy, and hope, and holiness, and love.” Such was the teaching of the Epistle to the Hebrews. S.

THERE is no portion of the New Testament whose authorship is so disputed, nor any of which the inspiration is more indisputable. Every sound reasoner must agree with Jerome, that it matters nothing whether it were written by Luke, by Barnabas, or by Paul, since it is allowed to be the production of the apostolic age, and has been read in the public service of the Church from the earliest times. Those, therefore, who conclude with Calvin that it was not written by Paul, must also join with him in thinking the question of its authorship a question of little moment, and in “embracing it without controversy as one of the apostolical Epistles.” We need not scruple to speak of this portion of Scripture by its canonical designation, as “the Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews.” Jerome expresses the greatest doubts concerning its authorship; and Origen says that “the writer is known to God alone.” The same doubts are expressed by Eusebius and by Augustine; yet all these great writers refer to the words of the Epistle as the words of Paul. In fact, whether written by Barnabas, by Luke, by Clement, or by Apollos, it represented the views, and was impregnated by the influence, of the great apostle, whose disciples even the chief of these apostolic men might well be called. By their writings, no less than by his own, he being dead yet spake. C.—The Epistle is Pauline in thought, design, and argument, even though it may not be in form and expression. The opinion that the apostle Paul is the author, though not the writer and composer, seems, on the whole, the most probable. A. S.—The more thoroughly we enter into the current of thought and line of doctrinal discussion in the Epistle, the more we are persuaded that the mind of Paul is at work. He may have sketched out the argument, and one of his friends (no one more fit than Apollos) may have written it out under his general sanction. D. F.

It may be held as certain that the Epistle was addressed to Hebrews Christians. Throughout its pages there is not a single reference to any other class of converts. Its readers are assumed to be familiar with the Levitical worship, the temple services, and all the institutions of the Mosaic ritual. They are called to view in Christianity the completion and perfect consummation of Judaism. They are called to behold in Christ the fulfillment of the law, in his person the antitype of the priesthood, in his offices the eternal realization of the sacrificial and mediatorial functions of the Jewish hierarchy. C.—The Jews did everything in their power to withdraw their brethren who had been converted from the Christian faith. To persecutions and threats they added arguments derived from the excellency of the Jewish religion. They regarded the law of Moses as given by the ministration of angels; that Moses was far superior to Jesus of Nazareth, who suffered an ignominious death; that the public worship of God, instituted by their great legislator and prophet, was truly splendid, and worthy of Jehovah; while the Christians, on the contrary, had no established priesthood, no temple, no altars. These arguments being both plausible and successful, the apostle wrote this Epistle to prove that the same God who gave the former revelations of his will to the fathers of the Jewish nation, by his prophets, had in these last days spoken to all mankind by his Son; consequently that these revelations, emanating from the same divine source, could not possibly contradict each other. The Epistle may be considered as the key to the Old Testament, unlocking all its hidden mysteries, and may be divided into three separate heads. First, that which relates to the person of the Son of God, as he had been described in the Old Testament. Secondly, to show that the religion of the gospel is the same under both Testaments, being shadowed out in the Old. And, thirdly, to prove that the Church of Israel was a figure of the Church of Christ. G. T.—The writer demonstrates the infinite exaltation of Christ above Moses, Aaron, and all angels, as well as the superiority of the new covenant established by him over the old. The arguments are mostly drawn from the Old Testament itself, which is to the writer a significant symbol and shadow of good things to come, prefiguring in all its wonderful institutions the higher glory of Christianity, but at the same time predicting its own dissolution as soon as the antitype and substance should be revealed. True, the Epistle implies throughout the existence still of the Jewish economy and the Levitical cultus, but represents them as superannuated and in process of decay, and points to the impending judgment which a few years afterward destroyed the Holy City and the Temple. These exceedingly interesting expositions are interwoven with the most precious consolations in view of the heavy persecutions from the unbelieving Jews, and with the most earnest and impressive exhortations to steadfastness in the Christian faith. For the more valuable the blessings of the new covenant in comparison with the old, the greater are its obligations also, and the heavier the condemnation for rejecting it. P. S.—To use one of its own expressions, the whole of this Epistle is a “looking unto Jesus”; and it derives its peculiar value from its showing us how all things under the law looked to Jesus also; how the Levitical ritual, the ceremonial cleansings, the prophecies of seers, the sacrifices of priests, and the functions of theocratic princes, were a prediction and an expectation of that Son of the Highest who should be the Revealer of God, the Reconciker of God and man, and the Ruler of his own redeemed and regenerate kingdom. Hamilton.

