Sermon Text: Hebrews 1:1–14
Preacher: Pastor Brian Sauvé
The Son & The Seraphim
I want to stop for a moment to think about what it is that we are doing together, and doing right now. We are doing something far more glorious than what happened in the Temple, or on Sinai, or at the Feasts of Israel.
We have this strange, and totally wrong idea, I think, very much lodged in our collective understanding that the worship of the Old Covenant system was more serious, scary, and glorious than the worship of God by the Church in the New.
Think about Mount Sinai for a moment—a terrifying, glorious thing! When God ransomed his people out of slavery in Egypt, he brought them to Mount Sinai, and called Moses up as their representative, to receive his Law. The mountain was smoking and fiery, and so holy was this God to whom they were coming, that if even a beast, if even their oxen, were to even touch the base of that mountain—the beast would fall dead.
And maybe you think, “If you’re point is that our little church service right now is more awesome than that, Brian, I’m not sure you’re coming out of the gate very strong.” Just wait. Listen to how Hebrews 12 will describe what we are doing, and doing, right now:
“For you have not come to what may be touched, a blazing fire and darkness and gloom and a tempest and the sound of a trumpet and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that no further messages be spoken to them. For they could not endure the order that was given, “If even a beast touches the mountain, it shall be stoned.” Indeed, so terrifying was the sight that Moses said, “I tremble with fear.” But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.”
-Hebrews 12:18–24
Whoa. We don’t, in other words, so much bring God down from heaven in our worship, as we do ascend to his throne together in our worship, to the heavenly Jerusalem, that better mountain than Mount Sinai—Mount Zion!—and join with a multitude of seraphim and cherubim, angelic hosts in festal joy. We are, right now, gathered spiritually at the foot of Christ’s throne with the angelic hosts.
Side note: We thought we needed to add smoke machines to that?
Why is our worship greater, more glorious? Because we come, not through types and shadows, but through the Substance, through Christ—who surpasses all the shadows. I say all of this, because the point that the author of Hebrews will spend the whole of the first chapter making, is that the Lord Jesus is gloriously greater than those angels with whom we gather in our festal service.
And if we don’t get a picture for just how terrifying and awesome those angels are, we might be tempted to think, “So what?” So in light of that, this morning we will try to do two big things:
We will try to understand what angels are, and why one might be tempted to give them undue glory.
We’ll see that Jesus is infinitely better than angels, because he is the divine Prophet, Priest, and King.
As we go, we will stop and ask the question, “So what?” three times—because this is anything but impractical theological theorizing. The supremacy of Christ is one of the most practically relevant truths you could understand.
So let’s begin by reading the entire first chapter of Hebrews 1, then we will ask for the Lord’s help and get to work.
“Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. 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. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs.
For to which of the angels did God ever say,
“You are my Son,
today I have begotten you”?Or again,
“I will be to him a father,
and he shall be to me a son”?And again, when he brings the firstborn into the world, he says,
“Let all God's angels worship him.”
Of the angels he says,
“He makes his angels winds,
and his ministers a flame of fire.”But of the Son he says,
“Your throne, O God, is forever and ever,
the scepter of uprightness is the scepter of your kingdom.
You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness;
therefore God, your God, has anointed you
with the oil of gladness beyond your companions.”And,
“You, Lord, laid the foundation of the earth in the beginning,
and the heavens are the work of your hands;
they will perish, but you remain;
they will all wear out like a garment,
like a robe you will roll them up,
like a garment they will be changed.But you are the same,
and your years will have no end.”And to which of the angels has he ever said,
“Sit at my right hand
until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet”?Are they not all ministering spirits sent out to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation?”
-Hebrews 1:1–14
What are Angels?
So, as verse 4 makes clear, the main point the author would have us take home from this first chapter is that Jesus is better than angels. We would probably be served, then, by asking the obvious question, “What are angels?”
There are lots of ways to answer that question. Both the Hebrew word for angel, malak, and the Greek word for angels, angelos, literally mean “messenger.” So we see that angels are messengers of God, and we certainly see them in that role in the Bible, speaking on behalf of God to everyone from Abraham to Moses to Zechariah to Mary to Paul.
We could say that angels are liturgical beings, ministering spirits, keeping the order of the continual worship service before the throne of God, as we see in Isaiah and Revelation.
