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THE REVELATION IN A SON
"God, having of old time spoken unto the fathers
in the prophets by divers portions and in divers manners, hath at the end of
these days spoken unto us in His Son, Whom He appointed Heir of all things,
through Whom also He made the worlds; Who being the effulgence of His glory,
and the very image of His substance, and upholding all things by the word of
His power, when He had made purification of sins, sat down on the right hand of
the Majesty on high."-- Hebrews 1:1-3
(R.V.).
"God hath spoken." The eternal silence has been
broken. We have a revelation. That God has spoken unto men is the ground of all
religion. Theologians often distinguish between natural religion
and revealed. We may fairly question if all worship is not based on some
revelation of God. Prayer is the echo in man's spirit of God's own voice. Men
learn to speak to the Father Who is in heaven as
children come to utter words: by hearing their parent speak. It is the deaf who
are also dumb. God speaks first, and prayer answers as well as asks. Men reveal
themselves to the God Who has revealed Himself to
them.
The Apostle is, however, silent about the revelations of
God in nature and in conscience. He passes them by because we, sinful men, have
lost the key to the language of creation and of our own moral nature. We know
that He speaks through them, but we do not know what He says. If we were holy,
it would be otherwise. All nature would be vocal, "like some sweet
beguiling melody." But to us the universe is a hieroglyphic which we cannot
decipher, until we discover in another revelation the key that will make all
plain.
More strange than this is the
Apostle's omission to speak of the Mosaic dispensation as a revelation of God.
We should have expected the verse to run on this wise: "God, having spoken
unto the fathers in the sacrifices and in the prophets, institutions, and
inspired words," etc. But the author says nothing about rites,
institutions, dispensations, and laws. The reason apparently is that he wishes
to compare with the revelation in Christ the highest, purest, and fullest
revelation given before; and the most complete revelation vouchsafed to men,
before the Son came to declare the Father, is to be found, not in sacrifices,
but in the words of promise, not in the institutions, but in holy men, who were
sent, time after time, to quicken the institutions into new life or to preach
new truths. The prophets were seers and poets. Nature's highest gift is
imagination, whether it "makes" a world that transcends nature or
"sees" what in nature is hidden from the eyes of ordinary men. This
faculty of the true poet, elevated, purified, taken possession of by God's Holy
Spirit, became the best instrument of revelation, until the word of prophecy
was made more sure through the still better gift of the Son.
But it would appear from the Apostle's language that even
the lamp of prophecy, shining in a dark place, was in two respects defective.
"God spake in the prophets by divers portions and
in divers manners." He spake in divers portions; that is, the revelation
was broken, as the light was scattered before it was gathered into one source.
Again, He spake in divers manners. Not only the
revelation was fragmentary, but the separate portions were not of the same
kind. The two defects were that the revelation lacked unity and was not
homogeneous.
In contrast to the fragmentary character of the
revelation, the Apostle speaks of the Son, in the second verse, as the centre
of unity. He is the Heir and the Creator of all things. With the heterogeneous
revelation in the prophets he contrasts, in the third verse, the revelation
that takes its form from the peculiar nature of Christ's Sonship. He is the
effulgence of God's glory, the very image of His substance; He upholds all
things by the word of His power; and, having made purification of sins, He took
His seat on the right hand of the Majesty on high.
Let us examine a little more closely the double comparison
made by the Apostle between the revelation given to the fathers and that which
we have received.
First, the previous revelation was in portions. The Old
Testament has no centre, from which all its wonderful and varied lights
radiate, till we find its unity in the New Testament and read Jesus Christ into
it. God scattered the revelations over many centuries, line upon line, precept
after precept, here a little and there a little. He spread the knowledge of
Himself over the ages of a nation's history, and made the development of one
people the medium whereby to communicate truth. This of itself, if nothing more
had been told us, is a magnificent conception. A nation's early struggles,
bitter failures, ultimate triumph, the appearance within it of warriors,
prophets, poets, saints, used by the Spirit of God to reveal the invisible!