1,2. Over and above the discoveries of the mind of God which are contained in the natural order of things, and which we may discern by an intuitive faculty or infer by a reasoning process, we have that which, in the clearest, fullest, strongest sense, must be called the “word of God.” Nay, he has not only given us a word, he has done more, he has given us words, separate, articulate, definite communications, each as truly divine as is the whole word which they compose. Such words of God were spoken of in old time as “coming to” particular persons, who were to be the messengers of those words to others. The prophets testified, when they spoke, that “the word of the Lord came to them”; and the testimony was authenticated of God and accepted of men. But the communications made through them were only introductory. “In sundry parts and in divers ways God having spoken of old to the fathers in the prophets, at the end of these days spake to us in his Son.” Those to whom the word of God came were succeeded by him who is himself the “Word of God.” He became man, and stood forth as the one real and eternal Prophet, the medium of communication between the mind of God and the mind of man. On the one side he received, on the other he gave. He spoke to the world the words which he had heard with his Father; and, in closing his personal teaching in the flesh, he lifted up his eyes to heaven and said, “I have given unto them the words which thou gavest me.” On the truth of this saying stands the whole fabric of creeds and doctrines. It is the ground of authority to the preacher, of assurance to the believer, of existence to the Church. It is the source from which the perpetual stream of Christian teaching flows. All our testimonies, instructions, exhortations, derive their first origin and continuous power from the fact that the Father has given to the Son, the Son has given to his servants, the words of truth and life. T. D. B.—These last days. But it may be asked, How could those days of primitive Christianity be called the last days, inasmuch as since those days eighteen hundred years have elapsed, and still the world’s history has not reached its close! The answer is obvious. No new dispensation has been established since God sent his Son into the world to die for sins, and, in consequence of his Son’s exaltation, poured down from heaven the gifts of his Spirit. And it is destined to be the last economy under which man is to be tried. E. M. G.

A Son! the Son! God’s Son! is the emphatic word in this passage, and it is the key to this Epistle. A Son, his express image, had come and lived on earth, and in a “mode” the most express and assuring he revealed the Father. We saw how he is not an abstraction, or an attribute, but a living person. We saw how God loves, and pities, and consoles. We saw how God dislikes pretense, and hypocrisy, and self-sufficiency; how he delights in humility, ingenuousness, and a believing or trustful disposition. We saw how God pardons sin, and how by long-suffering and wisdom he cures infirmity and elevates into the beauty of holiness characters which, as he found them, were feeble, selfish, and unlovely. And now that God has spoken in his Son, the revelation is not only precise and explicit, but it is supremely authoritative, and peculiarly kind and sympathetic. On the one hand, its sanctions are as august as its author is divine; on the other, its tone is as tender as the speaker is brotherly. Hamilton.

2. The grandeur of the latter discovery of God was derived from two views of a person. This person was not only a revealer, as all prophets were revealers of God, but he was in himself the revelation of God. The prophets spake concerning God and a coming Messiah. He spake concerning God and himself. Rather, he spake of God when he spake of himself. Nay, more, when he did not speak, but simply stood forth and wrought, so as to be seen and known, even then he most fully disclosed the nature and the character of God. He had only to say, “I and my Father are one,” “Whoso hath seen me hath seen the Father,” and then to stand still or move along before the eyes of men to be looked upon, in order to make manifest to men all of God that they could comprehend. J. T. D.—A mind informed from above will, in a peculiar manner, catch by sympathy the greatness, the magnanimity, which belongs to the character and actions of the Saviour of the world. In this character and in these actions, in these words of grace and deeds of mercy, scope is found, and more than scope, for the profoundest emotions which the spirit of man may at all sustain. The mind reaches no limit on this ground; the objects of its meditation, by a combination mysterious truly, possess at once all the distinctness and vivacity that belongs to what is human, and all the depth and height that attach to what is divine. Scarcely a sentence recorded by the evangelists, and scarcely an action narrated, fails to present, with more or less distinctness and in wondrous unison, the divine and human attributes of him who spake “as never man spake.” I. T.

