Today’s Passage: Hebrews 1:1–4
For hundreds of years God spoke through His prophets, through Moses and Isaiah and Jeremiah and many others, in many times and in many ways. Then everything changed. God spoke again, and this time not through another messenger but through His own Son.
As you read, hold this: Jesus is not a copy of God’s glory. He is God’s glory, shining.
Context Prophets, then Son
Hebrews was written to Jewish believers who knew their Bible well, and they knew that God had spoken through the prophets for centuries. Those were real words and true words, but they always pointed forward to something still to come. Hebrews opens by saying that the long story has now reached its last chapter, and the last chapter is not another prophet carrying a message. It is the Son Himself.
Hebrews 1:1–2 (BSB)
¹ On many past occasions and in many different ways, God spoke to our fathers through the prophets. ² But in these last days He has spoken to us by His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, and through whom He made the universe.
Notice what this Son had already done long before Bethlehem: He made the universe. This is not a man who became important later on. This is the One who was already there in the beginning.
Hebrews 1:3 (BSB)
³ The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of His nature, upholding all things by His powerful word.
Think for a moment of sunlight. Sunlight is not a copy of the sun sent down to visit us; sunlight is the sun itself, reaching all the way to where you stand. That is the picture the writer is reaching for here.
Yesterday’s passage called Jesus the image of the invisible God, and here Hebrews reaches for two more pictures, light and its shining, metal and its charaktēr, pronounced kah-rahk-TAIR. Strong's G5481, an exact mark or impression, the precise image stamped by a die. A die pressed into hot metal leaves its exact mark on a coin, not a rough guess but the very shape of the die itself. Hebrews says Jesus is God’s stamp. Look at Jesus, and you are looking at who God is. . Both of them point the same way. Jesus does not merely show us what God is like; Jesus is what God is.
And the Son does not only reveal God’s glory, He also holds up the whole universe, moment by moment, by His own powerful word.
Hebrews 1:3–4 (BSB)
After He had provided purification for sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high. ⁴ So He became as far superior to the angels as the name He has inherited is excellent beyond theirs.
Two things happen here, and both of them matter. First, Jesus provided purification for sins, and this is the cross, the work that only He could finish. Second, He sat down, and sitting is the posture of a king, which means that the work is finished and done.
The priests of the Old Testament never sat down in the Temple, because their work was never finished. Jesus sits down, because His work is.
Study notes Greater than every messenger
Angels are God’s messengers, and Hebrews spends its whole first chapter pressing a single claim: Jesus outranks every angel. Not because He earned a promotion, but because of who He has always been.
"The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth." John 1:14 (BSB)
Prophets spoke about God, and angels serve before God, but Jesus belongs to neither group. He is God’s own radiance, walking among us.
Personal Application
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Do you tend to speak to Jesus mainly as a kind friend, and what would change if you truly saw Him as God’s glory, shining?
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Where this week might you be treating Jesus as merely helpful, instead of worshiping Him as God?
Today’s decision: Today I will speak to Jesus in prayer the way I would speak to God, because He is.
Pray to Close
The central truth: Jesus is not a copy of God’s glory. He is God’s glory, shining.
Give thanks: thank God that He did not send us a copy, but sent us His own Son.
Confess: the small ways you have treated Jesus as merely wise, instead of worshiping Him as God.
Ask: for eyes to see Him clearly today.
Worship for Today
Song: Ancient of Days, by CityAlight
This song sings of the God who was before anything else existed, and Hebrews 1 says the very same thing about Jesus. Sing it as your answer to a Son who has always been King.
Listen: