God’s Nature Revealed

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Transcript:

We’re going to be in Hebrews chapter 1 this morning. Hebrews chapter 1. You know, the last time it was this cold in Oklahoma, that’s not setting up for a joke, by the way, but the last time it was this cold in Oklahoma, Charla and I were spending almost all of our free time at the Children’s Hospital in downtown Oklahoma City because Carly Jo last winter was born and was metaflighted there because of her heart condition we didn’t know about.

And I’m not an expert on medical things by any stretch of the imagination, but when your child suddenly is diagnosed with something potentially life-threatening, you do a lot of research and you sort of become an expert on that issue, right? And I remember being in there. We had visitors coming through at least once a day, sometimes especially at the beginning, multiple times a day.

And everybody’s wanting to know, well, what exactly is going on with her? And over time, I became well-rehearsed at explaining the inner workings of her heart, and her heart in particular, the things, what’s supposed to happen and what wasn’t happening, in contrast, what wasn’t happening, and explaining what should happen and what we were hoping for and what each of the medications did and answering their questions. And it got to the point where one of the doctors who was in there, because there were doctors and nurses in there all the time, You know, you can’t help but overhear people’s conversations.

One of the doctors asked me, do you come from a medical background? I said, no. Why? I’m just listening to you explain this to these people.

And I thought maybe you came from a medical background. What is your background? And I said, I’m a pastor.

I think he seemed a little bit surprised. I don’t know. Maybe they think, I don’t know, maybe they think Christians live in the backwoods and can’t read and don’t believe in science.

I don’t know. Anyway, I said, I’m a pastor. He goes, oh, okay.

I had a nurse ask me the same question another time. And again, it wasn’t that I could have diagnosed the things they could diagnose. It’s not that I could walk to somebody else’s bedside and tell you everything that was going on with them.

But that was my child, and so I’d studied up on it. And I remember going to my graduation in May, and the kids enjoyed being down there and telling the older two, Lord willing, we’ll come back in a few years and Daddy will be a doctor. And Madeline said, good, then you can fix Jojo’s heart.

No, not that kind of doctor. We’ve had several conversations about not that kind of doctor. You see, the point where I’m going with this, There’s a big difference between knowing about something and knowing something experientially.

All right? I have a whole lot of knowledge where I. .

. Doesn’t that sound arrogant? I don’t mean it that way.

I have a whole lot of knowledge about this one area. Okay, that’s where I’m going. I have a whole lot of knowledge about her heart condition, her particular one in 100,000 heart condition.

I know a lot about it. I can explain to you. I can draw diagrams because I’ve researched it.

I’ve studied it. But if those doctors called me in there and said, you want to scrub in and help fix it, I don’t, you cut that chest plate open, you look at the heart, I don’t know what any of this stuff is. I can tell you about it in theory.

Putting my hands on it, that’s a totally, no, you don’t want me. You know, you realize there’s a difference between knowing something experientially and knowing about something. You remember those commercials from a few years back, the guy wants to scrub in for surgery.

Oh, are you a doctor? know, but I stayed at a Holiday Inn last night. You remember those?

You don’t want some guy, if you need heart surgery, you want somebody who’s had their hands on hearts fixing them for 30 years. You don’t want some guy who stayed at Holiday Inn last night. You don’t want some guy who knows about it from reading about it off the internet, okay?

You want somebody who knows it experientially. We know there’s a difference. There’s a difference between what I know about Carly Jo’s heart and what her cardiologists know.

There’s a big difference. And this morning, we need to understand there’s this huge difference between knowing something and knowing about something. And a man named Henry Blackaby wrote about this concept in a book called Experiencing God.

Some of you may have read that book. I’m working through it for my third time now, I think. And I’m always blown away when I get into chapter 1, I believe it’s chapter 1, because I forget this point until I read it again and then it just smacks me in the forehead.

He talks about the difference between knowing something and knowing about something, or knowing someone and knowing about someone, and he calls it the difference between Greek knowledge and Hebrew knowledge. And here’s what he’s written, and I’ve pieced it together from a few different spots in chapter one of his book. But he says, for the Greeks to know something meant you understood a concept in your mind.

