Jesus Is Better
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth — who was sent here when the fullness of time had come, the Son of God born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law so that we might receive adoption as sons — and thus fulfill our holy calling to which God has called us according to his own purpose and grace which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began and which now has been manifested through the appearing of our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel…
This is the gift of Jesus to this world — he is the gift we’ve just celebrated during Christmas, and of course our celebrations don’t stop now but they continue throughout the whole year because Jesus is still the gift — not who had been given but who is being given in this exact moment. There is not just a Christmas Day and a Christmas season, but we are in the Christmas age of world history. And untold peoples for untold years in untold ways have longed for such a gift in such an age.
Because apart from God, we abound in darkness and we are deprived of hope. Apart from God, every human soul is fully lost and meaningless. And deep in each of our persons we know what that’s like. We know what it’s like to be distant from God and we want so badly to bridge that distance. Whether it’s the pursuit of worldly pleasure or the embrace of man-made religion, the whole story of this world, from one angle, is our desperate attempt to find God. We want to experience the happiness that would be in God’s presence; we want to know the purpose that would come from God’s design. We all want that, and collectively, we as mankind have searched for that down a trillion dead-end roads, and we never find what we’re looking for. And then God comes and says here. Here is all of that!
And he gives, which is why it’s a gift, and the gift is Jesus.
Jesus is the voice of God to us, the way of God for us, the reign of God in us and over us. And he is new, in that no gift like him has ever been given before; and he is final, in that no gift like him will ever be given again. Jesus is the ultimate, definitive, world-changing, history-defining gift and he’s right here, standing in front of your heart’s face.
Now I don’t know if you’ve ever imagined your heart as having a face, but think about that for a minute, and imagine that Jesus is standing right there. Jesus is right in front of the deepest part of you. And what are you gonna do? You gonna try to go somewhere else? Why would you go somewhere else?
Welcome to the Book of Hebrews.
For most of this entire year on Sunday mornings we’re going to be in this book, and it is a book of Jesus in your heart’s face. Historically, the Book of Hebrews has been considered a letter, although it’s not like the other letters in the New Testament, because it doesn’t start like a letter at all. There’s no sender or addressee mentioned; there’s no greeting; the book just starts with the Jesus, right here in your heart’s face.
According to some clues later on in the book, most likely Hebrews was actually a sermon for the early church (if you were to read the entire book out loud it’d take you 45 minutes — which is a solid sermon length).
The prose here is careful; the arguments are beautiful; the repetitions are strategic; and Jesus is front and center throughout the whole thing.
What we read about the glory of Jesus in these first four verses echoes through the rest of the book.
And we have the whole year to see this unfolding logic of Hebrews, but as we get started today, I at least want to give a broad introduction to the book as a whole. I think we could summarize the overall message of Hebrews to simply be a solution to a problem. A solution to a problem.
So what’s the problem? What’s the solution?
Those are the two points of today’s sermon. Here’s the first:
1) The problem is the possibility of our apostasy.
Now, when I use that word apostasy I want you to think the opposite of endurance. If endurance means to press on and hold fast, apostasy means to turn back and fall away. Endurance is to persevere in faith; apostasy is to abandon faith. And abandoning faith is a real temptation for us in real-time.
Now there are some deep theological waters we can get into here, and we’re going to go there in this series. But briefly, when it comes to apostasy, we know plainly from 1 John Chapter 2 that those who fall away from the faith were never actually in the faith. If you end up abandoning Jesus you only prove that you never actually knew him in the first place.
But if you do know him, if you are born again, if you are united to Jesus, then you are secure forever. Jesus himself says of his people, his sheep, John Chapter 10, verse 27:
“I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand.”
Jesus is saying he’s got you, and that’s an amazing promise.
So at a high level, the basics are this:
If you fall away you were not actually in.
If you are truly in, you will not fall away.
Everybody get that?
We have eternal security in the salvation of Jesus, and that is peace for us. We rest here. And, at the same time, we should be aware of ways that eternal security has been misapplied.
I saw this growing up in church. Growing up in the church where I did, there was a teaching I heard all the time that said “once saved, always saved.” I’m not sure if that’s a phrase you’ve heard before, but “once saved, always saved” is a big deal among Christians in some parts of our world, and it is absolutely true at face-value. Once you are saved — in that God resurrects you from spiritual deadness — if God does that you are always saved. God doesn’t make you spiritually alive and then later reverses that. When you are saved, you are always saved.
The mis-application of that truth, though, has to do with the meaning of being saved. In a lot of places “being saved” just meant that you had to walk down an aisle during an altar call and ‘pray’ a prayer. “Being saved” was reduced down to basically doing a thing and checking the box, and then you could go live however you wanted and have nothing to do with Jesus at all.
And I say this with a sickness in my stomach, but there are countless people in our country, where I’m from, who blatantly deny Jesus in how they live — they care little to nothing about Jesus; they’re not actively involved in a church — but they and everyone around them thinks they’re Christians because they repeated some words one time. They think that they were “once saved” and therefore, they think they’re always saved.
