The Radiance of His Glory (Hebrews 1:3)

Kootenai Church

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Let's bow together before we begin. Our Lord, our desire is that you would be glorified in and among your people through our understanding of and our obedience to your word.

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We pray that you would grant to us the ministry and the presence of the Holy Spirit in our hearts and our minds to illuminate the truth to us and make your glory our everlasting concern.

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We pray that you would help us to see Christ in all his glory and the truth about him being such a glorious savior that he is.

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We pray that you would be magnified through this time and keep us attentive, keep us obedient to our understanding of your word.

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And we ask this for the glory of Christ our Lord in whose name we pray, amen. Well, yesterday

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I had the joy of teaching our membership class, which is an annual thing that I do. And if you're taking the membership class or if you've taken the membership class, then you know what this entails.

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It's a joy for me because I get to spend the first, almost entire first half of the class, basically talking about theology and doctrine.

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We talk about some of the grandest of theological concepts. We begin with what the

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Bible says about itself. And then we go into what the Bible says about who God is and what he has done.

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We talk about the nature of Christ, the personality of Christ and the Holy Spirit. We talk about the

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Trinity and how the Trinity functions and what it means to worship a Trinitarian God. We talk about sanctification and the perseverance of the saints and the doctrine of election and divine sovereignty and human responsibility, the nature of man and sin and fallenness and salvation and all of those glorious doctrines.

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As we go through the entire gamut from the beginning to the end of our doctrinal statement and see what scripture teaches on all these various theologies, it is my joy and delight to do so because I believe that Christians love doctrine.

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It's kind of a quirky and odd and out of fashion belief amongst churches today and in churches today.

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But I do believe that the true Christian loves true doctrine. The true Christian loves to know who their

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God is. They desire to worship God as he has revealed himself in scripture, as he has manifested himself in the word of God so that we might worship him in spirit and truth.

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And because Christians love to worship their God, they love to hear about who their God is so that they can better worship him.

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And so Christians love true doctrine. And I've never bought into the idea that we should stay away from doctrine.

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In many churches, that's the fashionable thing. Far too many church leaders and pastors and teachers think we should stay away from doctrine.

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And anything that requires more than five seconds of arduous mental effort to understand, they push that off to the side.

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And it is, I think, one of the worst kept secrets among pastors that true

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Christians love true doctrine. Many pastors think that their job is to stand in front of people and to dumb down or to make overly simplistic the truths revealed in scripture.

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They withhold sound doctrine from their people because they think that people are more concerned with the practical day -to -day issues of life.

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And it's not that doctrine does not touch on those issues, but it is that they skip over the doctrinal instruction to address those practical issues without giving the people that they preach to an understanding of how the doctrine informs those things.

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They think it's okay to skip over the nature of Christ and the persons of the Trinity and to brush by that stuff, to skip over the doctrines of election and salvation and sanctification, to get into the matters that they think really matter to their people.

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You know, finances and how to be happier and how to do a better job with your friends and to influence people.

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And, you know, all the other nonsense that occupies so much of church life. I think that that is to the detriment of the church.

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True believers love true doctrine. And many pastors believe that if you preach deep doctrines, it will scare people off.

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And that's true. It does scare people off. It scares off the goats. It scares off unbelievers. I think it scares off people who don't love the

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Lord and don't love his truth and aren't concerned with truth. And they aren't interested in any of that.

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It does scare those kinds of people off. And to that, I say, let them be scared off. It doesn't bother me at all. It shouldn't bother any of us because we believe in teaching the truth and that God uses the truth of his word.

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God calls people to himself to glorify his name by saving people. And because God is sovereign in doing that, we can preach the truth unashamedly, clearly, and boldly.

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If the authors of the New Testament had the perspective on doctrine that so many people in the church leadership today have, do you think we'd have the book of Hebrews?

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Do you think we'd have the book of Romans? Do you think we would have the book of Galatians or Ephesians?

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We wouldn't. The early New Testament authors would have just said, no, people are too stupid to understand

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Jesus being a high priest or Jesus' sacrifice. And people are too dumb, too simple to understand that Jesus is the revelation and glory of the

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Father. You can't talk to those people about the true nature of God and the relationship of the

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Father to the Son. They won't understand stuff like that. They won't appreciate stuff like that. So they just push that off to the side and we won't write about that.

