S2 || Why Jesus Is Supreme || Hebrews 1:1-3 || Session 2

The first lines of Hebrews don’t stroll—they soar. We open chapter one and climb fast: God has spoken in many portions and many ways, and now finally in the Son. That single claim reframes all of Scripture and resets our assumptions about authority, revelation, and hope. Together we explore how the author of Hebrews weaves Old Testament quotations, poetic Greek, and high Christology into a focused portrait: Jesus is heir of all things, maker of the ages, the radiance of God’s glory, and the exact imprint of His nature.

As we read Hebrews 1:1–4, we connect the dots across the canon. John chapter 5 clarifies that calling God His Father was a claim to equality with God. Colossians chapter 1 echoes that all things were created by Him, through Him, and for Him—and that in Him all things hold together. That means the stability of the universe isn’t an abstract force; it’s personal providence. We also unpack what “last days” means biblically, why Christ is God’s final Word, and how the Spirit still guides believers without adding new revelation to Scripture.

Then we linger over those luminous phrases: the Son as radiance, the Shekinah glory revealed in Jesus, purification for sins accomplished, and the royal seat at the right hand of Majesty. Angels are honored in Hebrews, yet Jesus stands infinitely higher—Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer. The takeaway is both doctrinal and pastoral: relocate your trust. If Christ inherits everything, no rival can claim your heart. If He upholds all things by His powerful word, anxiety meets its match in His steady care. Come think deeply, worship clearly, and leave with your attention fixed where God has finally spoken—on the Son.

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Chapters

• 0:17 Starting Hebrews On The Mountaintop
• 2:11 Reading Hebrews 1:1–4 Aloud
• 3:11 How God Spoke Then And Now
• 6:07 The Last Days And Final Revelation
• 9:25 Messiah, Christ, And Progressive Revelation
• 12:53 Sonship As A Claim To Deity
• 15:05 Heir Of All Things, Maker Of Ages
• 18:41 Upholding The Universe By His Word
• 21:18 Radiance Of Glory And Shekinah
• 25:32 Closing Reflections And Next Steps

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:17

I hope you have your wings with you today. We're starting at chapter one, verse one of the book of Hebrews. This book starts off on a mountaintop and it very rarely comes down into the valleys. It occasionally touches down to the ground with some warnings, but the majority of the book stays way up in the clouds, giving us wonderful high praises for Jesus. The beauty of this book is a little intimidating. The concepts are so lofty, but the doctrine is also very heavy. We're always told the higher you go, the thinner the air gets. But way up here where we're going to be, the air is very rich and very nourishing. We are reasoning through the Bible. And as we said, if you have your Bible, open it to the book of Hebrews. This first chapter of Hebrews includes a lot of doctrine about the person of Jesus. As a matter of fact, most of the book is really about Jesus, on how he is better, a more excellent way. The deity of Christ is presented here in this first chapter in a handful of ways. The opening verse doesn't start like one of the epistles. The book opens up like a treatise or a theological book. Personally, I feel a little intimidated trying to teach this book simply because the concepts are so lofty and the doctrine is so wonderful and deep that it's going to be very difficult to communicate both the theology and the poetic literary beauty of this book. The writer in this first chapter quotes the Old Testament seven times. And there's many, many quotes of the Old Testament through this book. The author of Hebrews knew a great deal about the Greek language and the details of the Old Testament Jewish law and customs. So let's go ahead and dive in. Steve, can you read the first four verses of Hebrews chapter one?

SPEAKER_00: 2:19

God, after he spoke long ago to the fathers and the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in his son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom also he made the world. And he is the radiance of his glory and the exact representation of his nature, and upholds all things by the word of his power. When he had made purification of sins, he sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high, having become as much better than the angels, as he has inherited a more excellent name than they.

SPEAKER_01: 3:01

The beginning of this book in our English translation starts off with God and what he has done. But in the Greek, we really don't get the beauty of the language that happens. The Greek starts off with this wonderful poetic alliteration: holumeros, holotropos palai. It's an alliteration. These verses are just so wonderful. Steve, what do you think of when you read these first verses of this book?

SPEAKER_00: 3:28

What I see, Glenn, is that there's some consistency with the beginning of this book, with the beginning of John. There's also a parallel to the book of Colossians. As we go through here, as you mentioned in the introduction, there's a lot of quotes from the Old Testament. So what one of the things I see is not just the language that you pointed out, but it's the consistency between the New Testament and the Old Testament. It's the way to study God's word in that these books that we have are not just haphazardly put together. You and I believe that the Holy Spirit inspired all of these authors, but we have a total of 66 books between the Old and New Testament, written over thousands of years, put together by myriads of authors. And to me, it's just miraculous, really, that we have this consistency between these various books. It shows to me that there is one being behind the message that comes out of all of these books.

