This is MY Son

For to which of the angels did He ever say: “You are My Son, Today I have begotten You”? And again: “I will be to Him a Father, And He shall be to Me a Son”? But when He again brings the firstborn into the world, He says: “Let all the angels of God worship Him.” And of the angels He says: “Who makes His angels spirits And His ministers a flame of fire.” But to the Son He says: “Your throne, O God, is forever and ever; A scepter of righteousness is the scepter of Your Kingdom. You have loved righteousness and hated lawlessness; Therefore God, Your God, has anointed You With the oil of gladness more than Your companions.” (Hebrews 01:05-09, NKJV).

It is impossible to read the New Testament in its plain sense and not conclude that Jesus is God. I know some groups try very hard to deny the Deity of Christ, and attempt to justify their faulty conclusions from Scripture, but it is not logically possible.

Here, for instance, the Father Himself is declaring unmistakably that the Firstborn is to be worshiped, by angels, no less, and since only God is worthy of worship, it must mean that this Firstborn is God. But if that leaves you still unconvinced, the proclamation becomes even clearer a few words later, when the Father declares to the Son directly, "Your throne, O God…". 

Unequivocally, God the Father is calling His Son, God. Further, He is announcing the Son's right to rule His Kingdom. Don't miss that. He is granting the Son of Man sovereignty, and granting Him the Kingdom over which He is to rule.

The summary reason for this bestowal is the Son's immaculate and holy character, succinctly and brilliantly described as His having loved righteous and His having hated lawlessness. So much so that He voluntarily went to the Cross to establish the first, and abolish the second. The consequence? Therefore God, Your God, has anointed You with the oil of gladness more than your companions.

To be anointed with oil is to be publicly set apart for a holy and glorious purpose. Old Testament priests were anointed with oil when they assumed the mantle of the Levitical Priesthood. God sometimes anointed those men He ordained to be His prophets. Kind David was anointed by Samuel as heir to the Throne of His Father David. The very term Messiah is translated, the Anointed One. 

It is a symbolic affirmation of being selected by God for His purposes.

The phrase, oil of gladness, is a Hebraism signifying a soothing gift. Various plant oils were used in the ancient Middle East to soothe sun-ravaged skin, or to act as a barrier to irritations of the skin. It was both a protection and a comfort. Over time, the phrase came to be used as a synonym for being highly favored.

It is obvious then, that the Father is setting apart His Uniquely-begotten Son as more highly favored than other men, because of His superlative character, and His solemn work of redemption.

There is no question that Scripture portrays Christ as both the Pre-existent Second Person of the Triune Godhead, and the virgin-born, fully human, Son of Man. The Incarnation is both mystery and miracle made necessary by the depth of our depravity and the immeasurable cost of our redemption.

These profound truths align perfectly with the overriding purpose of the Book of Hebrews, which is the emphatic portrayal of the magnificence of the Savior.

Consider that when we mistakenly think that we contribute to our own salvation - that we can somehow satisfy God's righteous wrath against sin through some work on our part - we blaspheme the Son of God, and "trample Him under our feet." It is through faith in Him alone that we are accounted righteous; nothing else. There is no work of righteousness that we are capable of that could atone for our inherent fallenness. None.

Now while it is clear that we are not saved by good works, we are saved for good works - those purposes for each one of us prepared by God beforehand that we should walk in them.

I do not believe it is possible to overstate the goodness of our God.

I do not believe it is possible to exaggerate His kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.

He is, after all, the very definition of good and kind.

Every verse in Hebrews attest to these facts, and to the glorious majesty of His Son.

When the Firstborn God Returns

For to which of the angels did He ever say: “You are My Son, Today I have begotten You”? And again: “I will be to Him a Father, And He shall be to Me a Son”? But when He again brings the firstborn into the world, He says: “Let all the angels of God worship Him.” And of the angels He says: “Who makes His angels spirits And His ministers a flame of fire.” But to the Son He says: “Your throne, O God, is forever and ever; A scepter of righteousness is the scepter of Your Kingdom. You have loved righteousness and hated lawlessness; Therefore God, Your God, has anointed You With the oil of gladness more than Your companions.” (Hebrews 01:05-09, NKJV).

Throughout the course of Church history, especially at its beginning, Christians were characterized as "worshipers of the dead God."

That is the world's misinterpretation, of course, and a gross distortion of the truth, but it is an interesting one. By focusing on the sacrifice of Christ, the world affirms its historicity. It was an event that happened in time and space, and people noticed, but not because Someone was killed in a tortuous and gruesome manner - that happens all the time even today - but because of the impact that that particular death had on a significant number of people. It clearly and permanently changed human hearts and minds, from the inside out. Narcissists became philanthropists; hedonists became self-controlled; reprobates became decent; deceivers became honest - all because sinners became saved and regenerated by the power of the gospel.