And that’s kind of how I understand Carly Jo’s heart condition. For example, a Greek orphan might grow up and know the concept of a father. He could describe what fathers do and what it means to relate to or what it looks like to relate to one.

He could conduct research and know all the nuances of the Greek word for father. He could do all those things. In contrast, for a Hebrew person like Jesus, knowing something entailed experiencing it.

He says, in fact, you could not truly say you knew something unless you had dealt with it personally. And we see this kind of tension played out in the Bible as you’re dealing with a Greek audience a lot in the New Testament. These were people who thought about things and they knew about things.

Greeks were a very intellectual society. And then you’re introducing them to the Hebrew concept of a God that they could know, not just know about, but actually know by experience. And that was the whole idea of Jesus coming was for us to be able to know God and have a relationship with him.

Not know about God, not know that he exists, not believe a list of attributes about him, but actually know him personally. There’s a difference between knowing about God and knowing God. Now the problem here is that throughout our history, mankind’s knowledge of God has been limited.

It’s been largely in that first category of knowing about God. And I like to describe it this way, that many times our knowledge of God is like looking through a keyhole at something. You remember back the old locks where you could see through the keyhole.

You can’t see very much, right? You might have some idea of what’s going on in that room, but you can’t see everything. You can’t even see most of what’s going on in that room.

As a matter of fact, I was talking to my kids this week about the story where Jesus heals a blind man, and he ends up healing him by spitting on the man’s eyes, and the kids just thought that was hilariously funny. But partway through the healing, it’s like he heals him partway to start with. And the story, the Bible says that the man could see shapes, like he could see shapes and he could see light and dark, but it said all the people looked like trees.

And I told the kids, I said, close your eyes and now open them the smallest, don’t I look silly doing this, open them the smallest amount you can to see light and see shadow and see motion, but you can’t really see anything else. I said, how would you, Y’all want to try that or is it just me? Where that’s all you can see.

And I had them do that with me. And they’re like, that’s so hard. Well, life gets harder from here.

But that’s sort of how mankind’s knowledge of God has been. Just seeing these little shadows, these little glimpses of who God is. And as a result of that, some people feel like God is totally unknown to them.

Even today, some people feel like God is just a mystery. I don’t really know God. Some people feel like there’s some that that he’s somebody they know about.

He’s not totally unknown to them, but he’s somebody they know about, but not really somebody they know. You know the difference? I’ll go to these meetings with other pastors and they’ll say, oh, do you know so and so?

Well, I know who he is. I’ve heard the name, but you know, if I called him today, he’d say, who? You know, I know about him.

I don’t know him. Some people feel that way about God, that he’s somebody they know about rather than somebody they know. And some of you in this room may be in one of those boats.

You’re here this morning and you say, I’d like to know God, but I feel like I don’t know him at all. He’s a mystery. And some of you may be saying, I know about God, but I don’t necessarily feel like there’s any kind of personal relationship.

I don’t really understand God at all. And so we wonder if God is knowable. Sometimes people will spend years searching to know God, searching for some kind of understanding of, maybe they don’t even have a biblical concept of God, but they know there’s something greater than them, and they’ll spend years searching, and often searching in the wrong places, but they know there’s something out there they want to know.

But folks, the good news for us is, that’s the problem, the good news for us this morning is that God has gone to extraordinary lengths for us to be able to know Him. He’s gone to extraordinary lengths to reveal himself to us, not only so that we could know him, but so that we could go that step further and actually have a relationship with a God that we know. We couldn’t figure God out on our own.

We couldn’t just say, oh, God’s out there, let’s go find him. God had to reveal himself to us. What we know of God comes from his revelation of himself to us.

And God, as I said, he’s not just wanting us to peek through the keyhole. God has gone to extraordinary lengths to reveal himself to us so that we can know him and have a relationship with him. And this morning as we continue on with this series that I’ve called God With Us, we’ve been looking at how Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem and his life on earth continue to affect our relationship with God today.