Sometimes revelation would make but one advance in an age. We might almost
imagine that God's truth from the lips of His prophets was found at times too
overpowering. It was crushing frail humanity. The Revealer must withdraw into
silence behind the thick veil, to give human nature time to breathe and recover
self-possession. The occasional message of prophecy resembles the suddenness of
Elijah's appearances and departures, and forms a strange contrast to the
ceaseless stream of preaching in the Christian Church.
Still more strikingly does it contrast with the New
Testament, the greater book, yea the greatest of all books.
Only two classes of men deny its supremacy. They are those who do not know what
real greatness is, and those who disparage it as a literature that they may be
the better able to seduce foolish and shallow youths to reject it as a
revelation. But honest and profound thinkers, even when they do not admit that
it is the word of God, acknowledge it to be the greatest among the books of
men.
Yet the New Testament was all produced--if we are
forbidden to say "given"--in one age, not fifteen centuries. Neither
was this one of the great ages of history, when genius seems to be almost
contagious. Even Greece
had at this time no original thinkers. Its two centuries of intellectual
supremacy had passed away. It was the age of literary imitations and
counterfeits. Yet it is in this age that the book which has most profoundly
influenced the thought of all subsequent times made its appearance. How shall
we account for the fact? The explanation is not that its writers were great
men. However insignificant the writers, the mysterious greatness of the book
pervades it all, and their lips are touched as with a live coal from the altar.
Nothing will account for the New Testament but the other fact that Jesus of
Nazareth had appeared among men, and that He was so great, so universal, so
human, so Divine, that He contained in His own person
all the truth that will ever be discovered in the book. Deny the incarnation of
the Son of God, and you make the New Testament an insoluble enigma. Admit that
Jesus is the Word, and that the Word is God, and the
book becomes nothing more, nothing less, than the natural and befitting outcome
of what He said and did and suffered. The mystery of the book is lost in the
greater mystery of His person.
Here the second verse comes in, to tell us of this great
Person, and how He unites in Himself the whole of God's revelation. He is
appointed Heir of all things, and through Him God made the ages. He is the Alpha
and the Omega, the first and the last, He which is, and which was, and which is
to come,--the spring from which all the streams of time have risen and the sea
into which they flow. But these are the two sides of all real knowledge; and
revelation is nothing else than knowledge given by God. All the infinite
variety of questions with which men interrogate nature may be reduced to two:
Whence? and whither? As to the latter question, the
investigation has not been in vain. We do know that, whatever the end will be, the whole universe rises from lower to higher forms. If
one life perishes, it reappears in a higher life. It is the ultimate purpose of
all which still remains unknown. But the Apostles declare that this
interrogation is answered in Jesus Christ. Only that they speak, not of
"ultimate purpose," but of "the appointed Heir." He is more
than the goal of a development. He is the Son of the living God, and therefore
the Heir of all the works and purposes of His Father. He holds His position by
right of sonship, and has it confirmed to Him as the reward of filial service.
The word "Heir" is an allusion to the promise
made to Abraham. The reference, therefore, is not to the eternal relation
between the Son and God, not to any lordship which the Son acquires apart from
His assumption of humanity and atoning death. The idea conveyed by the word
"Heir" will come again to the surface, more than once, in the
Epistle. But everywhere the reference is to the Son's final glory as Redeemer.
At the same time, the act of appointing Him Heir may have taken place before
the world was. We must, accordingly, understand the revelation here spoken of
to mean more especially the manifestation of God in the work of redemption. Of
this work also Christ is the ultimate purpose. He is the Heir, to Whom the promised inheritance originally and ultimately
belongs. It is this that befits Him to become the full and complete Revealer of
God. He is the answer to the question, Whither? in reference to the entire range of redemptive thought and
action.
Again, He, too, is the Creator. Many seek to discover the
origin of all things by analysis. They trace the more complex to the less
complex, the compound to its elements, and the higher developments of life to
lower types. But to the theologian the real difficulty does not lie here. What
matter whence, if we are still the same? We know what we are. We are men. We
are capable of thinking, of sinning, of hating or loving God. The problem is to
account for these facts of our spirit. What is the evolution of holiness?