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That's what our New Testament would look like. But in the book of Hebrews, in the very first sentence of the book of Hebrews, what does the author do?

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We get pushed into the deep end of the theological pool, whether you're willing and able to swim or not is another issue.

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The author just jumps in with the teaching about how Christ is the radiance of the Father's glory, the manifestation of his very nature, that in Christ we see all that is

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God. And we have to grapple with those things in Hebrews chapter one. These doctrines relating to the nature of who

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Christ is and what he has done, that he is fully man and yet he is fully God and how that works out and what that looks like.

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And the author tells us who Christ is because for the rest of the book, he's going to lay out the realities of what

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Christ has done. Jesus is able to do the things that he has done because of who he is, because he shares the very nature of God, because he is the manifestation of God in human flesh.

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Because that is true, he is able to save to the uttermost those who come to him by faith. He is able to atone for all of the sins of all who believe and to pay the perfect price for them because he is infinitely righteous.

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And because he is the infinitely righteous God in human flesh, he is able to do all of those things.

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So before we can talk about, before the author can explain to us what Christ has done, he has to first lay the groundwork of who

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Christ is. And we're still in the middle of these seven statements in the first few verses of Hebrews that describe who

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Jesus is. He's the heir of all things, the creator of all things, the radiance of God's glory, the exact representation of his nature.

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He upholds all things by the word of his power. He's made purifications for sins and he sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high.

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Those are the seven statements. And last couple of Sundays, we took a Sunday each for those first two statements.

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He's the heir of all things and the creator of all things. And today we're going to look at those next two statements.

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We're gonna double the speed with which we're moving through Hebrews, at least for today, because we took one Sunday for each of the first two statements and today we're taking two statements.

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I'm doing this not because I'm trying to hurry through the book of Hebrews, but because both of these statements really describe the same thing from two different perspectives.

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And some people suggest that when he talks about Christ being the radiance of God's glory, the exact representation of his nature, that these two statements are the same, that they're just restating the same thing.

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I don't believe that these are the same thing. I believe that these two statements are somewhat synonymous.

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They both describe similar things, but they're not exactly the same thing. So I think the best way to tackle these statements is to simply look at verse three to describe what is going on here, what the author is talking about and to work out the implications of this.

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We'll look at these two statements in verse three. He is the radiance of his glory. And I want you to note that in the

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English translation, likely verse two ends with a punctuation mark, but verse three would begin a new sentence.

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But in the original Greek, this is all one sentence. The first four verses is all one sentence. And so this is just a rapid fire, seven statements about the person of Christ.

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And verse three begins with who he is being the radiance of his glory. And that second phrase, is the exact representation of his nature.

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We're gonna look first at what it means that he is the radiance of his glory. We'll tackle that first. You have to follow the pronouns again here, because again, we're talking about two separate and distinct persons, both of whom are called

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God in this context. And so we got to follow the pronouns.

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The first pronoun is the he there is that speaking of Jesus. Jesus is the radiance of his, that is the father's glory.

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As we've seen in the context, when the author is speaking of the father as being distinct from Christ, he uses the term

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God there. So the word God there is shorthand for the father. So we're talking about two separate persons, the father and the son.

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And the father is the radiance of the son. The word radiance there is an interesting word.

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It's only used once in the New Testament. It only appears once in the New Testament. And if we had multiple appearances of that word, you could compare the reference here in Hebrews, the use of it here in Hebrews with other uses of it in the

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New Testament. And you could kind of turn to passages and see how the word is used. But we don't have that benefit here.

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We have here a word that's only used one time and it's right here in our passage. And the word typically, it's used sometimes outside of the

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New Testament. And when it is used outside of the New Testament, it has one of two meanings.

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It can refer to the reflection of something or the effulgence of something.

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The reflection of something, when it's used in that sense, it would be describing one who reflects the light of something else.

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Like for instance, Christ then would be like a mirror reflecting the sun. So as the sun would shine on the mirror, the mirror itself is not the source of the light.

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The mirror just is a reflection of the light. And the word radiance here could be used to describe that reflection that a mirror reflects a light.