Angels are strange, awesome, terrifying, and glorious beings—and when you understand this, you will see why so many have given them undue regard, even worship. John repeatedly attempts to worship angels in Revelation, so great are they to him.
The Essenes—a sect of Judaism popular at the time of the writing of Hebrews, and one of the sources of potential temptation for Jewish Christians to abandon Christ—gave angels this kind of undue regard.
Angels are terrifying things, even those righteous angels that are in submission to God. They do not cease to be awesome, terrifying things when they cease to worship God. We see, for example, in the book of Daniel, that before Jesus shook the heavens and brought the demonic powers and principalities to open shame on the cross, the thrones of human kingdoms were upheld through demonic power. Demons upheld wicked pagan empires.
So before we too cavalierly dismiss those ancient, bloodthirsty, and evil religions—worshiping Molech and Chemosh and other ancient deities that demanded child sacrifice and temple prostitution—as just primitive people being primitive, pause and realize that demons have been masquerading as gods and meddling in human affairs as early as the Nephilim in Genesis.
Angels are terrifying, awesome beings.
So remember, the letter is written just prior to the destruction of the Temple and final removal of the Old Covenant system of worship, the Jewish aeon. Their great temptation was to “shrink back” to Jerusalem and be destroyed with it.
It was to go back to the shadows. One of the things that marked many diseased sects of Jewish worship at this time was an undue regard for angels. Like I said a moment ago, the Essenes, a separatist group that gave us the Dead Sea Scrolls, were particularly given to this, as were other Jewish sects.
So the author of Hebrews first states his position—that Christ is greater than angels—and then proceeds to prove it with a series of seven quotations from the Old Testament.
And let me just say this before we look at those texts: Maybe you are not particularly tempted to worship angels. First, I would urge you not to be so naive as to think that nobody today is thus tempted. The New Age is full of angel worship—specifically demon worship. Also, there are modern faiths, like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who expressly teach that Jesus is the archangel Michael, which is simply a different name for the same being.
Secondly, I would tell you that the same arguments for Jesus’ supremacy over angels apply to any other thing you might be tempted to exalt over him. Might I suggest that today, the most likely being for you to exalt over Christ—whether formally or just tacitly—is the being who brushes your teeth ever morning, shares your name, social security number, and email address.
So that said, let’s see how the author of Hebrews proves his case. He gives us three reasons that Christ is greater than angels in this first chapter.
Why is Jesus Better?
Now, this whole chapter hangs together as one argument. And so even through we looked in depth at the the first three verses last week—at Jesus as God’s incarnate speech—we need to see how the author make his case for the supremacy of Jesus over angels from those verses as well. So we won’t spend as much time on these first two reasons as on the third, but first:
1. Jesus is better than angels, because he is the Divine Prophet.
Jesus is better than God’s angelic messengers, because he is both the God who sends the messengers, and he is the very substance of that message.
Remember from last week: Jesus is God’s final, perfect, superior speech, or to put it another way, Jesus is the final and perfect Prophet of God, who seals up all vision and prophet. Verses 1–2,
“Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world.”
-Hebrews 1:1–2
So what?
So for the first time of the three times we will pause and ask this question: So what? Well, so you can stop trying to be a little, imitation prophet, or look for another prophet to tell you what God says. So…
Your heart has no prophetic authority.
Your emotions have no prophetic authority.
Your fallen reasoning has no prophetic authority.
Your words and mantras and self-talk have no prophetic authority.
The consensus view of culture has no prophetic authority.
All the PhDs at the university have no prophetic authority.
The so-called experts have no prophetic authority.
Modern religious gurus have no prophetic authority.
The LDS Prophets have no prophetic authority.
The Pope has no prophetic authority.
Jesus Christ is the final, full, perfect, vision-and-prophet-sealing Prophet of God with perfect and absolute prophetic authority. Number 2…
2. Jesus is better than angels, because he is the Divine Priest.
This will be another theme unfolded at great length later in the letter to the Hebrews, but we see it introduced in verse 3:
“After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs.”
-Hebrews 1:3b–4
The job of the priest was to make purification for the sin of Israel by the offering of God’s prescribed offerings. The author of Hebrews anchors the supremacy of Jesus in his priestly work on the cross. On the cross, Jesus was both Priest and Lamb, taking away the sin of the world by his shed blood.
So what?
