I want to speak this evening, or to begin to speak I should say really, as I don't think we'll do all of them, but I want to begin to speak on the first four verses of Hebrews chapter 1. We'll just read those verses again. God who at sundry times and in diverse manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets. hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds, who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high. being made so much better than the angels, as he hath by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they. These first four verses provide an introduction to all that follows in the book of Hebrews. They do so because of the emphasis on God's self-revelation or self-disclosure, which is a major theme of this epistle. These first four verses also focus on the Divine Son, which is again a big theme in the Hebrews. And thirdly, the mention of the angels in verse four connects with the rest of the opening of the rest of the two chapters. The very first word here is God. You will notice the writer starts with the assumption and presupposition that there is a God. But also with the presupposition that this not only is there a God, but that he is a speaking God. He is a God who reveals himself to humanity. Of course, people debate whether God exists. Some claim that they believe there is no God. We call them atheists, don't we? Others believe in many gods, with a small g. We call them polytheists. Some say that God is everything. Everything is God. We call them pantheists. The tree is God. I am God. You are God. Everything's God. Others assert that there is only one God. We call them monotheists. But if I believe or you believe there is one God only, how do we know who this God is? Which God are we to worship? Is it the God of Islam, Allah, or is this God Yahweh, Jehovah, the God of Israel, the God of the Bible? And if I believe in the God of the Bible, the question has to be, can I know him as he's spoken, as God communicated? Is he knowable? You see, many people believe in a kind of creator, a first cause, but not that many really truly believe that there is a God who we can know and have a relationship with. Well, even in these first few words at the beginning of Hebrews, the writer addresses some of the most fundamental questions of life. The big questions, the questions which fill the halls, the debating halls of universities and places of learning. He addresses all of these things in the first few words of Hebrews. And his answer, yes, there is a God. And he has spoken. He has made himself known to us. He has spoken in the past, but most fully now he's spoken in his incarnate Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. And so God is still speaking today in his Son. And we're so used to these things, aren't we, that we lose the awe of them somehow. But this is an amazing thing, that there is a God, and this God speaks to us. He could have been a God who we could never have connected with. All he had to do was to create and leave us to it. He could have done that. the kind of watch, the kind of watch-keeping theology, you know, that God sets the clock going and just goes round without any further intervention. Well, God could have done that in theory, I suppose, but he didn't. He's intimately communicating with his creation. And this is the most amazing thing in the universe. People spend, you know, NASA spends billions on trying to find life in some remote, I was going to say, burning planet with gas and all sorts of horrible places you wouldn't want to be anywhere near. Is there life there? Let's spend all our money on that and ignore the fact that there is life. It's God, divine life, and he's communicating with us. It's more than just the odd little radio wave that they might pick up. This is greater than even if they found an alien who spoke some kind of language we could discern. The God of the universe is not only out there, he's here, and he's speaking, and we found him, not because we've sought him, but because he revealed himself to us. And so the first four verses of Hebrews introduce the theme of the fact that God has spoken, but he has spoken through his Son, Jesus, and that this way of speaking is superior to all his previous modes or ways of revelation. The revelation delivered in the Son is contrasted with that delivered through men and angels And this opening paragraph is incredibly dense and rich in terms of what it says about our Lord Jesus. And we won't be able to get through very much this evening. There are seven affirmations, seven predicates, if you like, or statements about Christ. in these four verses, which all demonstrate that Jesus is uniquely qualified to be the one through whom God spoke his final word, his best word, his superior word. And tonight, though, in the main, we will focus on the contrast the writer makes between how God spoke in time past, that is verse 1, and how he has spoken in these last days, verse 2. Notice the contrast. Verse 1, he spoke in time past. In verse 2 at the beginning, hath in these last days spoken. So there's a comparison being made between how God spoke in time past and how he has spoken in these last days. These two phrases, in time past and these last days, sum up or encapsulate the biblical conception of time, of redemptive time. The Bible has its own way of describing time. It's in these two ages. The Bible conceives of the succession of two ages in the course of redemptive history. The phrase, in these last days, is a description of the present time as the final age, the age that we're in now. The last days in scripture means the whole church age in which we live from the time that Jesus came into the world until the time that he returns. Those are the last days. The last days were inaugurated in Jesus Christ, perhaps