The “saved” part is what they get wrong, and it’s a deadly error. It’s one that we reject expressly through church discipline. If you say you belong to Jesus but your behavior repeatedly denies him and you don’t repent, the local church is meant to help you by saying that we don’t think you actually belong to Jesus.
Remember that to be saved is to be saved to God. Saving faith in Jesus is to receive him as Lord, Savior, and Treasure; it means we worship him; we cling to him; we surrender to him as our only hope, and yes he forgives us, and unites us to himself, and we are in.
And if we’re in, we are secure, we won’t fall away. But how do we know we’re in?
That’s the question, right? How do we know if we’re really saved. Well we know we’re saved because God keeps us in that we believe. We press on. We hold fast. We endure in faith. We trust right now in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of our sins and the fulfillment of all God’s promises.
And that exhortation for us to trust, to believe, to hold fast — that is a vital on-going exhortation in the Christian life and its one that we see repeated in the Book of Hebrews. Because apostasy is a possibility. People have fallen away. People do fall away. So don’t.
The Pull of Apostasy
And I wanna get to the solution as soon as possible, but I need to say one more thing about apostasy. I want to pop the hood on apostasy for a minute and show you more about how it works, and this is the way I want to summarize it: apostasy is always a pull from something else.
I’ll put it like this: nobody abandons Jesus because they pursued Jesus and found him lacking. People abandon Jesus because they suspect that they will have it better somewhere else.
Jesus doesn’t push people away from him; but people are pulled away from him by something else.
For the original audience of Hebrews, that something else was Judaism. The first hearers of this sermon were Jewish Christians — they were Jewish people who had embraced the gospel, trusted Jesus as their Messiah, they had become Christians — but some of them had started to fall away back into Judaism. Most likely there was some kind of persecution going on. Christians were taking some heat. And apparently the pull away from Jesus was the short-sighted idea that “if I leave Jesus and go over there I won’t get mistreated.” They thought: “Things will be better for me apart from Jesus and his people.” That was the pull.
And you might think that’s silly, but “pulls” like that still happen today. It’s probably not Judaism for us like it was for this first audience, but there are “something elses” all around us in this world. And that “something else” doesn’t encourage you toward Jesus, but it pulls you away from him. And they’re not necessarily hostile things, sometimes it’s just the stuff of life, what Jesus called:
“the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches and the desire for other things” (see Mark 4:19).
Something elses. They’re the kind of things that makes being a Christian seem uncomfortable or inconvenient.
You know, in our language we use the phrase often of a “nominal Christian.” We mean someone who claims to be a Christian but isn’t really serious about it. Where I grew up, they were called “backslidden Christians.” And I know what they’re like because I used to be one. You just go through the motions and do all the external things.
Well, look, in reality, whatever we name that category, the so-called nominal Christian is actually just a non-Christian who doesn’t know it yet because they’ve not been tested. They’ve not been pulled. Following Jesus has not been uncomfortable or inconvenient for them, yet.
But it will be. You’re going to get pulled. And many of us know what that’s like. Some of us are getting pulled now in our current circumstances. There are things around us that would persuade us to forsake Jesus. And that’s a problem. All of this is a problem that is there all the time, and so what do we do? What’s the solution to this problem?
2) The solution is to hold fast to Jesus.
And you might be thinking wait a minute…
Hearer: So you’re saying the problem is that we could fall away, and the solution is to hold fast? That’s like saying the solution to falling away is to not fall away.
Me: And that’s right. I’m saying to do the opposite of falling away. Hold fast.
Hearer: And hold fast to what?
Me: Hold fast to Jesus and the hope that we have in him, which we do by remembering him. We must see him.
That’s the purpose of Jesus in your heart’s face — which is how Hebrews starts. We’re not first bombarded by the problem, but instead the Book of Hebrews starts by saying “Here he is! The Savior has come! Look at him! Look who he is! Look what he’s done! Trust him!”
That’s what’s going on in those first four verses, and it’s absolutely glorious. In verses 1–4 we read ten facts about Jesus:
He is the one through whom God has spoken
He is appointed by God to be the heir of all things.
He is the one through whom God created the world.
He is the radiance of the glory of God.
He is the exact imprint of God’s nature.
He upholds the universe by the word of his power.
He made purification for sins.
He afterwards sat down at the right hand of the Father.
He is superior to angels.
He has inherited a more excellent name.
Historically, it was the Reformer John Calvin who first elaborated on the fact that Jesus as the Messiah means that Jesus serves in a threefold office —
Jesus is the promised Messiah who has come — that’s his office — but Calvin says that this office “enjoined upon Christ by the Father consists of three parts.” Jesus is Prophet, Priest, and King. And then later Reformed theologians developed this more. It’s in all the Reformed catechisms, like our favorite, the Heidelberg Catechism:
Question 31: Why is [Jesus] called “Christ,” meaning “anointed”?
Answer: Because he has been ordained by God the Father and has been anointed with the Holy Spirit to be our chief prophet and teacher who fully reveals to us the secret counsel and will of God concerning our deliverance; our only high priest who has delivered us by the one sacrifice of his body, and who continually pleads our cause with the Father; and our eternal king who governs us by his Word and Spirit, and who guards us and keeps us in the freedom he has won for us.