3. In both the old Scripture and the new, whatever may be the word for the divine glory, its symbol is always light. God is light; he is a sun; he dwelleth in light; he clothes himself with light as with a garment. The light in the cloud was the token of his presence; the light of the Shechinah was the proof of his indwelling; the light in the temple was the sign of his majestic appearing to the prophet. Then, again, in the new Scripture, God is light; he is the Father of lights, the effulgence that causes the night to cease in heaven and the sun to be needless to the eternal day. From this symbol of the divine grandeur and excellence we receive our expressive word glory. It conveys the conception of outshining splendor. Of this glory of God, “Jesus Christ, his Son,” is said to be “the brightness.” It is not said of him, “who” disclosing or showing, but “who being the brightness of his glory.” Expanding the idea, the ancient creed declared him “light of light,” “very God of very God.” Jesus Christ is God’s very self revealed and known. He could say of himself truly, as he said, “He that seeth me seeth him that sent me.” J. T. D.—Believe the Son to be equal with the Father, but still the Son to be from the Father, and not the Father from the Son. With the Father is origination; with the Son equality. The Father always, the Son always. The Father without beginning of time, the Son without beginning of time; never the Father before the Son, never the Father without the Son. But still, since the Son is God from God the Father, and the Father is God, but not from God the Son, let it not displease us to honor the Son in the Father. For to honor the Son renders honor to the Father, and does not lessen his divinity. Aug.

4-6. The proofs of the eternal Deity of Christ are produced with that evidence of Scripture light that only a veiled heart, obstinate infidelity, can resist. The medium which the inspired penman makes use of is the comparing him with the angels, the most noble flower of the creation, and showing that he is infinitely dignified above them. This he does by a strong connection of arguments: First, by his title that is divinely high and peculiar to himself. He is declared by the testimony of the eternal Father to be his Son (vs. 4, 5) in the most proper and sublime sense; begotten of him, and therefore having the same essential perfections of the Godhead in their uncreated glory. But the angels are not dignified with this name in any places of Scripture, where the excellency of the angels is in the fullest terms expressed. And that this name is taken from his nature is clearly proved; because adoration is due to him upon this account, even from the angels of the highest order. When he bringeth in the first begotten into the world, he saith, “And let all the angels of God worship him” (v. 6). Bates.—Which one, then, of all the heroes, sages, saints, of any nation, commemorated by monuments, by literature, by private veneration, shall claim to be brother, in kind or in degree, of him whom even all the angels of God are commanded to worship?

7. His angels are his messengers. In so sublime a ceremonial as the visible ushering into the world of the Person of its Lord, they might well come as winged forms in the sky, heavenly light clothing them, singing a supernatural hymn; the whole appearance a court befitting the glory of the King. When God bringeth his Only-begotten Son into the world, he “maketh his angels spirits, and his ministers a flame of fire.” We call it supernatural, and it is; yet what could be more natural to him than that, when the eternal Son, begotten of his Father before all worlds, becomes a man—because men could not be thoroughly and inwardly saved but by the sacrifice and sympathy of a Saviour entering into the poverty and suffering of their mortal estate—those intermediate orders of life which stand between him and us should attend his advent, and announce the transcendent blessing to the world? It was too high a mystery to be heralded, even in music, from the stained and sinning lips of men. F. D. H.

8. The Father creates and gives life, grace, and peace, and even so gives the Son the same gifts. Now, to give grace, peace, everlasting life, forgiveness of sins, to justify, to save, to deliver from death and hell—surely these are not the works of any creature, but of the sole majesty of God; things which the angels themselves can neither create nor give. Therefore, such works pertain to the high majesty, honor, and glory of God, who is the only and true Creator of all things. We must think of no other God than Christ; that God which speaks not out of Christ’s mouth is not God. God, in the Old Testament, bound himself to the throne of grace; there was the place where he would hear, so long as the policy and government of Moses stood and flourished. In like manner, he will still hear no man or human creature, but only through Christ. We seek God everywhere; but, not seeking him in Christ, we find him nowhere. Luther.

13. To which of them said he, Sit on my right hand? This they look upon with perpetual wonder, but not with envy nor repiring; yea, they rejoice in the infinite wisdom of God in this design, and his infinite love to poor, lost mankind. It is wonderful indeed to see him filling the room of their fallen brethren with new guests from earth; not only that sinful man should thus be raised to a participation of glory with them who are spotless, sinless spirits, but that humanity in the Redeemer should be dignified with a glory so far beyond them. This is that mystery they are intent in looking and prying into, and can not, nor ever shall, see the bottom of it; for it hath no bottom. L.

14. There are many reasons to conclude that the angels who never sinned are constantly employed. The very name angel signifies a messenger; one who is appointed to execute a commission. They do the commandments of God. An angel appeared to Zacharias and to Mary. Angels announced the birth of the Saviour, and they attended him in his temptation and in his final agony. They conducted the apostles out of prison. An angel advised Cornelius to send for Peter. An angel informed Paul that he and his companions should not perish on their voyage to Rome. And the separation of the righteous from the wicked at the day of judgment is ascribed to the angels. In short, they are described as ministering spirits sent forth to minister to them who are heirs of salvation. All these passages go to prove that their great work is not silent adoration, abstract contemplation, but activity, boundless activity. B. B. E.