So for the second time, we ask, “So what?” Jesus is greater than angels, because he is the sin-removing High Priest. So what?
So…
You can stop hiding your sin.
You can stop trying to work off your debt.
You can stop trying to get other people to affirm you.
You can stop trying to punish yourself for what he has already borne punishment for.
The world is desperate for a priest, for someone to stand between them and God and make peace. The world is desperate for a clean conscience that only Christ can give. But he has given it, if you will come to him. If you will humble yourself, confess your sin, and be cleansed, you could have peace with God and yourself and your neighbor.
This is infinitely practical, because some of you, right now in this room, are trying everything you can except for that. Some of you would rather try to forget your sin that confess it and see it cleansed. Some of you would rather do good works to try and pay it off, to buy off your own conscience. Friends, that is a dead thing. Those are dead works that can’t cleanse. Only Christ’s red blood can remove your red sin and clothe you in white righteousness.
Jesus is the perfect Lamb and the divine Priest. And when he sits down at the right hand of the Majesty on High, having finished once for all his work of priestly atonement, he sits down on a thrown to begin his kingly rule. Number three…
3. Jesus is better than angels, because he is the Divine King.
This is the true megatheme of the book of Hebrews, remember? The message of Hebrews, remember, as a New Testament Deuteronomy, is that—just as God had given his people the Promised Land, promising to give it to them progressively as they went out in faith to conquer—God has promised the whole earth to his Son.
And just as Deuteronomy prepared Israel to invade that land, so Hebrews prepares us to go in the name of the Son—not to conquer through military might—but to conquer the nations as Jesus’ ambassadors, through evangelism and discipleship.
In this chapter alone, the author quotes from seven passages of the Old Testament to prove the supremacy of Jesus, and fully five of those seven passages teach us that the Christ will rule as King over all then nations, his inheritance.
Let’s look through those quotations in turn, starting with Psalm 2, quoted in Hebrews 1:5,
Psalm 2
The author asks (v. 5), “For to which of the angels did God ever say,” —and then he quotes Psalm 2:7—“You are my Son, today I have begotten you.”
We won’t do this with all of the quotations in this chapter, but we will be greatly helped by reading this whole Psalm, which would have been very familiar to the original audience of Hebrews. Psalm 2 reads,
“Why do the nations rage
and the peoples plot in vain?
The kings of the earth set themselves,
and the rulers take counsel together,
against the LORD and against his Anointed, saying,“Let us burst their bonds apart
and cast away their cords from us.”
He who sits in the heavens laughs;
the Lord holds them in derision.Then he will speak to them in his wrath,
and terrify them in his fury, saying,
“As for me, I have set my King
on Zion, my holy hill.”I will tell of the decree:
The LORD said to me, “You are my Son;
today I have begotten you.
Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage,
and the ends of the earth your possession.
You shall break them with a rod of iron
and dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel.”
Now therefore, O kings, be wise;
be warned, O rulers of the earth.Serve the LORD with fear,
and rejoice with trembling.
Kiss the Son,
lest he be angry, and you perish in the way,
for his wrath is quickly kindled.
Blessed are all who take refuge in him.”-Psalm 2
The New Testament teaches us that this entire Psalm is about Jesus—about his death, burial, resurrection, and reign in subduing the nations through his Church. Each major portion of the Psalm has a divinely inspired, inerrant commentary provided us by the authors of the New Testament:
Acts 4:24–28 teaches us that the first two verses are a prophetic foretelling of the crucifixion; the raging nations and the plotting rulers are the Jews, Romans, and demonic rulers plotting against the Son of God in the crucifixion.
Acts 13:33 teaches us that verse 7—the verse quoted here in Hebrews 1—is a prophetic foretelling of the resurrection. Paul, preaching to a crowd, says,
“…[God] has fulfilled [this good news] to us… by raising Jesus, as also it is written in the second Psalm, ‘You are my Son, today I have begotten you.’” -Acts 13:33
So the “begetting” spoken of here in Psalm 2 is not the eternal begetting of Jesus from John’s gospel, but the begetting from the dead that Paul references in Colossians 1:18.
So Christ is the only begotten Son of God from the dead, and what is the result of that in begetting in Psalm 2? Global inheritance. Verse 8 follows, “Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession. You shall break them with a rod of iron. and dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel.”