we should say most specifically with his resurrection and ascension. and they will end with his second coming. It's a phrase that is rich with eschatological meaning and presuppositions. And so the writer's understanding of redemptive time or eschatology provides the writer with the categories needed to interpret the whole of history. It's only really Christians, I think, that know their Bible that are any good at history, actually. Because every other way of understanding history is not right. You can only really understand history in terms of God's redemptive time. And the writer, in his deeply biblical mind, He is convinced that certain redemptive events have now taken place which mark the fulfilment of the foreshadowing of the Old Testament Scriptures. He believes that future decisive events will take place, such as the second coming and all sorts of other things, but that in these last days things have been fulfilled. Of course, the Bible teaches that there will be a last day or there will be a kind of last days to the last days. We're in the last days, but there will be a period of the very last days. But no one knows when that will be. It may be very soon or it may not be for a very long time yet. We don't know. were to live as if it would be soon. But the Bible gives many signs and indications that the time is near and some of those, I believe, have not yet taken place. In time past, God spoke, the writer says, through the prophets, but in these last days by the sun. The thought really here in the Greek is that in these last days God has spoken through no one less than his son. It's a comparative thing he's saying. He's saying he's spoken in the best possible way. He's spoken in his son, but the contrast is between these two ages, these two eras of redemptive history and revelation. And that is important because that means that the revelation of God in Jesus Christ can only be understood within the context of God's revelation to Israel. The writer is saying, God, having spoken to the fathers, the patriarchs, has now spoken to us. And he makes this contrast between how he spoke in time past to Israel by the prophets and to the fathers to how he has spoken to us now in these last days. And he contrasts these two things. He contrasts how God spoke in the past and how he speaks now. So let's begin with what the writer says about how God spoke in time past. Verse 1 really is the main thing here. God who at sundry times and in diverse manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets. First of all the writer says in time past God spoke through the prophets. Now I think we need to take a very wide meaning of prophets. I don't think the writer just means the prophets as in terms of Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and all those guys. I think he's meaning any man, occasionally a woman, mainly men, who God anointed to speak his word. First of all, God spoke through the prophets. That was the first phase of God speaking to the world up to the first coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. God's usual way of communicating with man in the past was to select prophets, inspire them, and tell them to preach to the people on his behalf. God normally used intermediaries, in other words, in all of his communication with men. He didn't speak to them very often directly. He did. We can think of examples of that. But I'm talking about in general. He spoke through prophets. God is a God, in other words, who has intervened in human history with a sovereign word addressed to the fathers which is a catch-all phrase for the people of the Old Testament, through prophets. Second, the way he spoke in time past is that he spoke at sundry times and in diverse manners. Literally, in more modern language, at various times and in many ways. God spoke at various times and in many ways, in different places, different times, different ways. God spoke. And that tells us something, I think, about the character of our God. Here's this God who loves to speak. He loves to reveal himself. He loves to communicate. And he does so, he doesn't just narrow it down to one way. God could have said, right, the only way I'm ever going to speak to man is through his dreams at night. And that's the only way I'll ever communicate. Just one method. But he didn't. He did it in many ways. He could have said, I'll just speak to man once. Maybe through, I don't know, Moses on top of the mountain in a dream. And that's it. Man has won. message, one divine email, as it were, from me, and that's the lot. But that's not our God. He's a God who loves to communicate. He doesn't narrow it down to just one time. He speaks through many centuries, different times of Israel's culture, which obviously evolved and changed. He spoke in many places and in many ways at many times. He spoke through prophecies and visions and events and institutions such as the tabernacle and the temple. God, you see, in other words, was not slow to speak. The problem is our side. We're slow to hear. God is speaking all the time, and he's speaking all these different ways. If they don't get that, maybe they'll get this. They won't listen to this, maybe they'll listen to that. And all the time, man is really, even sometimes the people of God, have stubbornly failed to hear God. But God wants us to hear him. God is a God who, even in times past, even when it was not as clear perhaps as it is now, as it is in Jesus. He was still speaking and he wanted his people to hear. But the phrase, I suppose, sundry times and diverse manners, it does carry the implication that the revelation of God in times past, in the Old Testament, was a fragmentary revelation. It was in different pieces, if you like. It was fragmented. It was at different places, in different times, to different