Classic Summer 2020: Jesus is Greater than Angels

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ, based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the Apostle Paul said, but we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

In short, if you like smooth, watered-down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you. By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her King.

Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry.

Jesus in the Book of Hebrews and a Higher View of Christ

Mike Abendroth here, and we are talking about Jesus Christ and the book of Hebrews, or Jesus in the book of Hebrews. And if you know the show, we talk about current events, we talk about issues, we talk about pop music, and today we're talking about Jesus, and I'm trying to get you to have an increased view of who Jesus is.

I'm all for faithfulness in response to what God has done in your life, and I'm all for living by faith and having the object of your faith, Christ Jesus, clearly seen as you look through the pages of scripture.

There is no other way to get to know Jesus except through scripture, and our minds have to be in the box. Don't put God in a box. In the box of scripture, as it were, God reveals himself. We could not know these things by looking at the stars and the sun and the moon.

I'm looking outside now, I see a lot of weeds in the church parking lot. If you would like to know more about No Compromise Radio, just go to nocompromiseradio .com. Maybe you're on that right now. You've got YouTube channels.

We've got a Reformation trip coming up May 20th through 30th in 2017, and you can go to the website for that as well. Love to have you. Let's have some espresso, stand in John Calvin's pulpit. I don't know if the laypeople can stand in the pulpit.

I've stood in the pulpit of Luther's pulpit, Zwingli's and Calvin's, also some other people that don't really care if I stood in their pulpit. I've stood in John MacArthur's pulpit. I cared about that one, but that was at night.

I was a janitor. It was midnight. That's how I introduced MacArthur when he was here in 1999 preaching in Massachusetts. I said, very thankful that John's here today and will be able to preach. And this is John's first time in the pulpit at Bethlehem, I think Baptist church at the time.

What John doesn't know, I preached in his pulpit. He looked at me quizzically and I said it was midnight, Friday night, janitors sat in the congregation and I preached. Hebrews chapter one is emphasizing the deity of Christ with a series of statements about the person and work of Christ in verses one, two, and three.

And then in comparison to the angels, there are seven Old Testament passages quoted by the author to nail down in your mind, to clinch the nail, to rivet it to your brain and your soul that Jesus is greater than the angels.

He will move on in chapter two to talk about the true humanity of Jesus, Jesus, the God man. But for the moment, he is in chapter one with an elegant style, front loading through this prism. So you would be able to see clearly the rest of the book through the lens of chapter one, probably one to three, but the whole chapter essentially.

And it says in Hebrews chapter one, verse seven, and of the angels, he says, who makes his angels winds and his ministers a flame of fire. Then using language on one hand, but on the other hand, using that language in verse seven and eight, he says in verse eight, but on the other hand, but of the sun he says, and now he addresses the sun, your throne, oh God is forever and ever.

The scepter of uprightness is the scepter of your kingdom. Verse seven and verse eight are grammatically tied together. Verse seven doesn't say anything about Jesus, but there's a comparison, there's a tie in, and the author is trying to give you proof, final proof, ultimate proof that Jesus is superior.

As we learned last time, angels serve as created beings. They don't have ultimately an immutable nature. I guess they're immutably fixed now, but when they were created, they were created upright and some fell.

They aren't sovereign angels, as cool as they might be, as wonderful as they might be. Remember John in chapter 19 of Revelation and in 22, he falls down on his face like a swimming pool on a tire iron, I'm backwards with that, like a tire iron in the swimming pool.

Well, I'm just tired today is what I am. I was thinking about something with the word H and Hebrews just came to mind. Oh, the new book on Amazon, you can probably get by about now, Evangelical White Lies.

Or if you wanna order some of the sexual fidelity, no compromise books, that would be a good book to get for group studies. And if you wanna buy 10 or more, I'll give you a great deal. Okay, back to angels.

Angels in the sun. Angels serve, the sun creates. Angels minister, the sun is sovereign. Angels run errands as they're told to. Jesus, the sun, is the one who gives the orders. Angels divinely sent, the sun, of course, sent by the father, but purifies sin, purifies transgressions, purifies trespasses.

And then, of course, is raised from the dead. Hebrews does talk a little bit about the resurrection, but it's just implicit everywhere. You'll see even early on that he was seated at the right hand of the father.

