The Preeminence of Christ
Hebrews 1:2-3
If you have your Bibles, we'd like to ask you to turn to Hebrews Chapter 1 and we're going to continue our look at the first three verses of this tremendous Epistle. We began last Sunday with an introduction to the book of Hebrews and laid some groundwork. We began with these first three verses to see that the writer of Hebrews introduces the person of Jesus Christ. And in this particular Epistle, his real theme for the whole Epistle is the person of Christ in His superiority and His preeminence.
That there is non other like Him. That everything and everybody else comes under Him. And so when we come to Hebrews we come to the preeminence of Christ and especially when we come to Hebrews 1:1-3 do we come to the preeminence of Christ. Someone has said He came from the bosom of the Father to the bosom of a woman. He put on humanity that we might put on divinity. He became Son of man that we might becomes sons of God. He was born contrary to the laws of nature, lived in poverty, was reared in obscurity and only once crossed the boundary of the land that which He was born and that in His childhood. He had no wealth or influence and had neither training nor education in the world schools.
His relatives were inconspicuous and uninfluential. In infancy, He startled a king. In boyhood, He puzzled the learned doctors. In manhood, He ruled the course of nature. He walked upon the billows and hushed the seas asleep. He healed the multitudes without medicine and made no charge for His services. He never wrote a book, yet all the libraries of the country could not hold all of the books about Him. He never wrote a song, yet He has furnished the theme for more songs than all songwriters together.
He never founded a college, yet all the schools together cannot boast of as many students as He has. He never practiced medicine, and yet He healed more broken hearts than the doctors have healed broken bodies. This Jesus Christ is the star of astronomy, the rock of geology, the lion and the lamb of zoology, the harmonizer of all discords, and the healer of all diseases. And throughout history great men have come and gone yet He lives on. Herod could not kill Him. Satan could not seduce Him. Death could not destroy Him, and the grave could not hold Him. This is our Christ the preeminent one.
And He is the theme of the Epistle to the Hebrews. He dominates the book from one end to the other. Now Hebrews is a marvelous letter from an unknown writer, an unknown Christian to a congregation of Jewish believers existing somewhere outside the land of Israel who were won to Christ by apostolic missionaries. The emphasis of the Epistle is to Christians, though throughout the Epistle, there are at least five parenthetical warnings to unbelievers, either those who know the truth and reject it or those who haven't yet understood the truth.
And whether He's talking to an unbeliever who needs to receive Christ or a believer who already has, he is constantly announcing the superiority of Christ. As I told you last week, even the Jewish Christians were in danger of staying tangled up with the old covenant and he wanted them to understand that they didn't need it any more that Christ was all in all sufficient.
And so the book of Hebrews then, to the Jewish Christian, is a reminder of the glories of his savior, and it is an encouragement that the new covenant is indeed better than the old covenant and that he does not have to hold on to the old covenant, but can let go of it and grow it in maturity in Christ in the new covenant. And then as I said scattered throughout in at least five parenthetical warnings to the Jewish non-Christian are the consequences, the damning consequences of rejecting the preeminence of Christ and the new covenant.
And fitting the theme of exalting Jesus Christ to the believer and the unbeliever, the opening verses are high and lofty in their exaltation of Christ. And they establish at the very beginning of the Epistle his absolute and total preeminence. Jesus Christ, superior to everything and everyone in existence. Now we began to study this last week and we saw first of all the preparation for Christ in verse 1. Notice it, "God who at sundry times and in diverse manners spoke in time past unto the fathers by the prophets."
Now if man is going to know anything about God, God has to do the speaking. If there is a God, the only way we will ever know that He is and who He is and what He wants is if He speaks. And so God spoke, and the speaking of God is what we call the Old Testament. And He spoke in many ways, in many forms, and many patterns at many different times. But it was always God speaking whether through the prophet or the priest, whether through the learned man or the unlearned man, whether through vision, parable, direct from heaven or indirectly through the mind of man, it was always God speaking so that the Old Testament is the voice of God in fact.
Now the Old Testament was God's message to men announcing the coming of His Son. So really the whole Old Testament is preparation for Christ and thus we say verse 1 is the preparation for Christ and we went into that in detail last week. Then secondly we begin to see the presentation of Christ in verse 2, just the beginning. "Hath in these last days,' that is God hath, "spoken unto us by His Son."