people. And until the Son of Man came, it would not be complete. Someone said, I don't know if it completely works as an illustration, but someone said, Reading the Old Testament is like having the jigsaw out with all the pieces. Someone's made a start. You can see something of the outline of the shape, but it's a bit of a job fitting it all together. When you come to the New Testament, you still have all the pieces, but you have the picture on the box to look at. You can see the revelation of what the jigsaw is supposed to be. And there's that fullness of revelation that you don't have, as it were, in times past. And then the writer then describes, in contrast, the revelation in these last days. Let's look at in these last days. How has God spoken to us in that era, in this era? Well first, and we're now really in verse two. First, God has now spoken unto us, it says, by his son. He hath in these last days spoken unto us by his son. And you can sense a kind of crescendo of emotion and amazement in the writer at the superiority of God's revelation in these last days. In other words, how much more does God speak to us now in these last days? Notice the contrast. In the past, God spoke unto the fathers by the prophets. But now, in these last days, he's spoken unto us by his son. That's interesting, isn't it? You see, he could have said, and perhaps we would have expected him to say, God spoke in the past through prophets, but now he speaks through his apostles. But he didn't say that, did he? He says God has spoken to us through his son. The apostles, of course, did have a crucial role to play. and in many ways are identical to the prophets, I think, the kind of New Testament prophets in terms of authority. They were scripture writers. They were the ones who God entrusted with the inspired word of God. But the superiority of the revelation between the old age and the new age is not described as a comparison between the Old Testament prophets and the New Testament apostles. You would have expected that. It's even greater than that. It's through Jesus Christ himself, the Son. The contrast is between the Old Testament prophets and Jesus. Prophets then, son now, as it were. Many prophets then, one son now. Many ways, many times, many prophets then, one son now, who is God's full and final word to us. The son is now God's word to us. Jesus is more than a prophet, he's the son of God. And the revelation we have in these last days is through someone who is God himself. God speaks through his son. Yes, he does speak through his son, but God's message to us is his son. He is the message. He's the messenger and the message. The ministry of the prophets marked the preparatory stage of this new age of revelation. And the word spoken now through the sun is the extension, as it were, of a history of divine revelation through the prophets, which is a far superior word of revelation. We must get that too. This is not a kind of Imagine writing an email, and you're writing an email, and you get, as it were, halfway through and new information comes in that throws great light on the issue that you're writing about. You could either keep it all as one message, as one email, or you could just send the first bit and then send a completely separate email. with the new information, as it were, or the added information, but that's not how the Bible is. It's all one message. It builds up. It builds from the old into the new, and it's all one organic growing message. And as you look back on the old in the light of the new, you see great light and truth in what the old meant. Although there are these contrasts, there are these continuities. God's word to Israel in time past was wonderful, with incredible revelations, but God has now spoken to us in even greater terms, with clarity and finality in the coming of Jesus Christ. This is why it's so wrong in Islam, for example, to treat Jesus as a mere prophet. This text specifically teaches that Jesus is the son of God more than a prophet. Jesus is God's only begotten son, of whom the writer will go on to give the highest praise and honour through seven amazing statements. We won't go into this now, but just for example, he is divine, verse three. He's the brightness of God's glory and the express image of his person. God spoke as son in his human nature into existence in Mary's womb. a virgin birth, and this son was holy to the Lord. In everything our Lord was, and everything he said, everything he did, he is God's word that he has spoken to us in these last days. And because God has spoken in his son, the son bears the nature of the father. He has the same will and purposes as the father. In other words, Jesus embodies the character of his father. Which is why we look to Jesus to know who God is. God's spoken to him. If you hear Jesus, if you listen to Jesus, if you read him in the word, he is the revelation of God. Which is why Jesus said to Philip one day, in answer to Philip's comment, Lord, show us the Father, and it suffice of us. It says, Jesus saith unto him, have I been so long with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? And Jesus says this amazing statement, he that hath seen me hath seen the Father. And how sayest thou then, show us the Father? We could say to anyone who's a seeker, you want to know God, do you? Where do you go? You look to Christ. All that God spoke in time past and has spoken in his son is to be found in the scriptures. The Old Testament scriptures and the New Testament scriptures. This includes prophecies about what is yet to be fulfilled in these last days, most notably the second coming of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, the final judgment, the consummation of the final kingdom of God all to come. But the Bible is the principal way that God speaks to us