Sermon Text: Hebrews 1:1–3
Preacher: Pastor Brian Sauvé
The Son is Speech
If you have your Bible, please turn to Hebrews 1. While you are turning there, I’d like to tell you about a parable that the Lord Jesus told in Matthew 21. It went something like this:
A man planted a vineyard and, needing to travel to another country for an extended period of time, leased the vineyard to some tenants, with the agreement that they would keep the vineyard and he would share in the profits, the fruit.
When the time came for him to receive his first share in the earnings, he sent a servant to speak to the tenants and bring back the fruit. But the tenants were evil and greedy, and so they beat the servant and drove him out without giving him anything.
So the man sent another servant, but they did the same thing again. Finally, the master of the vineyard decided to send his beloved son, with the hopes that they would respect him and honor the agreement.
Instead, the tenants saw this as an opportunity to completely seize the vineyard for themselves—to become their own masters. They said to themselves, “The son is coming. He’s the heir of this vineyard. If we kill him, we could seize the inheritance for ourselves.”
Jesus asks, the listeners, “When therefore the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?”
And the listeners respond, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death and let out the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the fruits in their seasons.”
Jesus responds by quoting from Psalm 118, “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone,” and concludes, “Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing its fruits. And the one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and when it falls on anyone, it will crush him.”
This parable is the story of Israel in miniature, brought to the very brink of where the author of Hebrews picks up the story in chapter 1 of his book. Look there with me, if you would:
“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…”
-Hebrews 1:1–3
Let’s ask for the Lord’s help, and then we will get to work together in our text.
God’s Crucified Word
I said that that parable of the wicked tenants is the story of Israel in miniature, brought to the very brink of where the author of Hebrews picks up here in our text. Let me explain what I mean by that.
In the parable of the wicked tenants, the master of the vineyard represents God the Father, the tenants represent Israel, and the servants represent the prophets. God sent the servants to plead with Israel to yield the fruit they ought to have, but they responded by killing the prophets. And so the Father does what the master did in the parable—he sent his beloved Son, the heir.
What’s interesting is that Matthew puts this parable in chapter 21, right after Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem—God has pleaded with Israel through his servants, the prophets, and now sends his Son into the vineyard to ask for the fruit.
And what do they do? They cried out to Pilate, “His blood be on us and on our children!” and they crucified him.
As the author of Hebrews put down these first sentences on the page, Jesus’ promise in Matthew 21 was about to fall. “…I tell you, the Kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing its fruits. And the one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and when it falls on anyone, it will crush him.”
Within a few short years and months of the writing of this book of Hebrews, the entire system of Old Covenant worship will be ripped away from the tenants, from Israel, as the Temple falls to Rome, and the blood of the crucified Christ—along with the bloodguilt of Israel for all of the prophets they murdered—will come down on their heads—just as they requested before Pilate.
Jesus told them in Matthew 24 that this divine judgment would come within the very generation that rejected him—a biblical phrase for a 40-year period—and now the author of Hebrews sits down to write roughly 36 years after that promise, on the brink.
So if you remember from last week, what the author of Hebrews is aiming to do in this book is to prepare the Church who has inherited the Kingdom ripped away from Israel to go out into the world and conquer—evangelizing and discipling the nations to believe the gospel, receive the Son, and obey him.
It’s as if the Lord has brought the Church to it’s own New Testament Deuteronomy moment—a book written to Israel, after a 40-year generation was judged and destroyed, on the brink of invading the Promised Land. The Church will now through the book of Hebrews, as Israel did then through Moses’ writing in Deuteronomy, receive instructions and warnings for entering the Promised Land—for them, Canaan, for us, a new, cosmic Canaan, the whole globe.
And I told you that this preparation, the contents of this book of Hebrews, was going to come in the form of three great themes:
1. Jesus is better.
2. The conquest is global.
3. Never go back.
And the first salvo of the book in these first three verses—no introduction, no “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God and Timothy our brother.” No, “Grace to you and peace from our Lord Jesus Christ.”—no, right out the gate, the book of Hebrews aims to convince us of Jesus’ total supremacy, of that first theme: Jesus is better.
In these first three verses, he would have us see that Jesus is God’s speech. He is God speaking. And he would have us see that not only is Jesus divine speech, he is better speech, a greater Word, than all of God’s previous ways of speaking. Verse 1,
“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…”
-Hebrews 1:1–2a
Jesus is the true and better and final Prophet of God, the very Word of God made flesh. The Son sent to the vineyard is greater than all of the servants he had previously sent.