The preparation of Christ was the Old Testament. The presentation of Christ was the New Testament. In the Old Testament, God spoke in many ways, in many forms through many different individuals. In the New Testament God speaks through His Son and all of the writers of the New Testament are commentators on or historians on His Son. For Jesus Christ becomes the theme of the New Testament and either the man is writing by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the history of the life of Christ or He is recording for us principals laid down by the person of Jesus Christ so that the New Testament is, in fact, the revelation of Christ or the presentation of Christ.
The Old Testament, as we saw last week, was fragmentary and no one prophet had the whole truth. But when Jesus came, He was truth incarnate. He was not a fragmentary revelation, He was God fully revealed, fully made manifest. So then there are two stages of divine revelation outlined for us in those opening statements. The Old Testament and the New Testament, now watch this one.
Divine revelation then going from the Old Testament to the New Testament is progressive revelation. Now I used that term last week and I want to define it a little further. Progressive revelation was from promise to fulfillment. The Old Testament is promise. The New Testament is fulfillment. Jesus Christ and, in fact, said "I am not come to destroy the law," that is the Old Testament, "but to do," what, "to fulfill it." And so the revelation progresses from the promise to the fulfillment.
In fact, the Old Testament clearly indicates that men of faith who are writing the Old Testament were trusting in a promise that they hadn't yet understood. They were trusting in a promise that was yet to come for everything. Let me give you a couple of illustrations in the 11th Chapter of Hebrews, for example, verse 39. And here it's speaking about all these heroes faith in the 11th Chapter, all the great saints of the Old Testament, and it says in verse 39, "Great as they were and these all having received witness through faith, received not the promise. God having provided some better thing for us that they without us should not be made perfect."
In other words, they never saw the fulfillment of the promise. They received it not. They merely laid down what was going to happen without seeing it fully realized. For example, again in 1 Peter 1:10, Peter says, the Old Testament prophets looked at what they wrote and didn't even understand it beginning in verse 10 of 1 Peter 1. "Of which salvation the prophets have inquired and searched diligently who prophesied of the grace that should come unto you searching what" person should be fitted in there, "or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ who was in them did signify when he testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ and the glory that should follow. Unto whom it was revealed that not unto themselves, but unto us they did minister the things which are now reported unto you by them that have preached the gospel."
In the Old Testament, they were writing it down in the terms of promise unfulfilled and then they were reading what they wrote to try to figure out what it meant. Now that's the essence of divine inspiration. They didn't even understand the fulfillment of what they wrote. So the Old Testament progressive revelation begins in promise and the New Testament ends in fulfillment. As God speaks in His Son. And if you want to hear what God has to say my friend, you listen to Jesus Christ and nobody else.
There are no other religions that give to us the word of God. There is no salvation in any other than Jesus Christ said Peter. "God hath in these last days spoken unto us by His Son." Now that is to say that God has spoken finally and exclusively in the Jesus Christ. You say, what about the people who are all kinds of religions. If they do not here what God says in the person of Jesus Christ, then they do not hear God at all.
Now the Old Testament tells us at least two places, Jeremiah 23:18 and 22 and then in Amos 3:7 that the prophets were let in on the secrets of God. And they wrote these secrets down without understanding them. But in Jesus Christ they are all understood. He is the fulfillment. He is God's final word. In 2 Corinthians 1:20 it says this, "For all the promises of God in Him are yes and in Him Amen," let it be, "unto the glory of God by us." In other words, every promise resolves itself in Christ. All the promises become yes, ye, stamped and in Him they are all fulfilled. And so Jesus Christ then is the final revelation.
Now notice what it says in Hebrews 1, it says, "Hath in these last days." What last days? In the last days of promise, in the days of fulfillment. The day of the fulfillment of all promises is the last days. In the Old Testament the Jew always saw the last days as the time when all the promises were fulfilled. They saw the last days as the time when Messiah came, the kingdom came, salvation came, Israel was not under bondage any more. The last days was the time when the promises stopped and the fulfillments began. And in fact, that's exactly what Jesus came to do. He came to fulfill the promises. And even though the promise of the kingdom is yet postponed, the age of fulfillment began when Jesus arrived. And it won't finally be completed until we enter into the eternal heavens will it.