now. His voice continues to speak to us in other ways. Yes, He speaks to us through the book of nature. We look up to the stars at night, we see the trees, we see nature. He speaks to us of a certain truth about God, that He's a creator. He speaks of something of His goodness. It doesn't get us all the way, though, does it? We need more revelation than that. The book, as it were, of evidence of our own bodies. Calvin makes much of this in his Institutes. So much evidence about the existence of God's biology, human biology, study of our own bodies. The human eye is a wonder. No one but God could have thought of how to create a human eye and these sorts of things. There's the book of Providence, how God what people call luck, so often in their lives when maybe they're saved from some kind of dreadful event by the skin of their teeth. God, or maybe they're brought into trouble when they didn't expect to be brought into trouble. There's the Book of Providence. God speaks through happenings and circumstances. We think they're circumstances, but nothing happens without God's sovereign will. But it is in the book of the Bible that we most clearly hear the living, active voice of God. That's why we need to know God's Word. We need to read it. I believe, and I can't say I always keep to this, but I think we should always, as far as possible, have it with us, wherever we're doing, wherever we're going. It's much easier to do these days, of course, if you've got a phone that'll download the Bible. That's why the leaders of this church are committed to verse-by-verse exposition of the Bible. Because you as a congregation want to hear from God, don't you? You don't want to hear silly stories, or stories about what I've been doing in the week, or what Mr. Pollish has been up to, like so often it is in many churches. You want to hear from God. And this is how we hear from God, by getting down into this, deep into this word. It's the word of God. We want to know what God has said. So this reference to the sun is the first part of verse two. Hath in these last days spoken unto us by his son? And that verse, the beginning of verse 2, introduces the core of the paragraph, the four verses. Well, we should say it extends really to the end of verse 3. From verse 1 to the end of verse 3, there are these amazing statements about our Lord Jesus Christ. Some biblical scholars suggest that this may be a fragment of an early piece of church liturgy, such as a creed. I don't know whether that's true or not, but it's certainly a beautiful piece of writing which celebrates Christ's role in creation, revelation, and redemption. Look at how beautiful this is. Spoken to us by a son, verse 2. whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds, who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the majesty on high. So why does the writer speak so beautifully and so highly of Christ here? in this context? Well, I believe it's this, because if it's true that Christ is God's final, decisive, fullest word, what are the grounds for believing him to be so? What authority has this son? Why should we believe that he is superior to the prophets? Well, our author tells us some of the reasons why he has authority to speak to us. As I say, there are seven of them, and they elucidate the greatness of the Son of God. Don't worry, we're not going to do all seven now. In fact, looking at the time, we're not going to get very far at all. The seven things we will look at, though, in the next one or two Lord's days, evenings, are the things that qualify the Son of God to speak to us in this full and final way. And I think I might leave it there because we're going to go on for too long otherwise. But the first thing that we will go on to see is in verse two, at the end of verse two, the last few words. Apologies. The first thing is, not the very last words, but the preceding words. Verse two, whom he hath appointed heir of all things. That's the first reason why Our Lord Jesus Christ is the superior, authoritative, final word of God because he has been appointed heir of all things. And we'll go on next to study that and all the other wonderful seven things that are mentioned about our Lord Jesus Christ. Often think of that hymn. Turn your eyes upon Jesus. Look full in his wonderful face. and the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace." All these seven affirmations the writer gives about Christ in these introductory verses demand, in a way, that Christ should be the centre of our vision of our lives, that demand that Christ should be the centre of our church life, of our church vision. to present him to the world, that he should be the centre of everything, the centre of our own personal affections. I wonder if that's true of you tonight, and I pray that it will be as we go forward. He's deserving, in every possible way, to be the sole centre of your affections, your emotions, and your love, and your time, and your youth, and your abilities. He deserves it all. Because he is beautiful in every possible way, as we'll go on to see described. Jesus is not only better than the prophets and the angels, he's better, superior than any sinful pleasure, better than any relationship you should not be in. He's better than any temptation that Satan might be holding out to you at this time. He should be your all in all. And so God speaks to us, he speaks to you by his son. Look to him and live for him. May we all do so tonight and all nights and all days in these weeks and months and years to come. Pray these things that will be so. In Jesus' name, Amen. Feel free to contact us at Sovereign Grace Church in Tiverton. Email us at grace2seekers at gmail.com. That's grace2seekers at gmail.com. Alternatively, you can visit our website at www.sovereigngracereformedchurch.co.uk.