The evidence was irrefutable, so much so, that the ensconced civil and established religious authorities of that day, and since, have done their dogged best to undermine the impact. Through persecution, marginalization, libel, slander, extortion and repressive control, true Christianity's abolition was sought with diabolic persistence. Bibles were burned, churches broken up, saints martyred - all to no avail. When outright demolition failed, the world tried the next best thing: mockery.

"They worship a dead God! What kind of lunatics worship a dead God? They must be insane! Pay no attention to them!"

In the end, that strategy fails like all the others. It's hard to really mock people who don't regard themselves as important in themselves. Or more precisely, who don't look at themselves as entitled to being treated a certain way. That kind of person, when mocked, typically bears it with good humor, taking it in stride, knowing that the mockers are like scared children afraid of something they don't quite understand, but are convinced is somehow a threat.

This chauvinism regarding a dead God is particularly fascinating because it stops at the Cross, and does not proceed to the Empty Tomb. Its underlying intent is to dilute the Deity of Christ by decrying how ridiculous it is for God to die. The implicit statement is this: any god worth its salt can't die, so clearly Jesus Christ was no god, and therefore His followers are either woefully deluded, or willfully demented.

They miss the main point, obviously, that God became a Man to be able to suffer death. And he became a Man by being the Father's firstborn. The sense of this word in Greek (prototokos) is not solely chronological, as in the first to emerge from the womb, though it certainly can be used with that connotation. The word is also positional, in the sense that it denotes prominence and privilege. The firstborn son in ancient cultures typically succeeded the patriarch of the clan, and received a double portion of the inheritance. He became the controller and primary shareholder of the family estate and business. In short, he was accorded first rank among siblings.

In both senses then, it is a fitting description of the Only-begotten Son of God. It encapsulates His unique Humanity, while emphasizing His divine authority. And while some have used that designation to argue that Christ is not God because He was born, that argument is just vapor. Nobody is arguing He wasn't born. His virgin birth is an integral part of the miracle of redemptive history.

But note also the subtle summary of salvation in the highlighted verse, But when He again brings the firstborn into the world. He came once as the Suffering Servant, sent by the Father to die a substitutionary atoning death for our sins, but then He rose again and went out of the world. The Father will send Him once again into the world, not as Servant, but as Judge and King.

He will judge men as the Son of Man, and He will rule in absolute sovereign authority as the Son of God. And His Royalty will be of such eminence that not only man, but angels will worship Him.

Later in Hebrews we will learn that He became a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death, but when He returns He will be crowned with glory and honor that cannot be denied or escaped.

In fact, the really amazing aspect of Christ's intervention in human history is not just the fact He condescended to intervene, but the surprising way he did so. He was born as one of us, to die as one of us, so that we could live as one with Him.

There is no comparison between Christ and anyone else, except the Father.

He is supreme in every characteristic: humility, divinity, humanity, love, obedience, mercy, grace and power.

And one day, every knee shall bow, and every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

The Son

For to which of the angels did He ever say: “You are My Son, Today I have begotten You”? And again: “I will be to Him a Father, And He shall be to Me a Son”? But when He again brings the firstborn into the world, He says: “Let all the angels of God worship Him.” And of the angels He says: “Who makes His angels spirits And His ministers a flame of fire.” But to the Son He says: “Your throne, O God, is forever and ever; A scepter of righteousness is the scepter of Your Kingdom. You have loved righteousness and hated lawlessness; Therefore God, Your God, has anointed You With the oil of gladness more than Your companions.” (Hebrews 01:05-09, NKJV).

There is something extremely moving about our Savior being the Son of God. It is ennobling to think that the Father considered our redemption so vitally important that He sent not just an Emissary, or a Servant, but the Uniquely-Begotten One (monogenes in Greek) to save us creatures from the penalty of sin.

Some have argued that the Eternal Second Person of the Trinity became the Son at the precise time appointed before the foundation of the world. Others have concluded that He was always, and eternally, the Son, since Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever. While I tend to agree that the first position aligns more closely with all that Scripture reveals about Christ Jesus, in the end, what matters most to me is the fact of His Sonship.

Of course, to satisfy God's perfect justice, the payment for Adam's sin had to be made by a man, because Adam was a man. Since the wages of sin is death, and since every soul that sins must die, the only way for a man's death to be the propitiation for more than that man's own sin, is for a sinless Man to voluntarily die on behalf of sinful others. It had to be a Man to take away sin precisely because it was through a man's rebellion that sin entered the world, and death through sin.