But the Old Testament age of promise ended when Jesus arrived. And so we see that Jesus Christ is no mere man. He is the revelation of God ended, climaxed. God fully expressed Himself in Christ in total truth. Now that makes Christ something very special. That makes Christ something more than just a human, however glorified people would like to make of Him. That makes Christ something infinitely superior to any other created being. For He is God manifest in the flesh, the final and last revelation of God in whom all God's promises are fulfilled. And that introduces us to the middle of verse 2 to the theme the preeminence of Christ.
We saw the preparation for Christ, the presentation of Christ, and here the preeminence of Christ. The end of verse 2 and verse 3. Now in this brief but potent section, the Holy Spirit exalts Christ as the full and final revealed expression of God. More exalted, more excellent, and superior to anyone or anything. And in these verses, He tells us that Christ is the end of all things, that He is the beginning of all things, and that He is the middle of all things.
Now the question is always brought up about who Jesus Christ is and some people will say He's a good teacher. And other people will say He's a religious fanatic and somebody else would say He's a fake, and somebody would say He's a criminal, and somebody would say He was a phantom. Somebody else would say He was a political revolutionary. Others might say that He was the highest form of human life, that He had the spark of divinity and He fanned it and all of us have it, be we don't fan it. And He just fanned it and got a little higher than we.
You have a lot of explanations about who Jesus is, but I want you to hear what God says about who He is. And here God gives His answer in a seven-fold presentation of Christ. In just half of verse 2 and verse 3, you will meet the seven excellencies of Jesus Christ. The seven excellencies of the person of Christ and they are fantastic. And this sets Him above and beyond anyone else.
First of all, His heirship. And I don't mean by that a blimp, I mean, H-...just thought of that. I mean, h-e-i-rship, as a son or an heir. His heirship, verse 2. "Hath in these last days spoken unto us by His Son," now He begins the seven excellencies, "whom He hath appointed heir of all things." Stop there. The first thing we learn about Jesus Christ is that He is the heir of all things. Colossians 1:16 says, "All things were made by Him and," what, "for Him." If Jesus is the Son of God, then He is the heir of all that God possesses. And everything that is finds its final meaning when it comes into the control of Jesus Christ.
Way back in the Psalms, the fact that Jesus Christ would be the heir to all that God possesses is indicated. Psalm 2:6, God speaking, "Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion." That is Christ. "I will declare the decree. The Lord hath said unto me, thou art my Son. This day have I begotten thee." And that's a reference to His resurrection. "Ask of me and I shall give thee the nations for thine inheritance and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession. Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron. Thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel."
The Psalmist way back in the Old Testament then indicates that God would have a Son who would become the heir of all that God possesses, and that Son is Jesus Christ. In Psalm 89:27, it says, "Also I will make Him my first born, higher than the kings of the earth." And by first born, He does not mean that Jesus Christ once upon a time didn't exist. The first born is the right to the inheritance. It's not necessarily a chronological term at all. It's a term of legal right. And so He is saying Christ will be my heir.
God's destined kingdom then will belong to Jesus Christ. Everything that ever was made was made by Christ and for Him. Another verse comes to my mind, Romans 11:36. "For of Him and through Him and to Him are all things to whom be glory forever, amen." So everything that exists, exists for Jesus Christ to become His. He is the heir of all things and to be lifted to that kind of plain speaks of His equality with God. To imagine that a Galilean carpenter crucified naked and bleeding like a common criminal on a cross outside the city of Jerusalem, to imagine that that same individual is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords is beyond the natural understanding.
Turn in your Bible for a minute to Revelation Chapter 5 and let me prove it to you. To even fathom that a human being such as Jesus could be the heir of all that there is and King of Kings and Lord of Lords for eternity just doesn't fit into the human brain, apart from divine revelation. Now in...and I've got to give you a little bit of background here. In Revelation Chapter 5, God is sitting on a throne and in His hand, He has a scroll. And that scroll is the title deed to the earth and all that is in it. And that scroll or that title deed is for the heir, the one who has the right to take the earth. And with that in mind we look at verse 1.
"And I saw in the right hand of Him that sat on the throne, written within and on the back sealed with seven seals." It was a law that when you wrote a will in Roman times, you had to seal it seven times. As you rolled it up, you sealed it and then you rolled it and sealed it again and rolled it and sealed it again. You kept on doing that so nobody could break it open and tamper with it. And so the seal is there. This is a will. This is the inheritance. And John says in verse 2, "I saw a strong angel proclaiming with a loud voice, who is worthy to open the scroll and to loose its seals." In other words, who is the rightful heir to the earth? Who has the right to move in and possess the earth?
