God Has Spoken

Hebrews 1:1–4

Read Hebrews 1:1–4 before proceeding. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.

After God spoke long ago in various portions and in various ways to our ancestors through the prophets, in these last days he has spoken to us in a son…
Hebrews 1:1–2a

Beginning a Book Without a Beginning

Every letter we have studied so far in this series began with a name. “From James, a slave of God and the Lord Jesus Christ.” “From Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ.” “What was from the beginning, what we have heard…” And though John never gave us his name in the prologue of his first letter, the voice is so unmistakable that by the second verse we know who is speaking. We have been trained, reading the New Testament, to begin with a greeting. To begin with a person. To know whose voice is speaking before we listen to what the voice says.

Hebrews gives us none of that. No name. No greeting. No “to the saints in” or “grace and peace.” The author, whoever he was, begins without introducing himself at all. He begins, instead, with God.

“After God spoke long ago in various portions and in various ways to our ancestors through the prophets, in these last days he has spoken to us in a son.” It is one of the grandest openings in all of Scripture. In the Greek, verses 1–4 are a single sentence: a single, rolling, magnificent sentence, carefully constructed, full of alliteration and rhythm that the English cannot quite preserve. The author opens his mouth and what comes out is not his own name but the announcement that God has spoken. And then, before the sentence ends, he will have told us seven things about the Son through whom God has spoken: that the Son is appointed heir of all things, that the world was created through him, that he is the radiance of God’s glory, the representation of God’s essence, that he sustains all things by his powerful word, that he accomplished cleansing for sins, and that he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high.

We will spend this whole session on those four verses. There is more in them than we will be able to exhaust, and more than we will be able to follow all the way down. That is a fair warning about the letter we are beginning: Hebrews does not hurry, and it does not thin out. It is dense almost from the first word. It expects a serious reader. It rewards one.

About This Letter

Before we enter the text itself, a few things about Hebrews are worth naming, briefly, and then we will move on. We will not spend a session on introductions. We will spend a session on the Word of God, which is what Hebrews is.

The letter is anonymous. We do not know who wrote it. The early church guessed. Paul was the most common guess, though ancient writers also proposed Barnabas, Luke, and Clement of Rome. Luther, reading Hebrews carefully, concluded that it could not be Paul and suggested Apollos. Later readers have added Silvanus and Priscilla to the list. Modern scholarship is divided and mostly honest about being divided. The best answer, and the one the Church has largely come to rest in, is that the Holy Spirit knows who wrote it and we do not need to. The letter has been received as apostolic without being Pauline, and that is where the matter rests.

The letter was probably written before the year 70, since it speaks of the sacrifices as still being offered, which is a significant piece of information, because once the temple was destroyed, the argument Hebrews makes about the old covenant being obsolete would have been made for him by history. He is arguing, before the destruction, that the old sacrificial system has already been superseded by Christ.

The letter was written to Christians (almost certainly Jewish Christians, or Christians who had been deeply formed in Jewish categories) who were facing pressure. The pressure might have been social, might have been familial, might have been ritual. Whatever it was, some of them were thinking about going back. Going back to a faith that did not mark them out as followers of the crucified one. Going back to the tabernacle, the priests, the sacrifices: to something that felt more ancient and more stable than this new thing. Hebrews was written to call them back from that drift. To show them that the thing they were considering returning to had always been pointing forward, and that what it had been pointing toward had arrived.

That is why Hebrews is, above all, a letter about something better. The word appears thirteen times: a better hope, a better covenant, better promises, better sacrifices, a better country, a better resurrection. If you had to name in one word what Hebrews is trying to say, the word would be better. Not better in the casual sense we often mean (better than nothing, better than we expected) but better in the full theological sense: that Christ is the substance of which the old things were the shadow, the reality of which they were the rehearsal, the true of which they were the copy. The letter will spend thirteen chapters making that case. The case begins in verse one.

“After God spoke long ago in various portions and in various ways to our ancestors through the prophets.”

The sentence begins with an assumption that would have been utterly obvious to the first readers and is worth slowing down over, because it is less obvious to us. The author assumes that God speaks. He does not argue for it. He does not prove it. He begins with it. In the beginning, God. And God speaks. The world we live in is a world addressed by God, and the first thing that needs to be said about any of us is that we are people to whom God has spoken.

That is an old claim and, in our time, a somewhat quiet one. We live in a culture that is quite comfortable with the idea that humans speak about God, or toward God, or in the direction of God, humans being the active party, the subjects, the speakers. Hebrews reverses that. God has spoken. The speaking is His, and we are the addressed. The human posture, before God, is primarily the posture of the listener. The one who has ears to hear.