As we continue on with this, we’re going to see how God has revealed himself to us through Jesus Christ so that we can know him and have a relationship with him. So this morning, hopefully you’ve already turned with me to Hebrews chapter 1. If you haven’t, it’s toward the end of the New Testament, toward the end of your Bible.

Look for Philemon, look for James, and it’s in between those two books. The book of Hebrews chapter 1, starting in verse 1. Long ago, God spoke to the fathers by the prophets at different times and in different ways.

In these last days, He has spoken to us by His Son. God has appointed him heir of all things and made the universe through him. The sun is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact expression of his nature.

Sustaining all things by his powerful word, after making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high. And this morning, I want us to just focus in on these three verses and what it tells us about Jesus and who he is and what he’s revealed to us about God. And we see in this passage that God used to make himself known to mankind.

Remember, we depend on God to reveal himself to us. We can’t just go out and find him, nor are we necessarily inclined to. So God had to reveal himself to us.

And in former times, it was in a very fragmentary way that he revealed himself to us. When I say very fragmentary way, hopefully you know what I mean by that. I mean, we just know bits and pieces.

We just know what we’ve been able to piece together because he spoke, it says in verse 1, long ago God spoke to the fathers by the prophets at different times and in different ways. When he’s talking about the fathers, he’s talking about past generations of the nation of Israel. The writer of Hebrews was writing to a Jewish audience and he was saying that God spoke to our ancestors in previous times through the prophets.

God spoke through these intermediary persons, these prophets, these men that stood between them and God to carry the message. He spoke to the prophets, and he spoke at various times and in various ways. We see all of that in verse 1.

Both the schedule of him speaking and the method of him speaking was not consistent. I don’t mean by that in any way that God was flighty. I don’t mean that at all, but I God spoke to them when it was necessary, and he spoke to them through all sorts of different people, and he spoke to them at different times whenever the need arose, and he spoke to them in varying ways.

I mean, my goodness, he spoke to Balaam through a donkey. He spoke to Moses through a burning bush. You couldn’t predict how God was going to speak.

You couldn’t predict when God was going to speak. Before Jesus arrived, there had been no direct divine revelation for 400 years, And so God spoke when it was necessary. God spoke through certain people.

What I’m telling you is this divine revelation, these words from God that they would receive, there wasn’t a constant stream of them. You didn’t have constant access to them. And they weren’t open to everybody, at least not directly.

Because not everybody heard God. Not everybody had access to God’s word in the sense that God was speaking to certain people. God was speaking to prophets, and then they were supposed to take the message to the people.

And so what you ended up with there was that there were a few people around who knew God. Moses knew God. Elijah knew God.

Abraham knew God. David knew God. There were a few people at any given time who knew God, but most people only knew about God.

Most people heard the words that the prophets brought them and nothing more, or what was written in the scriptures. Now that was enough for that time. God told them what they needed to know.

God didn’t hold back anything that they needed. I want you to understand, I want you to put yourself in that mindset of 3,000 years ago, where we, especially if you’ve been a Christian for any length of time, we’re used to being able to boldly approach the throne room of God, as the scriptures say. Come boldly before the throne of grace.

We’re used to having Jesus as our high priest and mediator who keeps us in constant fellowship with God. We’re used to that. But put yourself back in that time wanted to deal with God, you needed to confess something, you needed to get forgiveness of something, you had to go through a priest. If you wanted to know more about God, if you wanted to hear the latest thing that God had said, you had to listen to a prophet.

There was not widespread direct access to God, and most people only knew about God rather than having the opportunity to know Him. And if we put ourselves back in that mindset, it’s so different from where we are today, that it ought to make us appreciate where we stand with God through Jesus Christ today. Few people knew God.

Most people only knew about God. And this verse isn’t condemning that. It’s not saying shame on God for keeping the people at an arm’s length back then.

