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Well, if you would now turn in your Bibles to the book of Hebrews, the book of Hebrews
will be looking at the first chapter, verses five through the end of the chapter.
So if you would give your attention to God’s word reading from the book of Hebrews, chapter
one, starting in verse five, 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 sun, 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 foundations 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 God 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?
This ends the reading of God’s word.
You may be seated.
Let’s pray.
Our Father in Heaven, we ask that you would come now and give us your Spirit, Lord, that
we might understand what you have to say for us, that we might hear it, that we might receive
it with faith and love, lay it up in our hearts, and treasure it in our lives for the sake
of Jesus Christ.
We ask for your Holy Spirit.
Amen.
Well, last week in the evening, we looked at the first four verses of the book of Hebrews,
and the writer had said a number of things about the special Son whom God has spoken
through.
And now he turns to, in these last few verses of the chapter, this last half, to kind of
back up what he’s been saying with some quotes from the Old Testament.
This passage picks up some of the themes that we looked at last week, and I’ve entitled
this message, Heavenly Hierarchy, because the passage that we’re looking at this morning
talks about angels and their place in relation to God, the Son, and us.
And I want to look at four actions that we see in this passage.
In this passage, we’ll see that God says, the angels serve, the Son loves, and we inherit.
So starting off looking at God says, I remember a number of years ago, there was a church
near our house that we would drive by sometimes, and it had this big banner up, God is still
speaking, don’t put a period where God put a comma.
Now I would agree with that sentiment on its face, we shouldn’t alter God’s word, but unfortunately
in this case, it was clear they were talking about God’s word, the Bible, being a fine
place to start, but that we need a more recent prophetic revelation from God, presumably
that you would get at that church.
The writer of Hebrews would agree with the first part of that church sign, God is still
speaking, God definitely is still speaking, but instead of setting the Bible aside, Hebrews
would say that God still speaks through his word.
Sadly this church had missed that God still speaks through his word today, God did speak
in the past through his word, but he also currently speaks through his word.
And before we consider the content in this passage of what God says, I want to make sure
we don’t miss the big picture.
By considering the opening words, God says, it’s so obvious it’s easy to miss it, and
you may not realize this at first, but the way that Hebrews quotes the Old Testament
throughout this passage is actually an unusual way to quote the Old Testament.
In most of the New Testament, when scripture is quoted, it’s introduced by the phrase,
it is written, Jesus himself uses that phrase all the time whenever he introduced a quote
from the Old Testament, but the writer of Hebrews quotes the Old Testament as, God says,
not merely said, but he says.
Just to be clear, we shouldn’t think that there’s a conflict between Jesus and Hebrews.
Instead we should ask, what is the writer of Hebrews trying to highlight for us here?
While it may be obvious or something we tend to take for granted, we should not overlook
the way in which the inspired writer of Hebrews considers that scripture, which was written
thousands of years ago, is as relevant now as if God had spoken it for the first time
today.
There’s lots of people who are looking for a fresh word from God or a word from God for
today, and they hardly open their Bibles.
Hebrews is instructing us on how we ought to approach the scripture and see its ongoing
relevance in our lives.
The God who inspired Moses, David, and all the other writers of the Old Testament lives
and speaks to us today.
He speaks through what he has written, and we should not merely approach the Bible as
an old, dead document, which is at our mercy to dissect and assign meaning to at our pleasure.
This is what God is saying to us today.
So God says, but let’s take a look at, in our passage, what God says.
The writer of Hebrews is building off of what he had said in verse 4 that we looked at last
Sunday night.
He’s making the point, the Son is superior to the angels.
We’ll try to get a general sense of where these quotes are from and the main point they’re
making before circling back to look at a couple of these quotes in detail.
First, in verses 5, we see the unique relationship which Christ has with God.
God says, you are my son, today I have begotten you.
Now, we read earlier in the service where that comes from, from Psalm 100 and from Psalm
2, but you can hear the tenderness of this relationship.
There’s something special about the bond between a son and a father, and this human bond that
we see is actually modeled after God’s relationship with his son.
Psalm 2 verse 7 is what we read this morning, and we see that God is jealous and proud of
his son.