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And that would be then to say that Christ himself is merely a reflection of the Father's glory, the Father being the one who shines forth the source of that light, that radiance, and that Christ simply reflects that like a mirror might reflect the light of the sun.

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But I don't think in this context, because of all the things that are said of Christ here, that that is the way in which the word is used.

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I think the word is used here in terms of the effulgence to describe something that is the effulgence of something.

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Radiance is a good translation because it describes the visible display of something, the outward shining forth of something.

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But Christ himself is not merely the reflection of something outside of him. He is, that is to say, the actual source of that light.

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He is the source of that radiance. What we see is the radiance of the

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Father's glory, but it is a radiance of the Father's glory because Christ himself is the effulgence or the source of that radiance or that glory.

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So the idea of radiance here is probably a good translation. Jesus is elsewhere described in terms of being the visible expression of the glory of God.

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2 Corinthians 4, verses three and four says, "'Even if our gospel is veiled, "'it is veiled to those who are perishing.

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"'In his case, the God of this world "'has blinded the minds of unbelievers "'so that they might not see the light "'of the gospel of the glory of Christ, "'who is the image of God.'"

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And he uses there the idea that Jesus himself is the image of God, so he is the outward glory of God himself.

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In John 1 .14, John says, "'And the word became flesh and dwelt among us, "'and we saw his glory as of the only begotten "'of the

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Father, full of grace and truth.'" John says in John 1 .18 that no one has seen God at any time. Speaking of the

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Father, no one has looked upon the Father. But then John says in John 1 .18, "'The only begotten

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God who is in the bosom of the Father, "'in close relationship with the Father, "'that

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God has revealed the Father to us. "'The only begotten Son, the one who is God, "'has revealed to us the fullness of who the

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Father is.'" No one has seen the Father, but you see in the Son a perfect manifestation, all of the glory of the

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Father. So Jesus then is, because he is God, he is the outward manifestation of God's glory.

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We see, we look upon the Father's glory when we look upon the Son. Now what is the idea of the glory of God in Scripture?

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Sometimes the term glory is used of a brightness or a whiteness or a glow. Moses saw the glory of God and his face shone with that glory.

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Most often in Scripture, the idea of glory is used to describe God's visible essence, what we see of his visible person.

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God's glory is the sum total of all of his attributes. So if it takes God's eternality, his immutability, his transcendence, his love, his grace, his compassion, his justice, his holiness, his righteousness, and we could go on and on.

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All of these massive categories of God's attributes. You put all of that together and what shines forth from the being of God is his glory.

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It is his splendor, his majesty, the radiance of his person. That being cannot help but radiate this glory and splendor.

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In the person of Christ, we see the outward visible radiation, the radiance of that glory.

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So when we look upon Christ, we see God's attributes. We see his love and his compassion and his grace and his mercy, his kindness, his goodness, his long suffering.

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We see his justice. We see God's righteousness. We see God's wisdom. We see God's knowledge. We see all of those attributes in the person of Christ.

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So that when we look upon Christ, we are looking upon the very outward manifestation of all that is

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God. That is how Scripture describes the Lord Jesus Christ. He's the shining forth of God's being, the outward visible manifestation of the being of God.

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So his nature is the same as the father's. And so thus he displays the very same glory and essence that the father did.

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That is why the father does. So that is why John can say, no one has seen God as any time, but the only begotten

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God who is in the bosom of the father, he has declared him. We have looked upon that glory. We have looked upon him, the manifestation of the son, and we have seen the glory that belongs to the father.

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Jesus himself described his own glory in John chapter 17, when he prayed to the father. And so glorify me now with the glory that I shared with you before the world was.

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Jesus could speak of a glory that he had in the presence of the father as one who shared the very nature of God.

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Now, does this mean then that Jesus, when he was on this earth, walked around and glowed like Moses glowed?

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Other than that period of time on the Mount of Transfiguration, the Lord Jesus Christ, when he walked among us, humanity, he didn't have some sort of a glowing radiance about him, not a halo, nothing that distinguished him from other men, common men.

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You would not bump into him or notice him in a crowd of people. If you just looked out over a crowd of Jewish men and Jesus of Nazareth was standing there, you wouldn't, there would have been nothing about him visibly that would have set him apart from anybody else in the crowd.