Whence came prayer, repentance, and faith? But even
these questions Christianity professes to answer. It answers them by solving
still harder problems than these. Do we ask who created the human spirit? The
Gospel tells us who can sanctify man's inmost being. Do we seek to know who
made conscience? The New Testament proclaims One Who can purify conscience and
forgive the sin. To create is but a small matter to Him Who can save. Jesus Christ
is that Saviour. He, therefore, is that Creator. In being these things, He is
the complete and final revelation of God.
Second, previous revelations were given in divers manners. God used many different means to reveal
Himself, as if He found them one after another inadequate. And how can a
visible, material creation sufficiently reveal the spiritual? How can
institutions and systems reveal the personal, living God? How can human
language even express spiritual ideas? Sometimes the means adopted appear
utterly incongruous. Will the great Spirit, the holy
and good God, speak to a prophet in the dreams of night? Shall we say that the
man of God sees real visions when he dreams an unreal dream? Or will an
apparition of the day more befittingly reveal God? Has every substance been
possessed by the spirit of falsehood, so that the Being
of beings can only reveal His presence in unsubstantial phantoms? Has the
waking life of intellect become so entirely false to its glorious mission of
discovering truth that the God of truth cannot reveal Himself to man, except in
dreams and spectres? Yet there was a time when it might be well for us to
recall our dreams, and wise to believe in spiritualism. For a
dream might bring a real message from God, and ecstasy might be the
birth-throes of a new revelation. Some of the good words of Scripture
were at first a dream. In the midst of the confused fancies of the brain, when
reason is for a time dethroned, a truth descends from heaven upon the prophet's
spirit. This has been, but will never again take place. The oracles are dumb,
and we shall not regret them. We consult no interpreter of dreams. We seek not
the seances of necromancers. Let the peaceful spirits of the dead rest in God!
They had their trials and sorrows on earth. Rest, hallowed souls! We do not ask
you to break the deep silence of heaven. For God has spoken
unto us in a Son, Who has been made higher than the heavens, and is as great as
God. Even the Son need not, must not, come to earth a second time to
reveal the Father in mighty deeds and a mightier self-sacrifice. The revelation
given is enough. "We will not say in our hearts, Who
shall ascend into heaven? (that is, to bring Christ
down:) or, Who shall descend into the abyss? (that is,
to bring Christ up from the dead.) The word is nigh us, in our mouth, and in
our heart: that is, the word of faith, which we preach."[1]
The final form of God's revelation of Himself is,
therefore, perfectly homogeneous. The third verse explains that it is a
revelation, not only in a Son, but in His Sonship. We learn what kind of
Sonship is His, and how its glorious attributes qualify Him to be the perfect
Revealer of God. Nevermore will a message be sent to men except in Jesus Christ. God, Who spake unto the
fathers in divers manners, speaks to us in Him, Whose Sonship constitutes Him
the effulgence of God's glory, the image of His substance, the Upholder of the
universe, and, lastly, the eternal Redeemer and King.
1. He is the effulgence of God's glory. Many expositors
prefer another rendering: "the reflection of His glory." This would
mean that God's self-manifestation, shining on an external substance, is
reflected, as from a mirror, and that this reflection is the Son of God. But
such an expression does not convey a consistent idea. For the
Son must be the substance from which the light is reflected. What truth
there is in this rendering is more correctly expressed in the next clause:
"the image of His substance." It is, therefore, much better to accept
the rendering adopted in the Revised Version: "the effulgence of His
glory." God's glory is the self-manifestation of His attributes, or, in
other words, the consciousness which God has of His own infinite perfections.
This implies the triune personality of God. But it does not imply a revelation
of God to His creatures. The Son participates in that consciousness of the
Divine perfections. But He also reveals God to men, not merely in deeds and in
words, but in His person. He is the revelation. To declare this seems to be the
Apostle's purpose in using the word "effulgence." It expresses
"the essentially ministrative character of the person of the Son."[2]
If a revelation will be given at all, His Sonship points Him out as the
Interpreter of God's nature and purposes, inasmuch as He is essentially,
because He is Son, the emanation or radiance of His glory.