And of course, that means he is alive and he has been raised from the dead. When it comes to angels, they might be great, but Jesus is greater. And that is what the author is trying to show you. And in this particular case, he's quoting Psalm 104 in verse seven.

This blessed the Lord, oh my soul, oh Lord, my God, you're very great. Psalm, and it's in verse four. He makes his messengers winds, his ministers, a flaming fire. And those, the Hebrew word for messenger is translated angels in the Septuagint.

God is sovereign over the weather. God is master over the wind. God sovereignly does whatever he wants with weather. And then, of course, it's the same thing when it comes to angels. And this shows that the angels, while great, they aren't superior.

And the writer doesn't really say angels are inferior. Moses is inferior. The prophets were inferior. I mean, that is a logical conclusion. That is a logical deduction, superior, inferior. But the way the writer is talking about this is they're great, they're wonderful.

They're exemplary. That is prophets, angels, Moses, Aaron, old covenant. But Jesus is better. That's the point. It's not bad to worse, it's better. And Jesus is superior and he is served by the angels.

And we have seen that in Matthew 4 and Luke 22. Servants, the angels, serve the son who makes his messenger swift as the wind, his ministers mighty as a flame of fire. There's the Targum for you, for those of you that love the Targum.

Probably love the Targum as much as you love the message Bible. Here's what one writer said, winds are one of the striking phenomena in the psalmist country. They range from the refreshing breezes off the Mediterranean sea that make the largely arid land of Israel a climactically pleasant place to live to the searing blast from Arabia that burn and wither everything in their path.

Winds, particularly in the evening, pour down over the mountain slopes and whip the waters of the Sea of Galilee into dangerous turbulence. Psalm 104 does not picture nature in her violent moods, however, but in her prevailing condition.

Some would translate the psalm passage this way, who maketh winds his messengers and thus rule out any specific reference to angels as separate entities. Well, that might be true in the book of Psalms, Psalm 104, but in Hebrews, it makes it very clear.

This is a reference to angels and they do what they're told like the wind. The wind does what it's told, the wind is quick, the wind is fast, the wind is speedy and the wind accomplishes its purpose and so too do the angels.

As simple as we can make it, angels are servants. Angels are ministers, that's what they are. And we looked last time a little bit about the angels that helped deliver Lot, the angels that help deliver the dream to Joseph, angels who delivered Peter out of jail in Acts chapter 12.

Angels are great, Jesus is greater. And when it comes to angelology, these good angels, they don't get dinged by the author, they get spoken of as servants doing what God bids, but the one who is doing the bidding is God himself and that's where we come to verse eight.

The Son Is God and His Kingdom Is Righteous

On the one hand, angels are servants, on the other hand, the son is God. But of the son, he says, now he directly talks to the son, your throne, oh God, is forever and ever. The scepter of uprightness is the scepter of your kingdom.

You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness. Therefore, your God has anointed you with the oil of gladness beyond your companions. On one hand, angels serve, on the other hand, Jesus, the son, is in fact God.

There's a contrast here. The throne of God is eternal. Did you notice that? Forever and ever. As angels talked about later in chapter one, verses 10 through 12, angels are mutable. They mutate. The root word I'd always say to the kids, what's the root word?

They always give me a hassle around the house when I say, what's the root word? And I'll say, what's the root word for immutable? And they'll say, mute. Like they're supposed to be quiet. I don't know, maybe that has something to do with it, but I'm thinking mute like teenage mutant ninja turtles.

When I lived in North Hollywood, I lived in Carpenter Street. I still wish I had that house because it's probably worth four times what I sold it for. And down the street was one of the characters in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

I can't remember what was his name. Don Diego? Someone just wrote in and said, by the way, who was it? I'm trying to think who wrote in. I looked at the email last night. Al? Al Franken? Fred. Not the Fred we know.

Not Fred in California, but a different Fred. Fred A. The throne is eternal, not created. Servant angels worship the son because Jesus is himself. God, the Davidic Messiah, the anointed one. It is God, the son, talked about in Hebrews 1 as the writer is quoting Psalm 45 in that royal wedding that we were talking about last time.