SPEAKER_01: 4:36

The first verse here in our translation says, God, after he spoke long ago to the fathers and the prophets in many portions and many ways. So the book starts off with God reaching down and speaking to us. Just that concept alone is tremendous. We have a God who has reached down into creation and spoken, not just once, but many times and in many ways. These first verses tell us that God exists, God spoke, and how this is the final revelation of Christ. But think of it, we don't have to go somewhere to a temple and bring some sort of sacrifice and pray for a very long time or yell very loudly to get our God's attention. He spoke to us. There's many gods in many other religions that they don't speak. In fact, they're quite silent. But we have a God who has reached down into creation and has spoken many times in many ways. I think of when he spoke to Abraham in visions, he spoke to Balaam through a donkey, and he spoke to Moses in a burning bush, and he spoke to Moses on the top of Mount Sinai. He spoke to Elijah out of a whirlwind, but it was a still small voice. So one of the questions, Steve, does God still give us guidance and direction today? It's not the same as a biblical prophet, but we have the Holy Spirit that can speak to us today, can he not?

SPEAKER_00: 6:13

That is one of the great things that has been left behind for us as Jesus ascended. Jesus said, I must go so that he might come, speaking of the Holy Spirit. So we have this assurance and guidance of the Holy Spirit that is with us as believers. And God spoke to mankind in all of those ways that you mentioned, Glenn, but he also spoke to mankind in human form. If you remember when Joshua was going into the promised land and he was looking over Jericho and he saw this man that was standing there in armor and with a sword, he went up to him and said, Who are you? Are you with them or are you with us? And the man turned around and said, You don't understand. I'm here to lead you in. I'm the captain of the host. There were other times whenever we see God in a human form speak to various people in the Old Testament. So not only does he come in the various ways that you talked about, but he also showed up in the Old Testament in human form. And of course, it's in the New Testament, we see God in the human form of Jesus, the Messiah. So it is a great thing that God has gone to these extents to talk to his creation, communicate with them, even to the point that he came to tabernacle among us, as John put it, to dwell among his creation. And as we'll see in the later chapters of Hebrews, that he laid down his life and he became the satisfactory sacrifice so that humankind might be able to have eternal life. It's such a great, great thing. And this is just the first verse of the chapter of Hebrews. It's going to be a great study.

SPEAKER_01: 8:07

Really, not even the first verse, the first phrase starts off with this very lofty, solid theological foundation. God reached down into creation and spoke. He gave his word to us. The Bible is not a collection of human-inspired stories, nor is our God silent, nor is he distant. God spoke to our fathers and the prophets. The old King James puts this a very interesting way. It says, God, who at sundry times and diverse manners spoke to the prophets and the fathers. So in the past, God has spoken and given different messages to different people at different times. He gave a different message to Abraham, a different message to Elijah, different message to Moses, a different message to the different prophets. But he has spoken in these last days through Jesus Christ. God reveals himself to mankind and has done so many times, many ways, and to many people. Think of it. God reached down into creation to lowly sinful men and spoke to prophets who wrote down his words. We can read the very words of God. Other false gods are silent. They don't speak, they can't give revelation. Then in verse two, God spoke many ways in the past, but now has spoken through Jesus. Verse 2 calls the church age the last days, it says God spoke in many ways in the past, but we're in the last days. Then if that's the case, then Jesus is the final revelation. After Jesus, God sent no additional prophets because Christ is the pinnacle of God's message. Therefore, anyone who comes along today claiming to have new revelation in the same sense of a prophet of God, then we can be sure that person is a false prophet simply because we are in the last days. Sometimes, Steve, I've had people ask me, Do you think we're in the last days? And the real answer is yes, we are in the last days, and we've been in the last days since Christ came the first time, and we're going to stay in the last days until he comes back again, because we are in the church age, which is the last days. There's been many people in each generation who have all thought Christ was about to come. And so far, they've all been wrong. But the Bible does tell us we are in the last days, are we not?