You heard the words there. The Catechism explains that Jesus is our chief prophet, our high priest, our eternal king.
These are the three parts of his Messianic office and they give us a fuller picture of how Jesus is our Savior, and get this: we see all three parts in the Book of Hebrews (we actually see all three parts in these first four verses — right at the start).
We see Jesus is the Prophet — God has spoken to us definitively in him (verse 2).
We see that Jesus is the Priest — he has made purification for sins (verse 3).
But the resounding theme we see here — the part that shines brightest in verses 1–4 is that Jesus is the King. We see his supremacy here. That he reigns.
Just look at his preeminence — Jesus inherits all things and all things were made through him. That means he is the beginning and the end.
“Radiance of God’s glory!”
That means he is the ray of light beaming forth from the perfections of God. This is why the Nicene Creed calls Jesus the Light from Light.
“Exact imprint of God’s nature!”
That means Jesus is the precise representation of God’s heart. It means God is Christlike, and in him there is no un-Christlikeness.
Now look at his royal sovereignty — Jesus upholds the universe by the word of his power. Which means he is dependent upon nothing but all things are dependent upon him. What a king, right!?
And then what makes the kingship of Jesus clearest here is in verse 3:
“he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high.”
And that’s a really big deal because this phrase about Jesus sitting down at the right hand is an allusion back to Psalm 110, verse 1 when David writes,
The Lord says to my Lord: “Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.”
You’ve probably heard that verse before. That is the most quoted Old Testament verse in the New Testament.
When the apostle Peter preached his ground-breaking sermon at Pentecost, in Acts 2, when the church was birthed, Peter concluded that sermon by quoting Psalm 110:1. That was the crescendo.
Psalm 110:1 was also the verse that Jesus quoted to the Pharisees that finally shut their mouths. This is in Matthew 22. The Pharisees were altogether and Jesus asked them a question. He said:
“What do you think about the Christ? Whose son is he?”
They said to him, “The son of David.”
This is right — everyone knew the Messiah would come through the lineage of David.
Verse 43,
Then Jesus said to them, “How is it then that David, in the Spirit, calls him Lord,
Now where does David call the Messiah Lord? In Psalm 110. Jesus quotes it.
Verse 44,
The Lord said to my Lord,
Sit at my right hand,
until I put your enemies under your feet.
Then Jesus says, Look…
Verse 45,
“If then David calls [the Messiah] Lord, how can [the Messiah] be his son?”
And the Pharisees were speechless. Matthew tells us,
“no one was able to answer him a word, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.”
Why? Because Psalm 110 gets at the heart of who the Messiah is. There is an answer to the question Jesus asked. It wasn’t rhetorical. Jesus asked how can David call his son, the Messiah, his Lord?
The answer is that it’s because the Messiah is not just the son of David; he is the Son of God! He is our divine Messianic King — that’s what it means that Jesus sat down at the Father’s right hand. It means he is our Messianic King who is reigning as God.
The Unending Verdict
And you know, if we take this all in — if we give honest attention to the testimony of Scripture about Jesus and if we look around honest about the world, we’d understand that Jesus is incomparable. He has no rival. He has no equal.
But because there are pulls from something else, because apostasy is a possibility, the Book of Hebrews welcomes comparisons. Jesus is incomparable, but Hebrews says: Fine, give it a try. Put beside Jesus whatever you want. Compare him to whatever you want. The verdict is always the same.
And that same verdict we first see here in verse 4 — this is the first time the word is used. It’s the word translated here as “superior” — the Greek word kreitton — the word is used seven more times in Hebrews and it’s translated as “better.” That’s what it means. Jesus is better.
And you know, if the main purpose of Hebrews is to encourage us to endure (to not fall away but to hold fast), and that means we must look at Jesus, which requires some level of comparison (of our seeing the superiority of Jesus to every possible alternative), then it’s accurate, I think, to summarize this entire book in those three words: Jesus is better. Better than every something else.
If you’re going to hold fast to Jesus, you gotta know that. Take all the “something elses,” bring them altogether, put them side by side. Look at them all. Look at Jesus. Jesus is better.
Do you believe that?
The reason some of you have not surrendered your life to Jesus yet is because you don’t think that’s true. Jesus is standing in front of your heart’s face and you’re saying, “Yeah, I don’t know.”
What else are you looking for?
What do you think could possibly be better than him?
And that’s a question for all of us, all throughout our lives, and what we need is what the Book of Hebrews does for us. This book shows us that Jesus is better by helping us to “see Christ exalted, bright and burning, full of power and purity.” Would that God do such a work in our hearts!
Father in heaven, indeed, we ask that this year, through the Book of Hebrews, make us to behold your Son. Moses prayed and asked you to show him your glory, and we are asking the same thing when we pray for you to show us Jesus. Make us to see Jesus — our Prophet, Priest, and King. Make us to know that he is better. Make us to surrender everything that we are to him. For your glory, in his name, amen.