It’s just stating this is where things were, and now things have changed, and this is how they are now. It’s just a statement of fact, saying the better way has arrived. So we get to verse two, and we go from this time where God made himself known to people in a very fragmentary way, bits and pieces, through prophets, indirect, all of it, to now God has made known to us the very essence of who he is.

Because we see in verse 2, it says, in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son. Where he used to speak through the prophets, indirectly to the people, now he has revealed himself directly to man through the Son. Jesus Christ, we see in this passage that Jesus Christ, who is God the Son, He is the ultimate demonstration of who God is.

He doesn’t just give us some idea of who God is. He’s the ultimate demonstration of who He actually is and what He’s like. And through Him, we get to see everything that we need to know about the Father.

The Father who was mysterious and who was distant, this God who was still something of an enigma in the Old Testament. We now see him in all his radiance, in all his glory in the person of Jesus Christ. And that’s not my opinion on it. That’s what the book of Hebrews says here in verse 2.

It tells us that Jesus reflects the glory of God. He reflects the glory of the Father because it says the Son is the radiance of God’s glory. And I had to go back and look at my notes from where I preached through the book of Hebrews because I remember being amazed at what I found in this verse, but I couldn’t remember exactly what it all meant.

So I went back and looked at my notes and restudied all of that again and discovered that the phrase he uses here in Greek, and I won’t get into all the words here, but it indicates when he says he’s the radiance of God’s glory, he’s indicating a flood of light. We see in Jesus Christ, we see a flood of the light of the glory of God, not just a flicker. You know, you’ll see, you can stand in the dark and you can see somebody, you can see even somebody down the street light a cigarette in the dark.

You see that flame, it lights brightly for a minute and then it’s gone. Or you can be in the dark and somebody can turn on floodlights that make it look like noontime. Jesus is the latter of those two.

When we’re talking about a reflection of God’s glory, it’s not just a little glimpse of God’s glory we get. It’s a flood of the whole thing. That when people saw Jesus and they understood who Jesus was, when they saw him in all his glory and they understood it, they realized they were looking at the glory of God.

We see a few instances of this. I’m not saying Jesus walked around with glowing in a halo because the Bible teaches us that there was nothing in his physical appearance that was particularly striking and would draw attention to him. But there were a few instances of this where it took place in a literal, visible way.

When I say people saw the glory of God in Jesus Christ, I don’t mean that there was a physical difference, but there were a couple of instances in the Gospels where they saw even that physical manifestation of that. One time was at the transfiguration when Jesus stood on the mountain and met with Moses and Elijah, and the disciples just were overwhelmed by what they saw. I think they saw a glimpse of His glory in physical form after the resurrection, when He would appear to them out of nowhere.

And these men who questioned and doubted would fall down before Him and worship Him. Not merely pay respect to Him as their teacher, but they worshipped Him as God. they got to see him as he was ascended back to the right hand of the father they saw the heavens open up and they saw him received up into this glory they saw him for who he is but I don’t just mean with our physical eyes seeing the glory of god when you knew jesus and and when your spirit beheld the glory that was jesus christ they were beholding the glory of god not just a not just a flicker of it but the whole flood they saw the whole thing and it also tells us not only that he reflects the glory of God, but that he reveals the nature of God.

It says in verse 3 that he was the exact expression of his nature. And looking at this phrase in Greek, it’s something that they would use to describe an exact replica of something. The word actually is charakter, which I think is where we get the word character from.

Charakter. And as I was rereading that again, I was thinking of these little action figures that people make. Not dolls.

My sons don’t have dolls, they have action figures, which are just dolls for boys. But you see, depending on where you get them, some of them are better than others, right? I’ve seen Batman toys from certain stores or certain fast food restaurants where it looks like Batman has melted, you know, or Batman, it looks nothing like Batman.

And then there are some that, you know, the grandmas will buy and they’re this tall and you can tell that somebody put a lot of design and work into them and I mean you you don’t want to you don’t want to find them in the hall you don’t want to meet them in the hallway in the dark of night because you know they’re scary because they look lifelike other than their size a character this exact replica is not one of those little happy meal toys we’re talking about they they’ve put some time and and some uh some effort and some design into making an exact replica. Indistinguishable from the original. Now that doesn’t mean Jesus Christ was created. Let’s not go off into heresy right here.