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There was nothing that attracted to him or drawn to him. There was nothing about him that displayed that glory.

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But when we see his person, we see who he is and what he has done, his works, his compassion, his grace, his character and nature, we are looking upon in the face of Christ, the very glory of God himself.

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So there's a good analogy or an illustration and we have to be careful that we don't make too much of illustrations. But it seems as if the illustration or analogy that is meant here is the relationship between the beams of the sun and the sun itself.

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And John Owen in his commentary on the book of Hebrews, which is like this much of my shelf space, it's an immense volume.

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In his commentary in the book of Hebrews describes this, the things that are similar between the relationship of the father and the son and the relationship between the beams of the sun and the sun itself.

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And we wanna make sure that we don't make too much of this because no analogy captures the essence of our

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God. I tell people this in a membership class, when you're talking about the doctrine of the Trinity, you don't give any analogies or illustrations.

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You don't say God is like an egg or God is like a pie or God is like a cube or he's like water in a vacuum tube or whatever it is.

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There's no analogy for God that does not communicate more heresy than it does truth.

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So we don't give analogies for God, for the being of God. But the relationship between the father and the son in terms of what the author of Hebrews is saying is similar to the relationship between the beams of the sun and the sun itself.

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You cannot have the sun existing and I'm using S -U -N. Now we're gonna get into the whole problem with homophones.

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So I'm gonna have to start spelling a lot of words. You cannot have the S -U -N, son, without the beams that come from it. They must, if one exists, the other must exist.

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And so it is with the father and the son. If the father exists, then the son also exists. And as long as the father has existed, the son,

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S -O -N, has existed. These two always exist. So you can't have one without the other, nor can you have the beams that come from the son without also having the son.

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They are inseparably attached to one another. They're not the same essence or the same substance. And so that's where the analogy breaks down.

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We don't say that the beams of the son are actually the son itself. They don't share the same nature, but they are connected to one another.

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Similarly, with the son and the beams, the only way that we can see the son is if we look upon or receive the beams from the son.

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S -U -N, you know what I mean? Like inside here, there's no windows looking outside, so you can't look out and you can't look upon the son.

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But when you step outside and you look up into the sky and the beams of the son hit you, then you see the son, you feel its warmth, and you see the light.

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Are you looking forward to days when that's our experience again? You feel the warmth and you see the light, and you are able to see the son because there's nothing standing between you and the son.

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And so it is in the nature of the father and the son, S -O -N, we are able to see the father and know who the father is, and behold the nature of the father because he is revealed, communicated to us, and manifested to us in the

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S -O -N, in his son. It is in the S -O -N that we see the substance of who

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God is in all of his glory and his nature, because he is the radiation, the radiance of God's very being.

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So the only way that we can see the son is if we see the beams of light. And so it is with the nature of God.

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The only way we can look upon the father is to behold that glory veiled in the person of the son, and we look upon him and we see the very nature and the character of the father himself, of God himself.

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So Christ is that radiance. This is obviously something that communicates to us the nature of the

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Lord Jesus Christ, that he is not a mere man. Can you imagine scripture saying something like this about any mere human being?

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Would never happen. The fact that he is able to display to us the full manifestation of the glory of the father tells us who he is, who this one is.

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He is none other than God himself in human flesh. That's what it means that he is the radiance of God's glory. Now look at this second phrase in verse three.

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He is the exact representation of his nature. Again, follow the pronouns he, that is Jesus, is the exact representation of his, that is the father's or God's nature.

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Now the first, here's how these two sentences are different. These two descriptions are different. The first one tells us that Jesus reveals the nature of God.

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The second statement tells us that Jesus shares the nature of God. He is able to reveal to us who

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God is because he shares the very same essence, the very same nature in all of its fullness as the father possesses and as the

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Holy Spirit possesses. That very essence of God, Jesus is the exact representation of that nature because he shares that nature.

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Now this word exact representation is, again, one of these unique words that only occurs one time in all of the

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New Testament. And it's right here in Hebrews chapter one. He is using some very unique single words here to describe the nature and the character of God.

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It is the word charakter from which we get transliterated our English word character, charakter.