Verse 3, "And no man in heaven nor in earth neither under the earth was able to open the scroll neither to look on it. And John says in verse 4, "And I wept much because no man was found worthy to open and read the book, neither to look on it. And one of the elders saith unto me weep not, behold the Lion of the tribe Judah, the root of David hath prevailed to open the scroll and to loose its seven seals." Who is that? That's Christ.
"And I beheld and, lo, in the midst of the throne and of the four living creatures," those are angels, "in the midst of the elders stood a Lamb as though it had been slain, having seven horns and seven eyes which are the seven spirits of God," or the seven-fold manifestation of the Spirit, "sent forth unto all the earth. And He came and took the scroll out of the right hand of Him that sat on the throne." Why? Because He had a right to take it. He is the heir to the earth.
And so in Revelation Chapter 5, we see by prophecy in the vision of John that Jesus Christ will some day come take the scroll out of the Father's hand and inherit the earth. Then in Chapter 6 begins the tribulation, which is the record of Christ taking back the earth, which is rightfully His, and one by one He unrolls the seals and you have the seven seals of revelation being opened up. And in each of the seven Christ is possessing and controlling His inheritance.
And finally in Revelation Chapter 11, verse 15, we read this. "And the seventh angel sounded and there were great voices in heaven saying," this is the seventh seal that's opened, "the kingdom of this world is become the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ and He shall reign forever and ever." The climax when He unrolls that seventh and the seven trumpets blows, the earth is His.
Now Jesus Christ then is the rightful heir to all that God has. You say how rich is Jesus? He's the heir of everything. Look at verse 2 again. "Hath appointed heir of all things." You can't minimize that. The Bible says that when He came to earth, He became poor for our sakes that we through His poverty might be made rich. But when He came to earth He was poor. He had nothing for himself. He had not where to lay His head. Even His clothes were taken from Him. He was buried in a grave that didn't belong to Him.
On earth He was poor for our sakes. But He is some day to inherit all things and according to Philippians Chapter 2, all of those existing in the universe, whatever they be when asked who is king will say it is Jesus Son of God, Son of Mary. And so the Holy Spirit says to the Hebrews this Jesus, this Jesus is the heir of all things establishing His first glorious preeminence.
In Acts 2:36, Peter said much the same thing when he said to the Jews, "Therefore let all the house of Israel no assuredly that God hath made that same Jesus whom ye have crucified both Lord and Christ." It's the same Jesus. This carpenter from Galilee who died nailed to a cross is, in fact, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. He will rule the world.
Even Satan knew that because when he tempted Him in the devastation or the wilderness, he tempted Him to take the world the wrong way by bowing down to Satan. And so Jesus is the heir of His inheritance secured by God's promise. And it's a kind of fantastic thing to realize that you and I, according to Romans 8:16-17 shall be joint heirs with Christ. That when we enter into His eternal kingdom, we will jointly possess all that He possesses.
Now it never says we'll be joint Christs or joint Lords, but we will be joint heirs. It'll be ours as well. And amazing as it seems, even though this Jesus Christ is the heir of all that God possesses some still refuse Him. Some still reject Him. Some rejected the Old Testament. Some still reject the Old Testament. God speaks in the New Testament in his Son and they continue to reject.
In Matthew 21:33, the tragic parable reads like this. "Jesus said hear another parable. There was a certain householder who planted a vineyard and hedged it round about and dug a wine press in it and built a tower and leased it to a tenant farmer and went into a far country. And when the time of the fruit drew near, he sent his servants to the farmers that they might receive the fruits of it. And the farmers took his servants and beat one and killed another and stoned another. Again, he sent other servants more than the first and they did the same unto them. But last of all, he sent unto them His Son saying they will reverence my Son. But when the farmer saw the Son they said among themselves, this is the heir come let us kill Him and let us seize on His inheritance and they caught Him and cast Him out of the vineyard and slew Him. And the Lord therefore of the vineyard cometh, what will He do unto those farmers."
