Jesus, the Son of God

 

After making purification for sins, he [Jesus] 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”? (Hebrews 1:4-5 ESV).

 

Today we will begin a closer look at the passage from yesterday. The reading today is the first two verses of the longer passage. It emphasizes the essential truth that Jesus is indeed the Son of God.

 

One October morning in 1977, Maria Rubio was in her small green stucco house in southeastern New Mexico, preparing her husband’s lunch. It was 6 a.m., and she was making burritos—cooking beans, scrambling eggs, and preparing tortillas from scratch. And then she saw it, as she was putting together the second burrito: a burn mark on one of the tortillas, in the shape of a little face. That image was about an inch tall and an inch wide. If you look at photos from back then, the likeness is at best difficult to definitively identify. For Maria, however, she was convinced it was the image of Jesus. Her testimony is that it forever changed her life.

 

We may laugh at that story, but to be mistaken about the person of Jesus Christ is no laughing matter. As we’ve seen in the past week, the most crucial question for each person to answer correctly is Jesus’ question to His disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” (Matthew 16:15). If we have an inadequate or incorrect view of who Jesus is, we will not be able to have a relationship with Him that results in eternal life. He cannot be seen as a great teacher, or a miracle worker, or a prophet of God. The writer of Hebrews sees the importance of this and takes great care to detail who Jesus really is. Here he says Jesus is the Son of God.

 

Since this is such a crucial matter, it is not surprising that the world and the devil have consistently attacked the person of Christ. Sometimes the attacks have denied Jesus’ true humanity. At other times they undermine the true deity of Jesus. Many have taught that Jesus is just “slightly” below the status of God. The Jehovah’s Witnesses teach that Jesus is “a god,” and even “a mighty god,” but not God Almighty. They teach that Jesus was created as the archangel Michael and that through him, all other things in the universe were created. Thus, they hold to a relatively high view of Jesus, but they deny His full deity. But as Bishop Moule once said, “A Savior not quite God is a bridge broken at the farther end.”

We know that the Apostle Paul warned the Colossian church about the early Gnostic heresy that included angel worship (cf. Colossians 2:18). There was also a Jewish Dead Sea Sect, which believed in a dual messiah, both of whom would be subject to the archangel Michael. These views may have infiltrated this Jewish church. And, since the Jews at this time had begun to embellish the Old Testament teaching on angels he also sets out to convince his readers that Jesus is supreme over Judaism. He shows how He was not only supreme over Moses, but also over the angels. He shows them that Jesus’ becoming a man did not place Him beneath the angels in terms of His essential nature as eternal God. Jesus’ superiority to the angels rests on the fact that He is God. We cannot deny that truth.