Psalm 45, verse six, your throne, O God, is forever and ever. This is the contrast. Why is this being written about? Well, the writer wants you to have a great view of Jesus. And maybe you think angels are great.

I think, actually, the angels are great, but there's an antithesis here, as Pink would talk about. The mediator is much better. And actually, he tells the angels what to do. So if you're gonna worship the servants or you're gonna worship the master, who would you worship?

It'd be dumb to worship the servants, wouldn't it? It would be. The text goes on to say, we talked a lot last time about your throne, O God, and is it evocative? The nominative is what the cults want it to be.

And I gave you the reasons why it is clear that it is your throne, O God, forever and ever. I didn't talk about the scepter of your kingdom is a scepter of uprightness. One translator translates it, the rod of your kingdom is a rod of righteousness.

What's a scepter? Well, what does it do? What does it symbolize? Well, the answer is lordship, power, control, supervision, government. If you'd like to know what Christ's kingdom will be like, those are the answers.

The scepter of thy kingdom is a right scepter. Do you like monarchs who are unjust, unlawful, uncivil? Jeremiah says regarding chapter 23, the days are coming when the Lord shall raise up for David a righteous branch and he will reign as a king and act wisely and do justice and righteousness in the land.

In his days, Judah will be saved and Israel will dwell securely. And this is his name by which he will be called, the Lord our righteousness. And since Jesus is named that, then of course his kingdom is going to be a kingdom of righteousness.

I like that word scepter. If you're going to spell it with transliteration, R-H-A-B-D-O-S, rabthos, rabthos. I said tos, I should have said tas, rabthos. And you would have a piece of wood, depending on how long it was, and you would use that piece of wood.

Maybe you'd put things on it and you would whack people with it. Sometimes it was for looks and show. There might be gold on it. There might be emblems. There might be all kinds of things. It doesn't matter what it looks like.

Here, the idea is righteous scepter. God does everything rightly and properly. And might I say, goodly. And he does things well. I know, I know. Even though I went to school in Omaha, Nebraska. I mean, R. Scott Clark, he's from Nebraska, so he knows how to speak.

He knows how to tweet too. Don't ever get Dr. Clark going after you. You are smoked, you are so smoked. Hi, Dr. Clark, how are you? Jesus doesn't belong to any created order. That's the point. So the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Arians are going to try to make Jesus a created being.

He might be the firstborn of all creation, the best, and then created everything else, but Jesus isn't created. There's a Psalm that speaks of the celebration of this great, glorious, Davidic king. And that is what the book of Hebrews uses to paint the picture in your mind that Jesus is great.

And this Jesus, he loves righteousness and hates wickedness. I want perfect justice. I want perfect righteousness. And that is only gonna come from God. And that's exactly who Jesus is referred to here as God with this eternal throne.

Isn't it not true that when it comes to conforming to a standard or norm, straightness, we think of the word righteousness and well, should we? Should we well think of it that way? And this particular king, Jesus has been anointed with the oil of gladness beyond your companions to daub, to smear, to anoint with oil.

Jesus is the Christ. He's the anointed one. That's where we get the word anointed. And you would anoint the kings with oil, wouldn't you, in the Old Testament? And here we have Jesus anointed, as we said, with the Holy Spirit for his threefold office of prophet, high priest and king at his baptism in the Jordan, which was at the time of his entrance into ministry.

Now we can debate when he was that, but we got the part right with anointed oil kings in the Old Testament. Spurgeon, we have not a savior self-appointed and unqualified, but one sent of God and divinely endowed for his work.

Our savior Jesus is also the Lord's Christ or anointed. The oil with which he is anointed is God's own oil, the holy oil. He is divinely endowed with the spirit of holiness. When was this official recognition that Jesus was king?

I think everything in the passage that we've read so far has to do, contra, weest, has to do with coronation. There's death, burial, resurrection, ascension, and then coronation. And that's where we were talking about this in Psalm 2 ,7 that was quoted earlier.

The word picture here is fascinating. You would pour oil on the heads of guests if you were at a big feast. And there's some maybe allusion to that, although it's more than that because here is we're gonna anoint a king.

Now that might've been at a feast and we could put the two together, but when there's a lot of oil flowing, you can be sure that it's the oil of gladness as Isaiah 61 talks about. Oil of gladness. Jesus, the mediator, spurgent on account of our Lord's perfect life, he is now rewarded with superior joy.