Now, I don't even need to explain that parable. They say unto Him, he will miserably destroy those wicked men and will lease his vineyard unto other farmers who shall render him the fruits and their seasons. That's the answer to the people listening. "Jesus saith unto them," listen to this shot, "did you never read in the scriptures the stone which the builders rejected the same has become the head of the corner? This is the Lord's doing and it is marvelous in our eyes. Therefore say I unto you the kingdom of God shall be taken from you and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits of it. And whosoever shall fall on this stone, that is Christ, shall be broken, but on whomsoever it shall fall it will grind him to powder."
To willfully reject Jesus Christ as the world did to crucify Christ, to kill the Son, brings on the utter damnation and destruction of a vengeful God. And to Israel, that parable says since what you had done was so blatant, not only killing all the prophets, but killing the Son, the promise was taken from them and it was given to a new nation, the church, the Gentiles, and they were set aside until the time of their restoration.
Now tragic it is that even though Jesus Christ is clearly the final revelation of God and the ultimate King of Kings and Lord of Lords and heir of everything, men constantly reject Him, crucify Him afresh and put Him to an open shame. The second excellency of Christ that we see here is His creatorship. His creatorship.
Also at the end of verse 2, "By whom also He made the worlds." That is Christ is the agent through which God created the world. By dia means through. The agency through which God created is Christ. John 1:3 says, "All things are made by Him. Without Him was not anything made that was made." Jesus Christ is the agent of creation. Now my friends I've said this many times and to me it's a great single proof of who Jesus was. Jesus had the ability to create and that set Him apart from man. If anyone can create that's God. It has to be. You can't create. As I've said before if you could create, you'd be married to a different woman. A little bit different, not a lot, just a little different.
If you could create, you'd live in a different house, drive a different car, and probably have a different job if you had any job at all. Just sit in your backyard and make money. It's a good thing God didn't give depraved men the right to create isn't it? To be able to create belongs to God and God alone. And the fact that Jesus creates indicates and He is God. That establishes His absolute superiority over everything.
He created everything material. He created everything spiritual. And man has stained his creation with sin when Christ made it good originally, and even the creation, according to Romans 8 groans to be restored to what it knew in the beginning. Now I want you to catch a little thought here that's kind of hidden, if you don't understand the Greek. At the end of verse 2, it says "by whom also He made the worlds." The common Greek word for world is kosmos, but that is not the word that is here.
The word that is here is ionus. It does not mean the material, it means the ages. It means the ages, and He is not saying that Jesus Christ is only responsible for the physical earth. He is saying that Christ is responsible for creating the very concepts of time, space, force, action, and matter. Christ is responsible for creating the whole universe of time and space. That's what He's saying. He does not use the word kosmos, restricting it to this earth. But He makes Christ the creator of the universe, of the ages, of all concepts and bounds of existence.
Christ made it all, every bit of it without effort. Sir John Echols a Nobel laureate in neurophysiology said in Chicago in January 1968, he said that the odds were against the right combination of circumstances occurring to evolve intelligent life on earth. That's a very bright statement. The odds are against evolution bringing us what we've got. He said the odds are about four hundred thousand trillion, trillion, trillion to one. And that's probably not half right. He said it was fantastically improbable. Then he indicated that he believed that such did occur, but it could never occur again on any planet or in any other solar system.
Now, you see, that's the dilemma of science. You see, if you don't have God making it, then you've got real problems. Now we think we've figured it all out that man sort of slid out of some prime evil slime one day and nobody knows where the slime came from, it just was there. And the wondrous creature of man just evolved. That wondrous creature whose heart beats 800 million times in a normal lifetime and pumps enough blood to fill a string of tank cars on a railroad track from Boston to New York.
That same man whose tiny cubic half inch of brain cells contains all the memories of a lifetime. Whose little ear transfers airwaves immediately into fluid without ever losing any sound. Just slid out of some prime evil slime. It was some kind of a comic accident. Well, a man may play the fool and he may be able to live with that kind of idiocy if he never looks beyond his nose. But if that isn't enough, let him just look up once in a while and try to determine whether or not the heavens was cosmic accident.
A. K. Morrison the brilliant scientist tells us that conditions for life in the planet earth and the universe demands so many billions of minute involved circumstances that must appear absolutely simultaneously in the same infinitesimal moment for any kind of life to appear that it becomes beyond belief and beyond possibility. For example, consider the vastness of this universe that just zapped one day from nothing. You could bore a hole in the sun, it'd take a big drill to do it, but you could bore a hole in the sun and you could pour in 1,200,000 ear