Once again, the New Testament provides inerrant commentary: The book of Revelation refers to the “rod of iron” from verse 9 fully three times, referring to Christ rule over the nations, specifically in chapter 2 as ruling that takes place through the Church.
Psalm 2 is about the crucifixion, resurrection, and global reign of Christ over the nations from the right hand of the Father through his Church. We will move quicker through the rest of the quotations; this one serving as foundational.
2 Samuel 7:14
In verse 5, the author asks, “…to which of the angels did God ever say,” and then he quotes from 2 Samuel 7:14, “I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son.”
This passage refers to the house of David, specifically God’s promises to David that his offspring would reign forever. Jesus is not just King, he is the Davidic King, the one who fulfills all of God’s promises to David. So he is better than the angels, who minister around the throne, because he is seated on that throne.
Deuteronomy 32:43/Psalm 97:7
As the Davidic King, Jesus receives worship from angels—clearly making him superior to angels. In verse 6, the author quotes Psalm 97:7, which is also found in the Greek translation of Deuteronomy 32:43, “Let all God’s angels worship him.
Psalm 104:4
So angels are to worship Christ, but what are angels, anyway? The author in verse 7 quotes from Psalm 104:4, that they are winds, and flames of fire. These angels whom the Father commands to worship the Son are themselves not beings to trifle with.
Psalm 45; 102:25–27
Then, the author puts the deity of Christ beyond all question—which is why I have been referring to Jesus not just as Prophet, Priest, and King, but as divine Prophet, divine Priest, and divine King—quoting Psalm 45:6–7, as well as Psalm 102:25–27,
“But of the Son he says,
“Your throne, O God, is forever and ever,
the scepter of uprightness is the scepter of your kingdom.You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness;
therefore God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of
gladness beyond your companions.”And,
“You, Lord, laid the foundation of the earth in the beginning,
and the heavens are the work of your hands;
they will perish, but you remain;
they will all wear out like a garment,like a robe you will roll them up,
like a garment they will be changed.
But you are the same,
and your years will have no end.”-Hebrews 1:8–12
Jesus rule is not just a Davidic rule, but a divine rule—and one that is marked by the oil of gladness. He is the creator who laid the foundation of the earth who made the heavens, and who rules forever.
Psalm 110:1
Finally, the most quoted Psalm in the Bible, Psalm 110, verse 1, where the author of Hebrews asks, “…to which of the angels has [God] ever said, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet?’”
Paul also quotes this verse in 1 Corinthians 15, wherein he teaches us that Jesus will not stand up from this throne he has sat down on to rule from until he has put all his enemies under his feet, save one enemy: Death.
Until then, what is he doing? To repeat myself: He is doing the work of a New Testament Joshua—which will make the invasion of the Promised Land by Israel under the first Joshua look like kids squabbling over the sandbox at the local Elementary school playground. He is conquering the world through evangelism and discipleship.
So what?
And that brings us to the third and final: So what? For the third and final time, and we will close with this, so what? Jesus is King… So what?
So—and listen closely, Refuge—Jesus Christ does not just want to be King of your heart. He is King of the world. There’s this really popular worship song, “Let the King of my heart, be the mountain where I run, the fountain I drink from, oh, he is my song.”
Ok, fine. Yes. He is the King of your heart—and may that be! May he rule there, rule over your every feeling and emotion and thought. May we indeed take every thought captive and make it obey him. But may we also look out at the world and say, “He is King there. He is King there—already.”
Because Jesus is the cosmic, ruling King, we ought to pursue the Great Commission with verve, with boldness, and with the oil of gladness visible on our faces. We ought to view the work of evangelizing and discipling the nations to obey Jesus—not as an impossible and onerous task, but as a task in which failure is impossible.
Why? Because hasn’t God said, “He must reign until he puts all his enemies under his feet?” Hasn’t God said to the Son, “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool?”
And so, as the second Psalm applies all of this,
“Now therefore, O kings, be wise;
be warned, O rulers of the earth.
Serve the LORD with fear,
and rejoice with trembling.Kiss the Son,
lest he be angry, and you perish in the way,
for his wrath is quickly kindled.
Blessed are all who take refuge in him.”-Psalm 2:10–12
And all of God’s people said: Amen! Jesus is King: So what? So take refuge in him, for all who do are safe and are called blessed. Let’s pray.