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Now the danger of me saying that is that in your mind, you're taking the idea or the meaning of the word character and you're importing it into Hebrews chapter one.

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We always want to avoid doing that just because a word in Greek like dunamis sounds like dynamite doesn't mean that they are synonymous or equivalent, they're not.

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So I always have to be careful when I say this transliterates into our English word this, and then we take our

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English idea and put it back into the text. That's an exegetical fallacy. We don't want to do that. Instead we ask, what does the word charakter in Greek actually mean?

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It comes from a word that was used to describe a die, not D -Y -E, again,

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I guess our spelling stuff, this is horrible, but a die, D -I -E is like an engraving tool or a stamp.

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And so it was used to describe that, the word charakter comes from a word that was used to describe an engraving tool, a die or a stamp.

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And a charakter was the image that was created by the die or by the stamp. So you would take, for instance, it was used in minting of money.

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You would take the stamp and you would press it upon a softer metal that would receive the image of the harder stamp.

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And the image that is stamped into the metal would be the same image that was used to stamp it from the die or a stamp like you would take and press into a warm malleable wax so that the image that is created in the wax when it is warm and that stamp is pressed down onto it is identical to the stamp that makes the image.

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That was the charakter. So Graham Cockrell in his commentary says, the word was used for the impression left by a seal and for the impress reproduction and representation on a coin.

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You would look at a coin, you would look at the image and the seal of wax and you would say, that is the charakter of the die that made it.

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And what is meant by the analogy? What the intention of the analogy is to show that there is a one -to -one correspondence between that which makes the image and the image that is made.

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So that you can look at a coin in your pocket and say that is the charakter of George Washington.

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And if you were able to take that back to the mint wherever that coin is minted, you'd be able to look at the stamp to stamp that out and say, there's a one -to -one correspondence between what creates this image and the image itself.

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This image is the exact representation of the stamp that created it. Now, again, here's where the analogy breaks down because we would never say that Jesus is a created being, but we are saying that when we look upon Jesus Christ, we see in him a one -to -one correspondence, a perfect manifestation, a perfect representation, a perfect duplicate of the very nature of God himself.

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There is nothing that we can say about God, the father, in terms of his essential nature and character that we cannot also at the same time affirm of the

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Lord Jesus Christ, who is the incarnation of that God. At this point, we have to be careful in our thinking that we don't begin to affirm things of God that are true of Jesus of Nazareth.

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Here's where we have to be careful, and this is where we get into some deep doctrine. There are times in scripture where the

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Bible refers to the Lord Jesus Christ in terms that describe aspects of his humanity, because we believe that Jesus is fully

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God and fully man. So there are words that are used to describe Jesus in terms of his humanity.

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He is tired and he falls asleep in the bow of the boat. He's walking through Samaria and he is thirsty and he asked for the well for a drink.

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He has to sit down by the well, because why? John says, he was wearied from his journey. There are things that Jesus did not know, the timing of his own return, who touched him in a crowd, but he felt the power go out of him.

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Those are all phrases that describe his humanity, the limitations of his humanity. Then there are things in scripture that describe his divine nature, his infiniteness.

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He says to Nathaniel, before you even knew me, I saw you under the fig tree. I knew who you were.

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He is able to stand in front of a crowd of people like the Pharisees and say, you do not belong to me. You have not been given to me by the father.

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I know who are mine and I know who does not belong to me. And I know why you do not believe.

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He's able to say to a crowd of people, I know among you who it is that believes in me and who does not believe in me.

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So the one who is ignorant of the timing and the date of his own return, reads the hearts of men and knows their thoughts and knows the intentions of their heart.

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And what they're thinking, he is able in some situations to recite that back to people as an evidence of his omniscience.

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And he is all powerful. The very one who is wearied from his journey is able to speak in the wind and the seas obey him.

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So there are phrases that describe his humanity. There are phrases that describe his deity. What we don't want to do is look at the

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Lord Jesus Christ and say he was wearied from his journey, he was thirsty, he suffered pain and he was a bit ignorant. And so that must be exactly what the father is like.

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That the father is easily wearied, he's worn out, he can't journey very far, he has to have a drink and he's ignorant. We'd never want to do that.