SPEAKER_00: 10:52

We're in the last days because the Messiah has come. And that was the teaching from the Old Testament prophets that when the Messiah comes, that it would be the last days, he was going to come to usher in the messianic kingdom. So a little bit of groundwork. You and I, Glenn, as Gentiles, and because we are going through the New Testament here, we use the term Jesus Christ because that is what is put through in the English translation of the Greek. Christ is a transliteration of the Greek word Christos. Christos in Greek means anointed one. In the Old Testament, that word Messiah, the Hebrew word behind it, means the anointed one. So whenever we use the word messiah and the word Christ, they're both the same word. They're saying the same thing. They're saying the anointed one. We say Jesus Christ. In Hebrew, they would say Yeshua Hamashiach, Jesus the Messiah. So I wanted to lay that groundwork. Anytime that we're using the word Christ, we're talking about the Messiah, the anointed one. As the author puts here in verse one, that he spoke through many prophets, many portions, many ways. God always gave progressive revelation. He never gave one prophet the full revelation. And that's why it's important, I think, Glenn, for us to study the Old Testament and the Old Testament prophets. Because as you study them, you get a complete picture of what God was trying to communicate. With some of the prophets like Haggai, he only spoke for a month. With other prophets like Ezekiel, it was 14 years. Then you have other prophets like Daniel and Jeremiah, and God spoke through them pretty much their lifetime. So verse one, he spoke through many prophets in many portions in many ways. Then in verse two, as you pointed out, but now in these last days, he has spoken through his son. And the actual Greek there doesn't have a definite article. Some translations will say spoke in a son, spoke through the son. Here in our translation, it says in his son, but the actual Greek just says in Son. So as to the poetic language that you began with, we also have this thought here that the author is getting to is that in the past, God spoke through several different ways and different prophets to mankind. But now, in these last days, now that Jesus has come, the Messiah, he spoke in Son. It's the Son, S-O-N, that He is speaking to mankind. So we have the New Testament, the Gospels that speak of what Jesus did. That is the way that God has finally spoken to man. And as you pointed out earlier, there are no more prophetic revelations or anything else like that. God has spoken the last of it in Son. And the last revelation we have is the revelation of Jesus Christ itself in the book of Revelation. So it's just really, again, this very rich language here in Hebrews, in this very first phrase, there's so much packed into it of not only the poetry and the ideas that it's getting across, but also the theology. It's just tremendous.

SPEAKER_01: 14:35

The language in Hebrews is both deep theological teaching and this wonderful poetic language. And it's lifting up Jesus as the best thing that is in the universe. He is better, he is higher, he is God. And one of the places where he starts off immediately telling us he's God is in verse two, these last days spoken to us in his son. Now, this idea of the son of God gets lost in the modern ear simply because we think of Jesus as the son of God as being different than God. And that's not really what the term means, especially in the ancient days. Most modern people don't grasp the significance of when he says he's the son of God. To give you the significance, the apostle John gives us a very clear explanation of what it meant to be called the Son of God. In John chapter 5, the Jewish leaders were attempting to kill Jesus. The inspired apostle in John 5 gives us the reason why. John's commentary was this. He says, Quote, For this reason, therefore, the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because he not only was breaking the Sabbath, but also was calling God his own father, making himself equal with God. That's in John 5.18. So when he says, I am the Son and God is my father, according to the inspired apostle, that is making himself equal with God. So when it says here in Hebrews 1:2 that he spoke through the son, well, being the son is God. The son is the same as the father in the sense of both being God. It goes back to a Lord, a large landowner. The son is in the family of the owner. So he is an equal authority. That's a human example, but that's the sense here. When he says the son of God, it's a claim to the deity of Christ. And John 5.18 makes this quite clear. So then in verse two, it also says he is the heir of all things. So question, Steve, when it says Jesus is the heir of all things, how much of the created world does that entail?

SPEAKER_00: 17:05

It's another example of where all means all, I think. It says all things. So it's it's all of the universe, all of creation here on earth. It's everything. All means all.

SPEAKER_01: 17:17

And when it says the heir of all things, everything that is a thing is his. Jesus inherits all things. That means he inherits all of creation. He is Lord over heaven and earth. This phrase, heir of all things, is yet another claim for Jesus to be supreme over the entire universe. There's nothing above him. He is the highest. And this author of Hebrews is holding angels as we're going to get to the latter parts of the chapter. Angels is the highest of the created beings. Jesus is heir of even the angels, heir of all things, all of the world and all of the heavens. He alone is worthy. There is only one supreme over all things, and that is God. So when he is heir of all things, he is God. Says also through whom he also made the world. And Steve, you made the allusion earlier to Colossians. There's several of these concepts, especially in chapter one of Hebrews, that follow along with what is taught in the book of Colossians. Colossians 1.17 says all of creation was made by him, through him, and for him. Hebrews 1.2 agrees with Colossians in that Jesus is the means through which the worlds were made. The Greek term here is translated world, actually means ages. Jesus was created all the ages, past, present, and future. Jesus is the author of eternity. Steve, how great is Jesus?