But then the next quote, I will be to him a father and he shall be to me a son, comes
from 2 Samuel, and it comes in the context of a promise that God made to David.
We see here, God promises personally to be a father to David’s son.
What a comforting promise, and David surely didn’t understand fully when it was made what
it meant, but we can see now that it was fulfilled beyond David’s wildest dreams in Jesus who’s
the son of David, a human and also the son of God.
Angels, on the other hand, as we see in verse 6, while servants in the presence of God,
never receive the intimate exalted title of son.
We see that angels are commanded to worship the son.
Now, we shouldn’t be confused by the term firstborn in verse 6.
It’s not saying that Jesus is created by God or that he’s born as God.
It’s referring to him as the greatest or the most privileged.
That’s what firstborn means in this context.
We might recall that the angels proclaimed Christ’s birth in his manger to the shepherds.
They came celebrating.
Or we might also consider the fact that when he comes again, Christ will return in glory
with surrounded by his angels.
The son is the center of their attention.
They are praising him, not the other way around.
But then speaking of angels, verse 7, we see a quote from Psalm 104 to remind us that
not only do angels worship the son, but they are simply ministering spirits.
They’re spiritual beings, not described as rulers, but as serving as those who do the
bidding of God.
Next, in verse 8, we see that the son is explicitly called the title we’ve been assuming
all along, God.
Hebrews calls him God directly.
Your throne, O God, is forever and ever.
Well, at first, this directly calling the son God makes it clear that the son truly
is God.
As the quote continues, it reminds us of the complexity of the incarnation and the
Trinity.
The father is God.
The son is God.
The Holy Spirit is God.
And yet, as we see in verse 9, it says, therefore God, your God, has anointed you.
Because Jesus is at once God, the anointed and sent one by God.
He is God, and yet he has been sent by God, fully God and fully man.
And we cannot fully understand or explain this mystery.
And then, as the titles go on, we see in verse 10, a further step.
The son, who’s been identified as God, is now identified as creator and Lord.
If we look in the Old Testament, we find that this term, Lord, is the most prevalent name
for God.
But then, when we come into the New Testament epistles, we find that one of their favorite
ways to refer to Christ is our Lord Jesus Christ.
Sometimes, they even leave off the Jesus Christ and just refer to him as our Lord.
And while the Old Testament was most often referring to the father with the term Lord,
in the New Testament, it becomes the most common way to refer to the father.
It’s the same way to refer to the son.
See, everything that can be ascribed to the father, the Lord, the eternal creator of heaven
and earth, who will one day bring this age to an end, can also be said of the son.
Now, at this point, you may want to tell me that you already know that.
You weren’t doubting it.
You weren’t calling it into question.
But do you know where to take someone who’s questioning whether Jesus is fully divine
when you’re talking to the Jehovah’s Witness that knocks on your door?
Or if you have a Muslim neighbor that you’re having a discussion with who considers Jesus
was a great teacher, a good man, but not fully divine?
One of the places you can take them is Hebrews, Chapter 1, where very clearly Jesus is given
the titles of God and even Lord.
Lord, which is the same as Jehovah, the personal covenant name of God.
He’s fully God.
And finally, the seventh statement that we see in verse 13 is the quote from Psalm 110,
which is probably the most famous Messianic Psalm.
Now, if you’re not familiar with the term, Messianic Psalm is a term that people use
to talk about one of the Psalms that clearly speaks about the future Messiah.
Messiah, obviously, is just a Hebrew word for Christ, which means anointed one.
So a Messianic Psalm is a Psalm that speaks about the individual,
a coming individual who will be anointed by God, the Messiah,
who would bring deliverance to God’s people.
Now, we’ll see Psalm 110 get expounded a lot more in the rest of the book of Hebrews.
So we’ll visit it again later and we won’t spend a lot of time on it here.
But the point here is what we talked about last evening about the son sits down.
The son is given permission to sit.
Now, this is both a sign of his royalty, since only kings can sit down,
but it also indicates that his work is done.
The angels aren’t done their work.
They are not invited to sit.
The servants stay standing in the presence of the king,
but the son has been told,
sit at my right hand while I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.
Sit while your enemies are subdued.
Which brings us from the God says to the fact that angels serve.