Three are three reasons in these first 3 verses that demonstrate the supremacy of Jesus over all previous revelation:
1. He is the Son, not a servant.
2. He is the Creator who makes speech possible.
3. He is speech that could bleed.
Let’s look at each of these reasons in the text.
Son, not a Servant
Jesus is better speech, because the prophets were God’s servants, but Jesus is God’s Son. Look at the logic of the first two verses; Verse 1 and verse 2 run in parallel:
Verse 1: Long ago, at many times and in many ways…
Verse 2: But in these last days…
Verse 1: God spoke to our fathers…
Verse 2: He has spoken to us…
Verse 1: By the prophets…
Verse 2: By his Son…
The author is making a contrast between two different ways that God has spoken to mankind in two different times. Long ago, he spoke by prophets. In these last days, he has spoken by his Son.
Important side-note for us, who are likely to hear the phrase “last days” as a reference to the end of the world. It’s not. It’s actually a reference to the last days of the Jewish aeon. Later, in Hebrews 9:26, the author will identify the end of the ages as the time when Jesus came and offered himself as a sacrifice for sins.
So God previously spoke through prophets, but in these last days, has given us something greater—divine speech, incarnate in the Son of God.
This isn’t to somehow denigrate or delegitimize the Old Testament prophets in any way. There’s this absurd idea out there in many circles that we ought to be “red-letter Christians,” meaning that we should take all of the words of Jesus in the New Testament and turn them into some kind of canon within the canon. That’s absurd, and it’s absurd because God is the one who inspired and sent and authorized and breathed out every jot and syllable of the Old Testament—and Jesus is God.
Jesus is the final and greater Prophet of God—and that doesn’t denigrate the Old Testament prophets, it establishes them. Why? Because they spoke of Christ by the Spirit of God! They spoke with God’s authority. Their words were true. But Jesus is greater still: They spoke of the Son, and Jesus is the Son. They looked forward to the heir; Jesus is the heir.
Jesus is greater than the prophets that ended with John the Baptist the way a visit from a friend is better than a letter from that same friend. Through the prophets, God sent letters to us. In Christ, God actually visits us.
So the author of Hebrews would have us see that Jesus is the true and better Prophet, the Word of God incarnate. As such, he seals up vision and prophecy—just as we will no longer return to the shadow of Temple sacrifice now that the Lamb of God has been slain for sin, we’ll no longer return to prophets like Isaiah and Elijah and John the Baptist now that the Word of God has come in flesh.
Daniel prophesied this very thing in his great Seventy Weeks Prophecy of Daniel 9, that,
“Seventy weeks are decreed about your people [that’s Israel] and your holy city [that’s Jerusalem], to finish the transgression, to put an end to sin, and to atone for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness [that’s the work of Christ in his life, death, burial, resurrection, and ascension—now listen to this last part:], to seal both vision and prophet, and to anoint a most holy one.”
-Daniel 9:24 (w/commentary in bold)
Jesus’ incarnation, sinless life, substitutionary death, victorious resurrection, ascension to rule at the right hand of the Father, and coming on the clouds in 70 AD to level the apostate holy city of Jerusalem seals up vision and prophet. He is God’s final and full and perfect prophetic word. This is one of the best arguments for a closed canon by 70 AD, by the way—that was the decisive moment when the last vestiges of the Old Covenant system was ended.
The prophets wrote of him, but he is him. Jesus is better than prophets.
He Makes Speech Possible.
Number two, Jesus is better speech because he is Creator God—the One who makes all speech, all knowledge possible. Look again at the text:
“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.”
-Hebrews 1:1–3a
Jesus, the divine Word, is greater than the old prophetic Word, because Jesus’ word is the word of the creator God. This passage will allow no room for the offensive doctrine of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, that Jesus is a created archangel.
It will give no room for the blasphemous doctrine of the LDS prophets, that Jesus is a created man, elevated to godhood through obedience. This Jesus is the radiance of the glory of God, the exact imprint of the divine nature. He is the Creator and sustainer of the Universe.
As such, he is the One who makes all speech, and all knowledge even possible. God speaks, and so we know. God speaks, in fact, and so we can know. In order for you to know anything at all, God must speak.