SPEAKER_00: 18:55

He is the greatest of all. And we get this sense through Colossians and the first part of John, and now here with Hebrews, that Jesus is everything to us. Everything was created by him, for him. He holds everything together. Colossians also makes that clear. In the Old Testament, as I mentioned before, God coming down in the form of a human. You and I, through our studies, would look at that and we would call those Christophanies. Those would be times whenever the second person of the Trinity shows up in the form of a man. You start to formulate through scripture that the second person in the Trinity is over everything regarding us as humankind. He is the one that puts everything together. So really that shows Jesus' deity, that he is God, but we have this second person who very much so gets involved in creation himself.

SPEAKER_01: 19:58

In the middle of verse three, not only does Jesus make the world, but he also sustains it. It says there, Jesus upholds all things by the word of his power. Steve, how much power does it take to uphold every particle in the universe with your word?

SPEAKER_00: 20:28

And also with physics, you begin to understand that even the very tiniest things in the universe, atoms, are complicated and sophisticated, that there is something there that holds them together. The physicist can't describe what it is, but there is something there that holds it together. Well, we know scripture tells us that it is Jesus Himself that is holding everything together. So it's God Himself is the creator and also the sustainer, and also the one that holds everything together in Jesus Christ. That is what Scripture tells us.

SPEAKER_01: 21:10

The middle of verse three says Jesus holds all things by the word of his power. We made the allusion to Colossians a while ago. Colossians says in 117 that in him all things hold together. So one of the additional supports for the inspiration of the Bible is that the books align with their teaching, even though written by different people in different times. Hebrews continues this lofty description of the deity of Christ. In verse three, it says he is the radiance of his glory. This is really up here in a very high concept. Here, the word radiance means the pinnacle or the fulfillment. Saying that Jesus is the radiance of God's glory. I was trying to find an illustration I could use to try to communicate the significance of this. Think of the radiance of his glory would be the equivalent of saying that if you had the strongest person in the world, Jesus is the strength of the strongest person. Jesus is what makes God strong. The highest wisdom of the wisest God, Jesus would be what makes God wise. The goodness that makes up God's morality, Jesus would be what makes God good. Saying that Jesus is the radiance of God's glory is to say that Jesus is what makes God glorious. He is what makes the glory shine through. No created being could say this. Think of what it would sound like if we were to say something like, without Michael the archangel, God would not be as glorious as God would normally be. But it's Michael that makes God fully glorious. That would be blasphemy. And you could take that with any of God's attributes: God's wisdom, his strength, his power, his glory in this case. So to say that Jesus is the highest pinnacle, the eminence of God's glory is to say that he is God. No created being could be said to be the one that fulfills an attribute of God, because only God has infinite attributes. So this is yet another claim for the deity of Christ.

SPEAKER_00: 23:30

I think this is also referencing the transfiguration. The disciples that were there on the mountaintop saw the actual glory of Jesus whenever he let the cloak of his human form down. They saw the radiance. The Sekina glory is what the rabbis have come up with to describe the glory of God. When we went through Ezekiel, the very first chapter had all of this wonderful description. And you and I really came down to the fact that it's just God in his glory showing up. Moses was up on the mountain. When he came back down, his face was glowing as a reflection of the glory of God as he talked and conversed with God up on Mount Sinai. So I think those are manifestations of what the author here is saying in verse three and the radiance of his glory. It's the Shekinah glory of God. And the Shekinah glory is always talking about in person, that God in person is shown through the Shekinah glory. And I think the author is making the very much the connection between the Shekinah glory of God and Jesus Himself. They're once again putting together that Jesus is deity. Jesus is God.

SPEAKER_01: 24:50

We're going a little slow. We didn't get very far, but boy, is this rich. It's wonderful information here. You're going to need your wings again next time because we're still going to be soaring in the heights of the book of Hebrews. We trust that you'll be back with us again next time to reason through the book of Hebrews.

SPEAKER_00: 25:09

Thank you so much for watching and listening. May God bless you.