Angels serve, they serve God, and as we’ll see, they also serve us.
And we’ve been talking about angels in this passage
in comparison to the son.
And the author’s case is clearly made that the angels are not exalted like the son.
But then the question arises, why focus on angels?
Now, there are some people that think there was a unique problem with angel worship
that Hebrews is trying to address,
but the rest of the book doesn’t spend much time talking about them.
So it’s hard to make that case.
The fact is, angels are cool.
They’re also mysterious.
They’ve been the subject of lots of speculation.
Angels show up all over the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation.
We find them delivering messages from God,
enacting his judgment like on the Egyptians or Sodom and Gomorrah,
and most of all, worshiping God.
People have been fascinated with angels all throughout history,
and there’s lots we could explore, but we can’t get into it all right now.
We don’t have detailed descriptions of what they look like in Scripture,
but their most common greeting whenever they show up is,
do not fear.
This makes me think that their presence is terrifying.
And yet, on the other hand, in Hebrews 13, we’re going to see later,
it says that it’s possible to invite them into your home
without even realizing they’re angels.
So they probably don’t look like aliens.
They probably look like your average male human, normal.
But they do come directly from God’s presence.
Remember how Moses’ face glowed when he talked with God,
and it scared the people, so he had to wear a veil?
Perhaps it’s something like that.
They’re often described as shining with glory.
So perhaps this is why people fear them.
Angels are beings which dwell in heaven.
They dwell in the closest proximity to God.
They operate as his direct reports.
This understandably instilled a sense of reverence in the Jews,
because angels give messages straight from God.
We saw in our passage from Daniel,
when Gabriel showed up with a message from God.
And think about the Lord’s Prayer that we recited when it says,
May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
The implication is that in heaven, there’s no delaying,
no questioning, no disobeying of God when he gives orders in heaven.
Now we don’t know how many angels there are,
but Jesus tells his disciples that if he didn’t want to go to the cross,
he could have asked for 12 legions of angels, which would be about 72,000.
So there’s at least that many, probably a lot more.
The term angel that we use comes from the Greek word angelos,
which basically means messenger,
and it can be translated as either angel specifically or messenger in general.
It can sometimes be used to refer to a normal human who comes to carry a message.
Now despite the fact that angels show up all over the Bible,
we aren’t given that many details about them.
We see them in Revelation especially associated with God’s presence,
and we see them at different points in history
to deliver important messages directly from God.
The one angel everyone knows his name is called Gabriel.
He gets some special messages to deliver.
You noticed in our reading from Daniel
that when Daniel was getting discouraged in the exile,
Gabriel came to assure him that deliverance was coming.
And then a few hundred years later, he shows up to a man named Zechariah,
a priest in the temple, to tell him John the Baptist is going to be born.
And a few months after that, he shows up to a woman named Mary
to tell her that Jesus is going to be born.
He had some pretty important messages,
but we don’t really have the names of almost any other angel.
Now another reason, primary reason perhaps,
why the writer would have mentioned angels here
is because we read in Acts 7, for instance,
from Stephen’s sermon that the law was delivered by angels.
Now the Jews, they rightly held Moses in high regard as the giver of the law,
but it says the law was delivered by angels.
So it was angels that actually, you might say,
handed the Ten Commandments to Moses.
And in the very next chapter, Chapter 2 of Hebrews,
the author is going to talk about that even more.
This contrast between angels and the sun
that we’ve seen throughout the verses this morning
parallels the contrast the writer made in verse 1 and 2
between the prophets and the sun.
See, the contrast between the sun and angels
is a contrast between the Old Covenant and the New.
The Old Covenant, the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai,
was delivered by angels,
and yet we’re reminded this morning that angels,
though glorious heavenly beings,
have never been as intimate with God as the sun,
nor exalted to be called God and sit on His throne as the sun was.
They are glorious servants of God,
but they’re only His servants.
And as we move on, I want to see that the sun loves.
I want to return to a quote in verse 8 and 9
that we see here in the middle.
But of the sun, 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.
This little phrase, therefore,
has intrigued me ever since I stopped to consider it.
You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness.
Therefore, God has anointed you
with the oil of gladness beyond your companions.