That part of the equation is tragically brilliant and fitting. 

Further, since all men are conceived in sin by virtue of their being descendants of Adam, the "federal head of the human race", thus inheriting his fallen nature, a mere human could never qualify. The only perfect, sinless Man could not be born literally as a son of man genetically or existentially, but yet had to be born as a Man. Again, the divinely brilliant, surprising, and perfect solution is that the Savior would be born of a virgin under the Law. He would be the paradoxical Seed of the woman promised in Genesis 3, conceived not by a fallen man, but by the Holy Spirit of God.

Two age-old skeptical objections instantly arise. How can a virgin give birth? And, why are Adam's descendants held accountable for his long-ago rebellion?

The response to the first objection is simply this: why think it difficult for an Omnipotent Being to decree a Virgin Birth? He created all of reality by merely speaking it into existence. Sidestepping a couple of procreative laws does not seem to be that big of a deal. And logically, it makes little sense to insist that God, being God, think and act within the narrow confines of our paltry ideas of divine consistency. 

Now, if you disbelieve that God is Creator, I get your heartache. But then my question is why try to believe any part of God's redemptive plan at all, since it stands or falls on the literal existence of a First Man created in God's image who willfully rejected Him? Incidentally, this is also the answer to the second skeptical objection. For if God did not ordain that we were all represented in Adam, and thus guilty of original sin, then we could likewise not be represented in Christ, the sinless, propitiatory sacrifice who paid for our sin.

We'd be on our own, and as soon as we fell short of even one jot or tittle of God's moral law, we would be guilty of violating His absolute standard of perfection without hope of redemption. Picture a chain suspending us over the chasm of Hell. If one of the links is broken, it matters not at all how secure all the other links may be. The end result is that we fall screaming into the pit.

Do you see the mercy and grace and justice in all this?

But what makes the gift of grace in Jesus more spectacular still is that the prerequisite of being a sinless man could conceivably have been met by a holy angel incarnating as a human though a virgin birth. That man could then have been sacrificed on behalf of humanity, and again, speaking from a merely human perspective, the debt paid. But thinking along these lines is where we would go very wrong. For consider that it is not just the sacrifice, but our personally appropriating that sacrifice through faith that makes us righteous before God. We would then be required to have faith in an angel (some cults make this very mistake). And in gratitude for that sacrifice, the next natural step would be adoration and worship. But only God is worthy of worship. Do you see one of the problems? Angels are created beings unworthy of worship.

Secondly, from the very beginning God reveals that He is the only One mighty enough to save. Only He, the Uncreated One, the Uncaused First Cause, has the intrinsic power to take away the sin debt, forever. It is only the life of God Himself that is of sufficient value to offset the eternal debt of man's sin.

Only by God dying on the Cross could man be saved, and only by becoming fully Human would it be possible for Him to suffer death, and be the sinless Substitute that takes away the sin of the world.

Yet, the glory of all this goes further still by Scripture informing us that it was the Son of God - who is the express image of the Father, and in whom all the fulness of the Godhead dwells bodily - who came to save by dying. His own Son lovingly became the payment of the Father's divine and perfect justice. 

His Son.

Please don't miss the meaning of that.

What relationship would a God who is love value more than that of Father and Son? What better way of informing us of His value (and ours!) than by having Him become the Uniquely-begotten Son? I submit that the very concept of father, son and family, as well as human love and marriage, were expressly ordained for this very purpose - to show the depth of the Father's love, the loving obedience of His Son, and the utter heinousness of sin.

I do not think it is possible to understate the importance of understanding what it took to enable us to escape the fires of Hell.

It took love beyond measure.

It took obedience beyond description.

It took humility beyond imagination.

It took a sacrifice beyond price.

It took The Son.

Unveiled

For to which of the angels did He ever say: “You are My Son, Today I have begotten You”? And again: “I will be to Him a Father, And He shall be to Me a Son”? But when He again brings the firstborn into the world, He says: “Let all the angels of God worship Him.” And of the angels He says: “Who makes His angels spirits And His ministers a flame of fire.” But to the Son He says: “Your throne, O God, is forever and ever; A scepter of righteousness is the scepter of Your Kingdom. You have loved righteousness and hated lawlessness; Therefore God, Your God, has anointed You With the oil of gladness more than Your companions.” (Hebrews 01:05-09, NKJV).

Not surprisingly, the Book of Hebrews uses many allusions to the Hebrew Old Testament to present its overriding theme of the supremacy of Christ.