Others there are to whom grace has given a sacred fellowship with him, but by their universal consent and his own merit, he is prince among them. The gladdest of all because the cause of all their gladness.

At ancient Near East Feast, oil was poured on the heads of distinguished and very welcome guests. God himself anoints the man Christ Jesus as he sits at the heavenly feasts, anoint him as a reward for his work with higher and fuller joy than anyone else can know.

Thus the son of man is honored and rewarded for all his pains. As man, Christ claims all people as his companions, but as God, he counts it no robbery to be thought equal to God. As man, he is most truly man and only superior to man by reason of the purity of his birth, the perfection of his nature and the exaltation of his manhood by God.

As God, he is nothing less than God, though he took upon himself the nature of men. Jesus, Spurgeon concludes, is the anointed King. And though we share in the anointing, yet he is far above us. Christ is definitely greater than Christians.

Christ Is Greater Than Angels and Greater Than Christians

We are glad to have it. So, the point in all these verses is to make you say, Jesus is great. Why? Because he's in a different category than angels. He's not like angels. He's better than angels. Angels serve, angels minister, angels do what they're told, angels do the bidding of their master.

And Jesus is the one telling, Jesus is the master, Jesus is the son, and he sits at the exalted place in heaven at the right hand of the father. And the only way this can happen is if you say in your noggin, I was gonna say in your little noggin, I've got the little noggin too, Jesus is God.

It's the deity of Christ. Here we're talking Christology at the highest levels in the book of Hebrews, chapter one and chapter two. The son of God, the Lord is Jesus Christ. He has to be. Why even continue to read the book of Hebrews if Jesus isn't God?

I've said many times before on the show, and I'll say it again now, obviously, if you don't believe Jesus is God, and you're an Arian, you know, if you're the pagan, if you are, you know, a hedonist, if you're an atheist, agnostic, whatever you wanna call yourself, acting like there's no God, then, you know, I'm not necessarily talking about you per se, although it has some applicability.

But if you're close to the Bible, you're close to religion, you say you honor Jesus and worship him, but you're Jehovah's Witness, or you're an Arian of another, Arian, different stripes of JW, you're Unitarian, which is, I think, farther down the list.

I don't think they really care about Jesus. But if you're a Jehovah's Witness or Arian, I think there's some problem that you're trying to not let bubble to the top when it comes to morality in your life and what you like to do or think.

I think that's what it is. I think you understand what the Bible actually says about Jesus, and yet you cannot have this man reign over you. Now, if it's God reigning over you, fine. In your mind, that's how you think.

But when you won't have this man, and of course, Jesus is man, there's no definition of what a man's like unless you say Jesus, in every way, fully human, incarnate, but he's the God-man, and that's what you just won't let your mind get wrapped around.

How can there be the God-man? But you look at the text here, and this is exactly what the writer of Hebrews is doing. He's saying that he is great, that he's the creator, that he's the sustainer, that he's the purifier, that he's the one who's been coronated, sits at the right hand of the Father.

He's the one of whom the Father says to the angels, worship, get on your faces. If you had faces, get on your faces and worship Jesus. So the question is, do you recognize Jesus as God? Do you recognize Jesus is eternal?

Do you recognize Jesus was not created? Do you recognize that when you read the Old Testament and read the word Yahweh, you should be thinking Trinitarianly, you should be thinking of Christ, you should think nothing less than second person of the Trinity.

If second person of the Trinity is out of your definition of Yahweh, you've got the wrong God. Well, we're gonna continue in our little studies in the book of Hebrews because it's uplifting. It's not about my problems, your problems, it's all about the Lord Jesus, and he is certainly greater than your problems, and that is the point of Hebrews.

Look at how great Jesus is. Even though you're on the run, you haven't yet shed blood yet, you've lost your houses, Jesus is enough. Have faith in Jesus, look to Jesus, keep believing on Jesus, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you shall be saved.

Mike Abendroth, No Compromise Radio.

Closing Station Identification and Ministry Information

No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life transforming power of God's word through verse-by-verse exposition of the sacred text.

Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at six. We're right on route 110 in West Boylston. You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.

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