I’m not overstating this; that’s not hyperbole. For you to know anything, God has to speak. For you to know the color yellow or the multiplication tables or the taste of butter, or that density equals mass divided by volume—for you to know anything requires divine speech.
There is a reason that the author of Hebrews, here in a section about the way in which God speaks, points to Jesus, the divine Word, God’s speech, and says, “Through Jesus, all creation was created, and right now, every millisecond, creation is upheld by that same divine speech.”
See, Christianity properly understood gives us what Cornelius Van Til calls a revelational epistemology. Epistemology is just a fancy way of saying “a theory of knowledge,” or a theory of how we know things and even how we know what we know. I know some of your eyes just glazed over, but this is so essential for us, especially in a world of relativism gone wild. Think about this: What must be true for you to have knowledge? I’ll shotgun out 7 things, and there are more!
There must be such thing as reality; the world must exist.
You must exist.
You must be able to access and experience reality (senses).
Those senses must be reliable.
You must have the capacity for reliable memory of that past data and experience.
The future must be like the past—otherwise what you “know” about something 5 minutes ago is no indicator of what will be true in 5 minutes.
The world must be governed by unchanging, immaterial laws—something like logic. Why does 2+2=4 and not 7? Could it equal 7 somewhere in the Universe, even if it equals 4 here? Why can A not be Not-A? That’s the law of non-contradiction. Could A be Not-A? If so, why? If not, why not?
You and I and every other human being on the planet wakes up in the morning and performs 50 tasks and believe 10,000 things that all assume these preconditions exist, what theologians and philosophers call “The necessary preconditions for intelligibility.”
Let’s ask it again: Why does 2+2=4? Here’s the Christian answer if Hebrews 1:1–3 is true: Because Jesus is Lord, and he has created a world governed by laws of logic no less than by laws of gravity. 2+2=4 because Jesus is Lord. Without divine revelation illumining the darkness, we can’t see anything.
Jesus is better speech because he is the Word that makes all other words possible and meaningful. Finally, number three, Jesus is better speech, because he is speech that could bleed.
Speech that Could Bleed
Verse 3 tells us that,
“After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high…”
-Hebrews 1:3b
Why is Jesus speech superior to all previous prophetic speech? Because Jesus is speech that could bleed. He is the Word made flesh. Jesus is the Word of God clothed in mortal flesh, the Word of God with 2-billion nerve endings embedded in skin that could feel the exquisite pain of the Roman whip. Jesus is the divine Logos with blood that can be poured out for the sprinkling of the nations.
And after he hung on the cross and took our bloodguilt and became sin, he declared the work finished. And so he died, and rose, and ascended to the right hand of the Father—and there he sat down. He sat down, because the work of purification, the work of salvation, was done, and now the work of ruling had begun.
Jesus Christ is the sinner-purifying, crucified and risen and reigning Word sent out from God. And what you need to know about God’s word is that it never returns void, but it accomplishes all that he sends it out to do.
Have you come to this Christ by faith? Have you confessed your sin and sought mercy here? Then you are clean. Gloriously clean. As the author will say in Hebrews 9:11–14,
“…when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation) he entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption. For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the purification of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.”
-Hebrews 9:11–14
Jesus’ blood is effective blood. That is why, Refuge, we are a purified people. Do you hear that? That’s in the past tense. You are pure. You are clean. You are identified with this Christ, and so you are an heir with him.
And so if I might leave you with a final word of application and exhortation, I would exhort you to stop trying to conjure up your own words to declare yourself enough, and stop trying to find some other person, ideology, guru, product, lifestyle, philosophy, religion, priest—whatever!—that will speak over you words of meaning and cleansing and life.
Stop trying to counterfeit the Word of God with your own words. See, we are so desperate to be cleansed of our guilt and our shame, so desperate for the meaning and the glory and the purification that only Christ provides, that we will latch onto anything that promises it, right?
Because Hebrews 1 is true, you can stop with all of the “You are enough! You are special! You are great! You are extraordinary!” nonsense. Listen: You’re 100% not enough. Not even close. You are not good enough, great enough, righteous enough, or special enough.
But Jesus is. You can put down the weight of trying to be and the delusion of pretending to be, and rather let his blood speak a better word than your words and your self-justifications and self-glorifications. Worship Jesus, not yourself, and find yourself in the process. Believe what he has spoken over you: Clean. Purified. Forgiven. And believing—purified in conscience from dead works—serve the living God with gladness.