And that listening has a long history. “In various portions and in various ways.” Through Abraham, to whom God appeared and spoke and made promises. Through Moses, to whom God spoke from the burning bush and on Sinai and, later, face to face as a man speaks with his friend. Through the prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the twelve minor prophets) whose voices come down to us through the centuries, each of them speaking the word of the Lord in his own place and moment. Through the Psalms, which are themselves the prayed-back response of Israel to the God who had first spoken to them. The whole Old Testament is God’s speaking, refracted through human voices, in many forms and over many centuries.

Hebrews is not in the least dismissive of that history. The writer of this letter will quote the Old Testament more densely than almost any other New Testament book. The prophets were real prophets. God really spoke through them. The old covenant was real revelation. This is important to say clearly, because there is an old temptation, and it is still with us, to read Hebrews as though it were running down the Old Testament in order to build up Christ. That is not what Hebrews is doing. Hebrews is saying that the God who spoke then is the God who speaks now, and that what He was saying then is now being said with finality. The voice is the same voice. The covenant is fulfilled, not discarded.

But then the sentence turns. “In these last days he has spoken to us in a son.” The pivot is small in the English and sharp in the Greek. The Greek has no article here, which is why the NET renders it “in a son”: God has now spoken in one whose very standing is that of Son, not one more servant in the line of prophets. There was a long pattern (prophets, various portions, various ways) and then there is a new thing, a final thing, a thing that gathers up all the rest and brings it home. In these last days. The last days. The writer places his readers, and himself, and us as we read along with them, in the time of fulfillment. The great waiting of Israel has come to its conclusion. The long series of partial words has arrived at its Word. God has spoken (past tense, completed action) in His Son.

The Son

And here the sentence begins to widen. Having said that God has spoken to us in His Son, the writer cannot let the phrase stand without telling us who this Son is. Seven descriptions follow. They tumble out in quick succession, and they are the densest Christology in a book which is nothing but Christology from beginning to end. We will take them in order.

The Son is appointed heir of all things. The inheritance language is old: the firstborn in Israel inherited; the king of Israel was, in Psalm 2, promised the nations as his inheritance. The Son, who is the true firstborn and the true king, inherits everything. The universe is His by right. Not a possession He is working toward, not a reward He is hoping to receive, but an inheritance already appointed. At the end of all things, when the Son hands the kingdom over to the Father, what He hands over is what is already His.

The world was created through him. Not only the inheritor, but the creator. The same Son through whom all things will come at last into their proper place is the Son through whom they first came into being. The Gospel of John says the same thing (“all things were created by him”), and Paul says the same thing (“all things in heaven and on earth were created in him”), and here Hebrews says it in passing, in a subordinate clause, as though it were obvious. The Son was not created. The creation was made through the Son. Before the universe existed, the Son existed. Before there was a “beginning” at all, He was.

He is the radiance of his glory, the radiance of the glory of God. The word “radiance” is beautiful and worth pausing over. It is best understood not as reflection, as though the Son were a mirror, catching light from somewhere else. It means the shining-forth of the glory itself. The way the rays of the sun are not a reflection of the sun but are the sun streaming outward. The Son is not another God, a separate God, a lesser God beside the Father. He is God streaming outward. Like every picture drawn from creation, this one limps, so we must say plainly what it does not mean: the Son’s being from the Father is eternal. He did not begin at some point in time, He is not a lesser light spilling down from a greater one, and He is not a portion of God leaking out into the world. There was never a time when the Father was without His radiance. He is, as the Nicene Creed confesses, “begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father.” Where God’s glory is, the Son is. Where the Son is, God’s glory is.

He is the representation of his essence. The word translated “representation” is the Greek charaktēr, the word from which we get our English “character,” and older translations render it “exact imprint” or “express image.” It was a word used for the stamp a coin received from its die. The die and the coin are not the same object; but what the die is, the coin exactly shows. The Son shows exactly what the Father is. There is nothing about the Father that the Son fails to display. To look at the Son, to hear the Son, to know the Son, is to look at and hear and know the Father. “The person who has seen me has seen the Father!” Jesus told Philip, and Hebrews 1:3 is saying the same thing in different words.

He sustains all things by his powerful word. Again, the Son as sustainer. The creation does not stand on its own. It is held in existence moment by moment by the One through whom it was made. And held by what? By his word. A word from the Son kept the world going as you read this sentence, and another word keeps it going now. This is not the deism of an absent God who wound up the world and stepped away. Hebrews will have none of that. The Son sustains every atom, every moment, actively, by his word.

Five descriptions so far. The Son is the heir, the creator, the radiance of glory, the representation of God’s essence, the sustainer. We have not, so far, met any limitation in the Son. Nothing about Him, so far, has been less than God. Everything about Him has been the full identity of God, streaming outward, exactly stamped, upholding all things.

And then the sixth description. And the sixth is the one that changes everything.