By the way, St. Nicholas, this has nothing to do with the message, but St. Nicholas, what he’s actually famous for, I love this, there was an argument over the deity of Jesus Christ. There’s a group of people called the Arians who believe that Jesus was a created being.

There was a meeting of all the pastors, all the bishops in that day and age, and they got into a fist fight over the deity of Jesus Christ, and St. Nicholas was famous for punching out heretics who believed that Jesus was created. So, this Christmas, don’t fall off into the belief that Jesus Christ was a created being, or Santa Claus might come down the chimney and beat you up.

That’s not what that means. When it calls him that exact replica, it’s not saying he was created, but it’s saying the way that one of those character, one of those images would be the exact replica of what it represented, It’s saying Jesus Christ is an exact replica of the Father. When you look at Jesus Christ, again, not physically, but when you look at who He is in His personality, in His nature, in His will, in the very essence of who He is, when you look at Him, you’re seeing an exact replica of the Father.

You’re seeing Him for who and what He is. When I see these things about Him reflecting the Father’s glory and being the exact representation of His nature, I think of that phrase that moms all over the world use, you’re just like your father. It’s not always said with the nicest of intent.

Charla and I were talking yesterday in the car about the ways I’m like my father. I said I never realized how much like my father I am until the kids got a little older and I started getting on to them and my father’s voice would travel 50 miles from the city and fly out of my mouth. In a lot of ways, I’m like my father.

Now, in some ways, I’m different too. Benjamin is in some ways like his father. In some ways, he’s not.

So if you see him do something around here and you say, but he’s just like the pastor. No, that’s one of those ways he takes after somebody that’s not me. I don’t know.

We say that about kids, you’re just like your father. That’s not entirely true, is it? No child is exactly like their father.

Jesus Christ, though, was exactly like his Father. That statement has never been truer about anybody in history than it was about Jesus Christ. He is exactly like his Father. Two separate persons of one God, but exactly like his Father in his nature, in his essence, in his character.

And we see that in verse 2, how are some of the ways that they’re exactly alike? What the Father possesses, the Son possesses. because verse 2 tells us that God has appointed him heir of all things.

Now, I don’t expect you to remember when I talked through this passage going through the book of Hebrews two years ago or last year. It’s been a while. I don’t expect you to remember all that.

So I want to come in and explain that just a little bit but not spend a tremendous amount of time on it because we don’t have a tremendous amount of time left this morning. When the Bible says that Jesus is the heir, it’s not talking about him inheriting things in the sense that at one point He didn’t have all these attributes of God, and he had to inherit them. It’s describing his position that he by nature is the son of the father, all right?

When it says heir, don’t think of it as anything being added to him. Think of it as his position and who he is. He is the father’s heir.

Everything that belongs to the father belongs to him. Someday, Charla and I will die if the Lord tarries long enough, and what we have will belong to our children, okay? Because, because of who they are.

And Jesus, because of who he is, everything that belongs to the Father belongs to him. Now we also see in verse 2 that what the Father can do, the Son can do, because verse 2 says that he made the universe through Jesus Christ. Jesus, the Son, was present. John 1, 1 says, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

The same was in the beginning with God. He was there at the very beginning. He wasn’t created.

He’s eternal just like the Father. But hear me on this. When the Father was creating the universe, we think of the Father doing it all.

Jesus was every bit as much involved in the creation of the universe as the Father was. Everything we see about creation in the New Testament points to the fact that Jesus Christ was there and actively involved. And as a matter of fact, if you even look back at the earliest chapters of Genesis, God said, let us make man in our own image.

That does not mean that we were created by a plurality of aliens, as the Looney Tunes on the History Channel would tell you. These people who speak on Bible documentaries who seem to have never seen a Bible in its natural habitat. That, to me, indicates the trinity of God.