In continuing the specific argument regarding the inferiority of angels as compared to the Son, the writer cites seven Old Testament passages (Ps 2:7; 2Sa 7:14; De 32:43; Ps 97:7; 104:4; 45:6,7), sometimes with unexpected surgical precision, selecting only part of a phrase or sentence (2Sa 7:14; De 32:43).  The primary purpose is to reemphasize the Son's superiority, and also to demonstrate conclusively that there is nothing about the Messiah that was not first foreshadowed long before Jesus' Incarnation, and then exactly and uniquely fulfilled by His life and words. In addition, there is another, more subtle, teaching as well - that God's Word, every jot or tittle, noun, pronoun, verb and adverb can have prophetic or doctrinal significance. Therefore, the closer we get to the literal translation of the original languages, the more precise will be our interpretation and understanding.

The Apostle Paul, in Galatians 3:16, provides another interesting example of this premise, when he stipulates the exactness of the promises to Abraham in Ge 12:7, 13:15, and 24:7, regarding his singular descendant:

Now to Abraham and his Seed were the promises made. He does not say, “And to seeds,” as of many, but as of one, “And to your Seed,” who is Christ. (Galatians 3:16, NKJV).

These, and other profound teachings, are treasures hidden in Scripture, inspired by the Holy Spirit for the edification and encouragement of the saints in Christ; rewards for those who lovingly study and meditate upon His Word, as it is written:

“The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but those things which are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law. (Deuteronomy 29:29, NKJV).

Does this mean that you need years of training in ancient languages to fully understand God's redemptive plan? Or that you cannot know fully what He requires of you, O' man?

No, because overwhelmingly, the main doctrines in the Bible concerning sin, salvation, Christ, the nations, Israel, and prophetic history are plainly understandable if you take a reliable translation in the plain sense in which it was intended. As declared long ago, "the main things are the plain things", so that "we are without excuse." And by reliable, I mean those translations made by believing scholars, who are willing to sign a written declaration of faith in Christ, and in the inerrancy of the original Scriptural texts. Modern translations that meet that criteria include the NKJV and the NASB. These attempt to be literal word-for-word translations, with the NIV of the mid-1980's   purporting to be an accurate thought-for-thought translation.

Other translations, particularly those comprised primarily of paraphrases (current human words substituted for God's words), while perhaps of devotional value, cannot be used for deep word studies, nor can they be considered as authoritative in terms of doctrine and prophecy. And certainly, these versions are disqualified for unveiling the hidden treasures mentioned above, as they are merely human transliterations of divine truth.

In fact, it is because of the proliferation of modern translations that skeptics argue that the Bible can't be considered other than man-made since "there are so many contradictory translations." While this is superficially true regarding less rigorous works, it is completely untrue as it pertains to those following the traditions of the "authorized versions", like the KJV, NKJV and NASB. 

Are there variant readings in the roughly 5000 oldest manuscripts of the New Testament? Yes. But in every case, these variations do not alter any of the foundational tenets of the faith, and (and this is very interesting), these variations serve as the major vehicle by which translators arrive statistically, through textual criticism and analysis, at the original words. This is so because the volume of manuscripts, some chronologically very close to the events recorded, enable scholars to analyze the variations with the understanding that no two copyists, separated geographically and/or historically, were likely to make the same error in the same place. 

Incidentally, compared to other ancient manuscripts, the Old and New Testaments have more, and older, ancient texts than any other ancient manuscript - exponentially more.

Returning tone of the main points here, it is this: Surely the Lord GOD does nothing, Unless He reveals His secret to His servants the prophets. (Amos 3:7, NKJV). This is especially true regarding His Son, about whom all of the Old Testament pointed, and all of the New Testament revealed, including the focus passages above.

The Book of Hebrews is remarkable in its unveiling of the supreme excellence of Christ, virtually from its first verse onward. As such it paints a portrait of Messiah's magnificence, nobility, deity, integrity, power and faithfulness. It refutes any mistaken beliefs past, present or future about Him being other than coequal with God the Father, proclaiming emphatically that He is alike in essence, character, and nature, and differing only in redemptive role -  and that through loving filial subservience to the Father.

Perhaps nowhere else in Scripture do we find Him explicitly compared to angels or humans, with each incidence resulting in the resounding proclamation, as here, that He is as far above creaturehood of any kind, including vaunted angelic beings, as it is possible to get. He is Lord of All, unveiled in all His intrinsic glory and substance.

God, Creator, King, Lord, and Savior, to whom be glory and blessing and honor and strength forever and ever. Amen.