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Because what we see in Jesus is the glory of that divine nature in essence veiled and limited in human flesh.

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So as the hymn writer says, it is veiled in flesh the Godhead see, hail the incarnate in flesh deity.

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Pleased as man with men to dwell Jesus our Emmanuel. And we say that Jesus is the exact representation of the nature of the father.

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What we're affirming is that in his divine essence, he is a perfect replication, a perfect expression, replication is the wrong word, a perfect expression, a perfect representation of all that God is.

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There is nothing about God that Jesus does not capture because he is that divine essence.

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And there is nothing about Jesus in his divine essence that is separate from or different from the father.

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That's how we have to be careful with our thinking in that. Now there are other passages of scripture like Philippians chapter two verse six, where it says that he existed in the form of God, the very outward expression of that inward reality, that inward nature.

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Colossians 1 .5 says he is the image of the invisible God. Second Corinthians chapter four verses three and four describe him as the image of God.

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Colossians two verse nine says in him, the fullness of deity dwells in bodily form. John 14 .9

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Jesus said to Philip, Philip, if you've seen me, you have seen the father. He's able to say to Philip, if you've looked upon me, you have seen everything that can be communicated about the nature of the father.

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Why? Because they are one in nature and one in essence. Jesus is not a lot like God, a little bit like God.

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He is the perfect representation of all that God is. In fact, Jesus is more than just a little like God.

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He is God in human flesh. So when we look upon him, we see the nature of God veiled in human flesh, united in humanity.

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And so we're able to affirm both his perfect deity as well as his perfect humanity. In a way, we are image bearers of God.

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And maybe some of you are wondering, well, how does this bear? How does this connect with us then being image bearers of God? Because it is true that even fallen men bear the image of God.

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That's what gives them value and worth because they bear God's image. There is something about humanity, even fallen humanity, though in our fallen state, that image of God is marred.

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It is blurred, but it is still there. There is an aspect of fallen humanity in our body, our soul, and our spirit that bears

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God's image. It reflects the image of God is still in man. And when we talk about Jesus being the image of God, we're not saying that he is kind of a really rough reflection of who

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God is. He's a good mirror or even a really good mirror of who God is. That's not what we're affirming.

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Nor are we saying that he is a lot like God. Like my child or my kid might be a lot like me.

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And you look at one of my kids and you say, well, you look a lot like your dad. In fact, just this last week, I was walking out of a restaurant with Shepley.

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In the morning, we'd had breakfast together and the waitress said, are all of your kids as handsome as this one is?

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And I said, so you're asking me if all of my kids look as much like me as he looks like me? And she kind of clucked her tongue and rolled her eyes and snarled at me and said, no, that's not what

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I was asking you. And she said, how many kids do you have? And I said, four. I said, this is my oldest boy.

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And then she asked how many kids I had. I told her that. And then I said, so how did you know he's my son?

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And she looked up at me and looked up at him and said, come on, look at that. I said, so you are saying that it looks a lot like me.

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See how we brought that full circle back around to me again? So even though we might affirm that my kids, my child would, and any parent could say this, look like you, sound like you, act like you, think like you, reason like you, right?

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Even have some of the very same vocal or physical quirks and twerks that we have as parents.

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We see the image of that in our kids. You would never say that any of my children are the exact representation of me, because truth is they're far different from me than they are, far more different from me than they are alike.

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They're like me in many ways. You would never say of any of my children that they are the exact representation of me, because they are their own person, their own being, their own essence.

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They don't share my essence. They don't share my essential being. When the author of Hebrews says that Jesus is the exact representation, the exact character of the

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Father, he is affirming that he shares the nature of the Father. And when we look upon him, we see all that can be seen with human eyes and human minds of the nature and the glory of God, because he is manifested and incarnated in human flesh.

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So he's the radiance of God's glory, and he is the exact representation of God's nature. This is what qualifies him to be the final and full revelation of who

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God is, chapter one, verses one and two. This is why he is able to reveal to us as the final revelation who

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God is. This is what makes him better than, greater than, clearer than the Old Testament revelation. Now, what are the implications of this?

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Let me give you a couple of them. There are implications in this of our understanding of God.