I admit it sounds perhaps unremarkable at first.
Love righteousness, hate wickedness, oil of gladness.
Sounds like great poetic language.
But then I began to ask, what would that look like?
To be happy beyond all of your companions.
Loving righteousness, hating wickedness
seems pretty common sense.
Who wouldn’t, right?
But then notice the result.
Greater joy than any of his companions.
Jesus is happier than anyone he knows.
And he knows everyone.
So he’s happier than everyone.
So he’s happier than everyone.
So he’s happier than everyone.
And this comes from him loving something
and hating something else.
If his joy comes from loving righteousness
and hating wickedness,
and he’s happier than anyone else,
it must be because he loves righteousness
and hates wickedness more than anyone else.
How often or how much do you and I love righteousness?
Do you eagerly obey God in all things?
Any begrudging?
Considering the commandments of God as burdensome?
Or think about the other side of the coin.
How much do you truly hate wickedness?
I find when I look in my own heart,
I can often find an apathy towards sin.
I often only half-heartedly fight against sin.
It’s so easy to have pet sins.
Disobediences that we hide away in the closet.
Sins which we tell ourselves
we would never allow to grow to full flower.
Just not ready to kill them off quite yet.
Remember that even though tigers are cute when they’re babies,
they grow up to kill you.
When it comes to sin, we have to become cold-blooded killers.
Infant sins quickly grow up to take over our hearts
and warp our perspectives,
making us less and less likely to want to kill them later.
The son we read loved righteousness.
He hated wickedness.
He hated wickedness with a pure, absolute, intense hatred.
You and I do not hate sin nearly enough.
That’s partly because we can’t see how bad it is.
The insidious nature of sin
is that it actually blinds us to its own evil.
Now we could describe sin in a variety of ways.
Treason, rebellion, disobedience,
an affront to God.
But perhaps the most poignant way to describe it
would be as an embrace and treasuring of all that God hates.
And this is why it’s most commonly portrayed in Scripture
as spiritual adultery.
It’s not just the desire to do our own thing,
to be our own person apart from God,
which would be bad enough.
But when we choose what God has expressly forbidden
or fail to obey what he has expressly commanded
at its root, this is embracing and entangling ourselves
with another lover while we’re pledged to God.
Despite all of the confusion in our culture today around sexuality,
there remains a sense that betrayal between lovers is wrong.
You don’t cheat on your spouse.
God uses the image of betrayal
to help us understand something about sin.
That betrayal is all the worse
when the other party is completely innocent.
And while in human relationships
we rarely find one party completely without fault,
in our relationship with God he is completely without fault.
He deserves our complete undying devotion.
That would be the bare minimum
that his holiness and goodness towards us deserves.
He deserves our highest affection.
And when we sin, we’re cheating on God.
And it’s always with an inferior partner.
We like to think of sin as a little mistake,
a lapse of judgment, but in reality it’s always personal.
It’s a betrayal to the one who gives definition to faithfulness.
If we were to really grasp what this meant,
we would not think of hell as an unjust punishment for sin.
Awful, yes, but unjust, no.
The eternal punishment that God justly meets out upon sin
gives us a glimpse into its true evil.
Yet that is not the only way that we can glimpse the evil of sin.
The other way is in the cost of atonement.
Because in God’s mercy, he determined to save some
from bearing this awful, dreadful punishment for their own sins.
The son of God who became man,
who never once entertained a sinful thought,
who loved righteousness with an unmatched ferocity,
and utterly hated sin with his whole heart,
went to the cross.
He who knew no sin became sin for us,
suffering the punishment for sins
that he would never have entertained in his wildest dreams,
so that we could become the righteousness of God
and be graciously given all the privileges that only he merited.
We see the son loves.
Jesus went to the cross out of love.
He makes clear that he went to the cross out of love for his father
and also out of love for us.
So finally we see in this passage that we inherit.
We inherit salvation.
The last verse of our passage, Hebrews 1.14,
are they not all ministering spirits, talking about angels,
sent out to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation?
This verse really is quite amazing.
The writer’s been focused on contrasting angels with the son.
His contrast has assumed that angels are very glorious and very exalted.