He Accomplished Cleansing for Sins

“When he had accomplished cleansing for sins.”

There is no warning that this is coming. The sentence has been ascending for five descriptions. Heir, creator, radiance, representation of God’s essence, sustainer of all things by His powerful word, and then, without pause, without the slightest syntactical hesitation, the Son who sustains the universe by His powerful word accomplished cleansing for sins. The word is katharismos, cleansing or purification: the washing away of the defilement that sin leaves on sinners.

Stop and feel what that sentence is doing. The same Son who sustains every atom of the universe by his word, this same Son, accomplished cleansing for sins. He did the work of a priest. And not only of a priest: the priests of the old covenant offered sacrifices; the sacrifices were other than the priests themselves. The lamb was not Aaron. The bull was not the high priest. But the Son, who is God streaming outward, accomplished cleansing for sins, and we will learn in the coming chapters that He did it by offering Himself. The One through whom the universe was made became the sacrifice by which the universe was purified. The One who upheld all things by His powerful word let His own hands be pierced by the things His hands had made.

The writer does not pause to explain this. He will spend chapters 5 through 10 explaining it in detail. Here, at the beginning, he only names it. As if to say: before you read another sentence of this letter, know this. The One who is about to be spoken of at great length (the Son, who is everything just described) is the One who has accomplished cleansing for your sins. Not the One who is about to. Not the One who might. The One who has. Past tense. Finished action. It is done.

Hebrews will return to this theme again and again. “Once for all” is one of the letter’s signature phrases. And it begins here, in passing, in verse three, before the argument has properly started. The cleansing is accomplished. The work is finished. It is in the past for the writer of Hebrews, and it is in the past for us who read him now, and the Christian life is not a project of trying to achieve purification but a life lived out of purification already accomplished.

This is the first place in Hebrews where we meet the pattern the whole letter will trace: Christ’s work is complete; our drawing near is the response to a work already done. If there is one thing Lutheran readers of Hebrews need to hear first and hold tightly, it is this. The priestly work is finished. He accomplished cleansing for sins, and then He sat down.

He Sat Down

“He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high.”

The seventh description, and the climax of the sentence. The Son, having accomplished cleansing for sins, sat down. We read this quickly, because the phrase is familiar to us (the creed says it, the hymns say it), but it is worth pausing over. In the old tabernacle, the priests did not sit down. There was no chair in the holy place. The priests stood, because the work was never finished. Day after day, sacrifice after sacrifice, year after year, the same sacrifices were offered which could never take away sins. Hebrews 10 will say so directly. The work went on and on because it could not, finally, do what sin required. The priests stood because they were not done.

The Son, having accomplished cleansing for sins, sat down. He sat down because He was done. The sitting is the great signal that the work is over, that nothing is left to offer, that the sacrifice has been made and accepted and completed. And not only does He sit; He sits at the right hand of the Majesty on high. The right hand is the place of authority, the place of rule, the place where the work is validated and the worker exalted. The Son sits there because that is His place.

Here, already in verse three, Hebrews has told us in shorthand what it will unpack at length: that Christ is both priest and sacrifice, both the offerer and the offering, and that His offering, once made, needs no repetition. The priesthood of Christ is not a priesthood that keeps on working. It is a priesthood that worked, perfectly, and now reigns.

And the One seated there is the One who accomplished cleansing for our sins. That is what we need to remember. He sat down because it is finished. He reigns because the work is done. And when we come to Him (when we gather around the Word preached, when we come to the font, when we come to the table) we come to One who is not still working out our salvation but who has accomplished it and is now distributing what He has accomplished to us, through the ordinary means He has given.

The Name Above Every Name

The sentence ends with a comparison: “Thus he became so far better than the angels as he has inherited a name superior to theirs.” Notice the word better. Here, in verse four, is the first of the letter’s thirteen.

The comparison with the angels will dominate the next session. Here it is only introduced, as the sentence’s final note. The Son is superior to the angels. His name is superior to theirs. And that superiority is established, the writer wants us to see, not on the basis of something the Son achieved from below but on the basis of who the Son is from the beginning. He is the heir. He is the creator. He is the radiance. He is the representation of God’s essence. He is the sustainer. He has accomplished cleansing for sins. He is seated at the right hand. Of course the angels are less. Every created being is less.

But here is the thing to notice, because it will matter in the next session: the Son, though He is all of this, is not less the Son for having become the One who accomplished cleansing for sins. It is not as though He left His divine glory behind in order to do the priestly work. He did not. He is the radiance of glory who accomplished cleansing for sins. He is the representation of God’s essence who, in the flesh, tasted death for everyone. This is already, here in verse three, the central mystery of the Christian faith: that the One who is everything we have just said He is became one of us, and did the work, and then sat down.