One God in three persons saying, let us make man in our own image. Jesus was there. Everything the Father can do, the Son can do.

Because they’re co-equal persons of the Godhead. And we see in verse 3 that as the Father cares for man, so the Son cares for man. It says in verse 3 that He’s sustaining all things by His powerful Word.

Jesus Christ holds all of this together. He not only set the universe in motion, He not only created it and set it in motion, but He sustains it. He’s the reason all of this works today.

In your world, in the world, He’s sustaining things, and in your world, He’s sustaining things this morning. We don’t serve a God who, as the deists say, created everything kind of like a watchmaker, put it together, wound it up, and let it go. Some people believe God is disinterested in the world in that way.

But we serve a God who not only put the watch together and wound it up, but makes sure all the gears are spinning where they need to be at all times. Now, I also believe in free will to the extent that that doesn’t mean everything that happens on this planet that God is pleased with. But we know that He’s in control.

He’s still sovereign. And Jesus Christ sustains all things by His powerful Word because He cares about us. And we see a demonstration of that care further into verse 3.

He demonstrated His care for us by His crucifixion and resurrection. Because it says in verse 3 that He made purification for sins. He made a purification for our sins by dying on the cross as the one and only sacrifice to pay for our sins in full.

The people who originally would have read this passage in Hebrews were used to centuries, millennia even, where they would have to go in regularly and make these sacrifices of animals on the altar. The blood would have to be spilled and the innocent would have to die for the sins of the guilty to cover those sins and cleanse them. And yet it was the blood of bulls and goats and lambs and so it never could quite keep them pure and clean.

They needed an ultimate sacrifice that would be enough to cleanse them and to purify them once and for all. And so Jesus Christ came to be that sinless sacrifice. He came to be that pure spotless lamb so that he could be offered on the cross, so that he could be nailed to that cross, so he could shed his blood and lay down his life as that perfect sacrifice that fulfilled all the demands of the law for us, where all the sacrifices of bulls and goats never could.

And they went from having to offer these sacrifices all the time and never be quite sure that they were in a right standing with God, because how do I know that since I’ve offered the last sacrifice, I mean, as soon as I walk away, I could have had an impure motive in something I did, even a good thing, and suddenly I’m a sinner before God and that sin is held to my account. They went from that position to having a once for all pure and sinless sacrifice who could purify them from their sins in one act of sacrifice and that sin is washed away past, present, and future never to be held against us again. So that never again would we have to worry.

am I actually in a right relationship with God? Now that doesn’t mean we get to just sin and do what we want and, oh, the blood covers it. If we can do that as a habit and say, oh, the blood covered it so I can sin however I want and it’s all good.

That’s an indication we’ve never been born again. We need to revisit that. And I’m saying we don’t have to walk around in fear every day that I’ve lost my relationship with God because I’ve sinned and maybe I didn’t even know it.

See, He’s purified us by His shed blood. And even our salvation He sustains, just like He sustains all things by His Word. He demonstrated His love for us by going to the cross so that our sins could be forgiven, so that our peace with God could be purchased, so we could be brought into a relationship with the Father.

He came to show us exactly what the Father’s like, and He showed us God’s hatred of sin in His dealing with people. Sometimes he was harsh about the hatred of sin and dealing with the Pharisees. Sometimes he was gentle, but still let people know God’s hatred of sin, like telling the woman caught in adultery, I don’t condemn you, but go and sin no more.

This is not okay. He showed God’s mercy. He showed God’s love.

He showed the holiness of God by never sinning even once. Every attribute we can think of with God. He could read what was in people’s hearts and on their minds.

He could make food appear. He could, and the feeding of the 5,000 still is an amazing story to me. They ended up with more food left over than they started with.

That does not compute. Only God can do that. We see all the attributes of God on display from his creativity, his holiness, his justice, his omnipresence, his omniscience, all of it, his love, his mercy.

All of his attributes are perfectly on display in the person of Jesus Christ. And because of Jesus Christ coming and sho