Today in God's Word—August 2023
East Tallassee Church of Christ
August 26, Hebrews 1
Angelic beings act as messengers, servants and warriors of God throughout Scripture. From Genesis to Revelation, these powerful spirit beings are very real and active. Human fascination with the angels is still evident today. They’re the subjects of paintings, sculptures, books, songs and television shows. As is often the case when Biblical subjects are treated in the popular media, there’s a lot of misinformation and misconception about these beings.
I suspect Biblical angels have very little in common with the chubby cherubs in stores, gardens and curio cabinets. For all our interest in them, we really know very little about them. Once when I was a guest speaker at a church, a woman approached me and asked if I knew much about angels. From my answer she deduced that I needed to read the book she had written about them. She brought me a copy of the book with a bill for it the following night!
The unknown writer of Hebrews didn’t write a lot about the angels, except to show how Jesus Christ is so vastly superior to them. All our interest in angels is fine, but the shadowy details about them are not nearly as important as the vivid, broad and clear statements about Jesus. The writer’s first sentence claimed that God has spoken to us today not through the prophets but through his Son, the divinely appointed heir of all things, and the one who created the world. He asserted that Jesus is the one who upholds the universe by his power and the one who died for our sins.
God didn’t call any angel his begotten Son. He did say all the angels would worship the
Son and be his servants. He said Messiah was anointed of God and eternal, and that while the angels were sent out to minister, the Son now sits at God’s right hand. All these details make the Hebrew writer’s opening point: Jesus is superior in every way to angels. However awesome they may be, he is infinitely more so.
The first readers of Hebrews were being tempted to swap their relationship with Jesus for something else. The particular temptations of our modern situation may be different, but the clear message of this book is just as relevant to us as it was to them: Jesus is altogether superior to any competitor and totally sufficient to meet every spiritual need. Whether we see the competition as new ideas or just old ones that get dug up every few generations, the Hebrew writer wants us to know that every alternative, even ones used and approved by God in the past, are inferior to Jesus. No one is going to teach you more about God than the one he described as “the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature.”
Copyright © 2010 by Michael B. McElroy. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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