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We have to affirm here that the language that Hebrews is using cannot be used to describe anybody who is not a divine person, a divine being.

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You can never say this about any rabbi, about any teacher, about any Gandhi -like mystic figure who is in touch with the divine consciousness.

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You can never say this about any of those people. You can only say these words and these phrases about one who is fully, in all of his nature, perfectly equal to, co -eternal, co -existent with the very person, the being of God himself.

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Therefore, Jesus is the full manifestation, and we affirm the full deity of the

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Lord Jesus Christ, because this language is used of him, and this language could never be used of somebody who is not

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God. Some people will say, well, I think that the Bible's a good book, and Jesus was a good man.

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I just don't believe all that stuff about him being God. Well, that's nonsense. It doesn't make any sense at all.

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Jesus Christ is not very God in human flesh, and he was a lunatic, because he claimed to be

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God in human flesh. Or worse yet, he was a wicked deceiver, because he said he was God when he was not.

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So those are your two options. And further, the Bible's then not a good book, because various passages in the

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Old Testament tell us that the Messiah would be a divine figure, and almost every New Testament book affirms the deity of Jesus Christ.

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Therefore, the Bible's not a good book. It's not a trustworthy book. It's a wicked deception. So there's a lot at stake. If Jesus is not fully

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God in human flesh, then he is either a liar or a lunatic, and the Bible is a wicked book at best, and certainly not trustworthy.

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So you can't say, I like the Bible and I like Jesus, I just don't believe he was God. He was God, and he was

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God in human flesh. Second, some make a radical distinction between the

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Jesus of the Bible and the God of the Old Testament. So they will say something like, the God of the

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Old Testament was full of wrath and anger and malice, and he was jealous, and he wiped out civilizations and destroyed the world, and that's not

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Jesus. Jesus came to correct that Old Testament misunderstanding of God. The Old Testament gives a great picture of the essence and the nature of who

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God is. The God of the Old Testament is a God of compassion and grace and love and long -suffering and kindness and goodness.

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He is a merciful God. He is a loving God. He is a God who was planned and purposed and chosen to redeem mankind for his own glory, to show mercy to sinners.

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That's the God of the Old Testament. His mercies are new every morning. He is long -suffering and faithful. That's the God of the

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Old Testament. Jesus is the incarnation of the God of the Old Testament.

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We cannot make a radical distinction between who Christ is and our view of God, the God of the Old Testament. The Old Testament God is incarnated in the person of Christ.

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So we can say that Jesus is the God who ordered the destruction of the

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Canaanite peoples for their wickedness and their rebellion. Jesus is the God who destroyed

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Sodom and Gomorrah for their sexual perversion. The Son, the divine

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Son incarnated in Jesus Christ is the God who ordered the stoning of adulterers and Sabbath breakers and homosexuals and kidnappers.

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That is the divine person who is incarnated in Jesus Christ. So Jesus is not the

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God who's like, he's a lot like God. He's all that you really like about God and none of the things that you don't.

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And so you can have Jesus and have everything about God that's pleasing and appealing. And you don't have to have that God of the

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Old Testament who has all those characteristics that we really don't like. No, Jesus Christ is the incarnation of the

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God who is revealed in the Old Testament. Now, somebody may object and say, well, that's not the Jesus I worship. Well, that's good.

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I'm glad that you were clear about that. And we can all affirm that the Jesus you worship is not the Jesus of the Bible. Let's just get that out on the table.

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And therefore the Jesus that you worship is himself a creation of your own diseased imagination, your own idolatrous creativity, your perversions of your own heart, and you're not gonna submit to that God.

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And that Jesus isn't gonna save you on the day of wrath because he doesn't exist. Jesus is not the part of God that we really like and none of the things that we don't.

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Have you read the end of the story? Do you know what he's gonna do when he returns? When he comes back, he's going to war.

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He is going to slaughter rebels in the Valley of Armageddon. He's going to put down the nations.

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He's going to crush them with a rock. He's going to rule them with a rod of iron. He is going to cast impenitent unbelievers into everlasting flames, prepared for the devil and for his angels.

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He is going to say to those who are on his left, depart from me, I never knew you, you workers of iniquity. He is going to make all of his enemies a footstool for his feet.