We’ve seen that they’re spiritual creatures who are without sin
and serve directly in God’s presence,
and are often commissioned with direct messages from God.
But the final point of contrast between the son and the angels
is that the angels are actually made to serve,
made to be the servants of believers.
In the next chapter we’re going to see the writer of Hebrews
remind us of Psalm 8, in which David considers mankind,
which is a little lower than the angels.
We might be inclined to think that we as humans ought to be serving the angels.
They’re the glorious ones in God’s presence.
We’re merely the lowly, sinful human creatures,
and yet instead we see just the opposite.
The writer concludes this chapter with a reminder that God is so kind,
so gracious, has gone out of His way to make us the unexpected objects
of His incomprehensible love,
that He has commissioned His own personal heavenly servants
to ensure we get everything we need to inherit salvation.
Now, there’s a right way to look at this,
and there’s a wrong way to look at this.
The wrong way would be to think that, look at us,
we must be pretty something special,
because God’s made us the center of His saving work.
The wrong way to think that this has something to do with who we are inherently.
And the Bible is clear. It says nothing to do with who we are.
The right way to take this is to see that it has everything to do with who God is.
God is not highlighting our worth, but His grace,
that He would be so extravagant to such undeserving creatures as us.
Now, consider the phrase, inherit salvation.
That should make us think about what it means to inherit.
To inherit something would be the opposite of earning it, opposite of deserving it.
An inheritance is an absolutely free gift, given by the one who gives it.
It is impossible to deserve or to earn an inheritance.
It can only be given and received, cannot be bought or earned.
And notice how the writer of Hebrews describes believers,
those who are to inherit salvation.
If you look at the children of rich men and women,
billionaires, millionaires and billionaires,
there’s often an understanding that sooner or later that child
will be the recipient of an enormous gift.
They’re entitled and they’re certain to receive something
they’ve not fully received yet.
And that’s what life is like for us as Christians.
You might hear people speak about how salvation is,
how we’re living in the already but not yet.
And this is what, partly what we’re talking about.
There are things we’ve already received, justification, adoption, sanctification,
but there are things that are yet to be, ours as heirs of God.
There’s still more to come.
This is why we must live by faith.
Our full deliverance from sin is still on the horizon.
We are free from the power of sin now,
but not free from the presence of sin.
For now, we daily repent when we fall.
We ask for a greater hatred for sin,
a greater love for righteousness knowing we’re not on our own.
We look to Jesus, who loves us so much that he’s commanded the angels
at his disposal to serve us as we follow him on the path to our inheritance.
What a comforting thought.
You know, Satan quoted falsely to Jesus, Psalm 91,
about he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways.
Jesus rebuked Satan, but the reality was true.
God has commanded his angels.
Some of you may know this conservative Scottish theologian named John Murray.
And there’s a story one day of him walking into a class
that he was about to teach of his students
and calmly matter-of-factly remarked,
an angel stopped my car this morning.
He had one glass eye and had trouble driving and seeing where he was going
and a car had run a red light in front of him
and he swears that he never put his foot on the brake,
and yet God preserved him.
God preserved his life.
He believed, as Hebrews says, that God has his angels taking care of us.
As we close, have you considered the vast numbers of angels
that God has commissioned at his servants to aid you in your Christian life?
Now, we’re never told to pray to angels or to order them around.
They report directly to God.
But we should take comfort that God has directed them to care for us.
Jesus himself throughout his ministry was helped and served by angels.
From directly following his temptations by Satan in the wilderness,
we see the angels show up ministering to him.
To his night in the Garden of Gethsemane,
angels show up and strengthen Jesus in his weakness.
God has commissioned the same angels who ministered to Jesus
in his times of weakness on earth
to also guard, watch over, serve, and see you through your Christian life
as you follow Jesus by faith.
Let’s pray.
Father in heaven, we thank you that you have exalted your son.
You have given him a name above all names.
You have intimate fellowship with him.
You have sent him to die in our place,
to give us forgiveness of sins as we look to him, trust him by faith,
and that you have commissioned your angels to watch over, care for us
as we live looking to Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith.
Pray that you would aid us in this.
You would help us to take comfort in these words,
in these truths that you have given us from your word.
We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.