We will spend the next thirteen sessions inside that mystery. This first session has only introduced it.

Gathering the Threads

Four verses. One Greek sentence. And the whole letter already in miniature.

God has spoken. He has spoken before, in various portions and in various ways, through the prophets and the writings and the history of a covenant people. And He has spoken, finally and decisively, in these last days, in a Son. The Son through whom He made the universe. The Son who is the radiance of God’s glory, the representation of His essence, the sustainer of all things. The Son who accomplished cleansing for sins and sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high.

Three things press in on us as we close this first session. We name them briefly; they will be developed in the sessions that follow.

The first is that Hebrews begins with the Word of God. This is, for Lutheran readers, not a surprise but a comfort. The Reformation recovered the Word of God as the central means by which God addresses His people. “The church was born by the word of promise through faith, and by this same word is nourished and preserved,” Luther wrote. Hebrews says the same thing from the other direction: God has spoken. The life of the Christian begins when the speaking God addresses us, and it continues as we listen. This letter, these four verses, are part of the speaking. We are not studying Hebrews as an ancient document; we are being addressed by God in Hebrews. That is what reading it means.

The second is that the Son who addresses us is the Son who has also cleansed us. The same Word through whom God speaks is the Word through whom God has cleansed. These are not two unrelated movements. The One who reveals is the One who redeems, and what He reveals is His redeeming. Hebrews will not let us have a Christ who is only a teacher, or only a revealer, or only an example. The Christ of Hebrews is the great high priest who has accomplished cleansing for sins, and the cleansing is the message.

The third is that all of this is already accomplished. He accomplished cleansing, and then He sat down. Past tense. Completed action. The Christian does not approach God as one who is waiting to find out whether the work will succeed. The Christian approaches God as one for whom the work has already succeeded, and approaches, therefore, with confidence. This will become one of the great themes of Hebrews. Confidence. Boldness. Drawing near. “Let us confidently approach the throne of grace,” says Hebrews 4:16. The reason we can is that the One who sits at the right hand of the Majesty on high is the One who has already cleansed us.

Everything Hebrews is going to say rests on what these four verses have already established. God has spoken. The Son has accomplished. Therefore we listen, and therefore we draw near.

For Discussion

Hebrews begins not with the writer’s name but with God. What does it mean, practically, for our Bible reading and our Christian lives, that “the first thing that needs to be said about any of us is that we are people to whom God has spoken”? Where in your life do you find it easy to remember this, and where do you find it difficult?
The writer says that “in various portions and in various ways” God spoke through the prophets, but “in these last days” He has spoken in His Son. What is the relationship between the Old Testament prophets and Christ? How can we honor the prophets without minimizing Christ, and how can we honor Christ without discarding the prophets?
Seven descriptions of the Son tumble out of verses 2 and 3: heir, creator, radiance of glory, representation of God’s essence, sustainer, the One who cleansed us from sins, and the One seated at God’s right hand. Which of the seven is most familiar to you? Which is least familiar, or most surprising? What would it mean to take that one more seriously?
“When he had accomplished cleansing for sins, he sat down.” The priests of the old covenant never sat down because the work was never finished. Christ sat down because His work is finished. How does the finished nature of Christ’s priestly work shape the way we understand our own Christian lives? What does it protect us from?
The author of Hebrews is unknown to us. Some Christians find this unsettling. Others find it freeing. What does it mean for our reading of this letter that we receive it as the Word of God without knowing the human author’s name?
If you had to describe, in one sentence, what you are hoping to receive from this study of Hebrews, what would you say? What would you like to know, understand, or be strengthened in by the time we reach the end of the letter?

Looking Ahead

In Session 2 we begin the letter’s first sustained argument: that the Son is superior to the angels. This may strike us as a strange place for Hebrews to begin; we do not, in our time, tend to worry about angels. But the original readers did, and the writer has pastoral reasons for beginning here. He will walk through seven Old Testament citations, each of them contrasting what is said of the Son with what is said of the angels. And then, abruptly, he will pause the argument and issue the first of the letter’s four great warning passages: a warning about drifting away from the great salvation announced by the Lord. We will read that warning carefully, with the pastoral care Lutheran readers have always brought to such texts.

Before next session, read Hebrews 1:5 through 2:4 carefully. Notice how densely the Old Testament is quoted. Notice where the argument pauses. Notice how the warning in 2:1–4 is connected to the high Christology that precedes it. And bring your questions.

Closing Prayer

Almighty God, who in these last days has spoken to us by Your Son: grant us ears to hear and hearts to receive what You have said. We thank You that the Son through whom You made the universe is the Son through whom You have cleansed us from our sins, and that He now sits at Your right hand. Help us, as we begin this study, to hear Your voice in Your Word and to find our rest in the finished work of our great high priest, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.