2. He is the image of His substance. A solar ray reveals
the light, but not completely, unless indeed it guides the eye back along its
pencilled line to the orb of day. If the Son of God were only an effulgence, Christ could still say that He Himself is the
way to the Father, but He could not add, "He that hath seen Me hath seen
the Father."[3] That the revelation may be complete, the Son must be, in
one sense, distinct from God, as well as one with Him. Apparently this is the
notion conveyed in the metaphor of the "image." Both truths are
stated together in the words of Christ: "As the Father hath life in
Himself, so hath He given to the Son to have life in Himself."[4] If the
Son is more than an effulgence, if He is "the
very image" of God's essence, nothing in God will remain unrevealed. Every
feature of His moral nature will be delineated in the Son. If the Son is the
exact likeness of God and has a distinct mode of subsisting He is capable of
all the modifications in His form of subsisting which may be necessary, in
order to make a complete revelation of God intelligible to men. It is possible
for Him to become man Himself. He is capable of obedience, even of learning
obedience by suffering, and of acquiring power to succour by being tempted. He
can taste death. We might add, if we were studying one of St. Paul's Epistles
(which we are not at present doing), that this distinction from God, involved
in His very Sonship, made Him capable of emptying Himself of the Divine form of
subsisting and taking upon Him instead of it the form of a servant. This power
of meeting man's actual condition confers upon the Son the prerogative of being
the complete and final revelation of God.
3. He upholds all things by the word of His power. This
must be closely connected with the previous statement. If the Son is the
effulgence of God's glory and the express image of His essence, He is not a
creature, but is the Creator. The Son is so from God that He is God. He so
emanates from Him that He is a perfect and complete representation of His
being. He is not in such a manner an effulgence as to
be only a manifestation of God, nor in such a manner an image as to be a
creature of God. But, in fellowship of nature, the essence of God is
communicated to the Son in the distinctness of His mode of subsisting. The
Apostle's words fully justify--perhaps they suggested--the expressions in the
Nicene and still earlier creeds, "God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God." If this is His relation to God,
it determines His relation to the universe, and the relation of the universe to
God. Philo had described the Word as an effulgence,
and spoken also of Him as distinct from God. But in Philo these two statements
are inconsistent. For the former means that the Word is an attribute of God,
and the latter means that He is a creature. The writer of the Epistle to the
Hebrews says that the Word is not an attribute, but a perfect representation of
God's essence. He says also that He is not a creature, but the Sustainer of all
things. These statements are consistent. The one, in fact, implies the other;
and both together express the same conception which we find in St. John's Gospel: "In the beginning was
the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things were made
by Him; and without Him was not anything made that hath been made."[5] It
is also the teaching of St. Paul: "In Him were all things created, in the
heavens and upon the earth, things visible and things invisible, whether
thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things have been
created through Him, and unto Him; and in Him all things consist."[6]
But the Apostle has a further motive in referring to the
Son as Upholder of all things. As Creator and Sustainer He reveals God. He
upholds all things by the word of His power. "The invisible things of God
are perceived through the things which are made, even His everlasting power and
Divinity."[7] There is a revelation of God prior even to that given in the
prophets.
4. Having made purification of sins, He took His seat on
the right hand of the Majesty on high. We come now, at last, to the special
revelation of God which forms the subject of the Epistle. The Apostle here
states his central truth on its two sides. The one side is Christ's priestly
offering; the other is His kingly exaltation. We shall see as we proceed that
the entire structure of the Epistle rests on this great conception,--the Son of
God, the eternal Priest-King. By introducing it at this early stage, the author
gives his readers the clue to what will very soon prove a labyrinth. We must
hold the thread firmly, if we wish not to be lost in the maze. The subject of
the treatise is here given us. It is "The Son as Priest-King the Revealer
of God." The revelation is not in words only, nor in external acts only,
but in love, in redemption, in opening heaven to all believers. It is well
termed a revelation. For the Priest-King has rent the thick veil and opened the
way to men to enter into the true holiest place, so that they know God by
prayer and communion.
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