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And he is coming back with eyes that are aflame with the fire of righteousness. And he is going to settle accounts.

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And it is not going to be pretty for those who do not seek refuge in the son. That is what is going to happen when he returns.

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That is the Jesus of the Bible. He came the first time not to condemn men, not to judge them, but to save them, to provide an atonement and a sacrifice for his people.

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When he comes again, it will be for wrath and not for salvation. And that is why scripture implores us to seek refuge in the son.

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So this has implications for our understanding of who Jesus is and what he is coming to do. Second, it has implications for our worship.

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A Christian, we worship a triune God. And we must be mindful of that. And when we come together as a people to worship here on a

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Sunday morning, we ought to have in our hearts and in our minds this recognition that we're not worshiping a nameless, faceless energy force in the sky that has indescript attributes and characteristics.

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And then there's Jesus over here. And he kind of tells us a little bit about God. But now I'm turning my attention to worship my own conception of who the divine being of the divine consciousness is.

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That's not Christian worship. The Christian worship is directed to and at the person of the

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Lord Jesus Christ, because in him, we see all that is God. That is what we should picture.

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Jesus, as he is revealed in scripture, that is what we should picture as the object of our worship on a

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Sunday morning. You say, that's idolatrous. Only if Jesus is not God. If he shares the divine being, and if he is

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God in human flesh, which he is, the scripture affirms that he is. And it's not idolatry, it's worship. We worship him.

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Down in verse six of chapter one, the father commands the angels to worship the son when the son comes into the world.

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The father says to the angels, when he brings the firstborn into the world, let all the angels of God worship him.

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Therefore he is able and willing and has a rightful right to the worship of his people.

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So we worship a triune God. The spirit of God works within us to worship the father as he is revealed in the son.

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We look toward the father, through the son, we see the son. That is the God that we worship. The God that is revealed in the person of Christ.

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That is the Old Testament God. That is the New Testament God. It is the one and only God. He is revealed in the son. We worship the son and thus we are worshiping the father.

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And we are also at the same time worshiping the Holy Spirit because the Holy Spirit is doing that and the Holy Spirit is God. So our worship of God in the son is a worship of all three persons of the divine

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Trinity. We are Trinitarians who worship a triune God and our worship should reflect and our understanding of God in our worship should reflect the triune nature of who

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God is. And the second implication that pertains to our worship is this, the one whom we trust and in whom we have placed our faith is none other than God himself.

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The faith that God rewards, the faith that pleases God is a faith that is placed in Jesus Christ.

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So we don't believe upon Christ for some things and the father for other things and the Holy Spirit for other things.

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In the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, we place our confidence, our faith and our trust in him.

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And that is a confidence faith and trust that is placed in the being of God himself.

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So that our faith in Christ is a faith in God. What does it mean to have faith in God? It's not to have some generic expectation of good things from a divine power somewhere.

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It is a confidence in the person of Christ, in who he is and in what he has done. And my trust in Christ is a trust in the father.

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It is a trust in the Holy Spirit. It is a trust in the triune God who has revealed himself in the son. And he is glorified in our confidence and our trust in him because we are trusting in God when we are trusting in Christ.

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It is one and the same. It's not a distinct or separate faith. It's not faith in different beings for different purposes.

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It is a faith that is in God, but it is placed in the God who is revealed in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. And that is a well -placed faith.

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Let's pray together. Our father, we thank you for the glory of your nature and the goodness of what you have revealed to us in scripture concerning Christ and concerning his work and the

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Holy Spirit. We thank you that we worship a triune God who has manifested in the person of Christ.

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Thank you that you sent the son, the divine being, the divine son down here to fully reveal to us all that is true of our

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God, the nature of our God, his love, his grace, his goodness. We thank you for this.

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And we thank you that we can worship Christ that we can trust Christ and that you have opened our eyes and our hearts to understand these things so that we might glorify our triune

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God in the person of Jesus Christ by worshiping and obeying and loving and trusting him. Thank you that you have made yourself known not only in Christ, but also in the pages of scripture.

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You've given a perfect revelation of who you are and what you want and desire of us. We pray that you would incline the hearts of your people toward that confident faith and belief in your son, that you may be honored and glorified in the church which he purchased with his own blood.