God’s Message in the Last Days
One afternoon, on a family walk, my little daughter asked out of the blue, “Papa, how come God don’t talk?”
She heard us talk to God all the time. When something was wrong, we’d pray. Before our meals, we’d pray. Before bed, we’d pray. We talked to God, and God did a lot of listening. But he didn’t seem to have too much to say.
Maybe you’ve wondered that, too. In the Bible, God talks to Adam, Abraham, Isaac, and Moses. He speaks through the prophets. Long ago, God talked to people. Now, it seems, he’s stopped speaking.
But that’s not what the author of Hebrews says. He writes, “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son” (Heb. 1:1–2).
Does God speak to us today? Yes, he speaks through Jesus.
How Does God Speak through His Son?
God speaks through Jesus, but the writer doesn’t explain this the way we might expect. He doesn’t focus on what Jesus said—at least, not what he says in human language. He focuses instead on who Jesus is.
So, who is Jesus?
First, he’s “the heir of all things” (Heb. 1:2). Everything God made belongs to Jesus. He inherits it all from his Father. This alludes to Psalm 2:7–8: “The LORD said to me, ‘You are my Son; today I have begotten you. Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession.”
Second, Jesus is the creator. The apostle Paul says regarding Jesus, “All things were created through him and for him” (Col. 1:16). The writer of Hebrews says something similar: Jesus is the one “through whom also (God) created the world” (Heb. 1:2). How was the world created? Through God’s speech: “And God said, ‘Let there be light’ and there was light” (Gen. 1:3).
Even in the beginning, the Son of God was the Word of God.
Third, Jesus holds the universe together: “He upholds the universe by the word of his power” (Heb. 1:3). The word uphold here is the Greek word phero. It means “to carry from one place to another.”[1] Jesus, by his word, carries along the course of history, moving it toward his desired end. This is called divine providence.
If Jesus’s word carries along everything in the universe, then there’s a lot of divine speech going on around us. Everything—the birth of a deer, the falling of a sparrow, the circumstances of our lives—is carried along by Jesus’s word.
So, who is the Son? He’s the creator of all things and the one who holds that creation together. In other words, he’s God. And now, “in these last days,” he inherits all that he created and sustains.
God’s Speech in Human Flesh
Jesus is equal in power and glory with God the Father: “He is the radiance of the glory of God, and the exact imprint of his nature” (Heb. 1:3). This is where we get the language in the Nicene Creed that Jesus is “God of God, and Light of Light.” Jesus is the radiance of the Father’s glory. In the same way that you can’t have a fire without light, you can’t have the Father without the Son—they’ve always existed together.
God was speaking through the prophets, “at many times and in many ways,” but his revelation of himself through the prophets in the Old Testament was incomplete. It was like a blurry picture that you could mostly make out, but left a lot to be desired. When Jesus came, we had more: “the exact imprint of his nature” (Heb. 1:3).
This was better than God’s Word in high definition; it was God’s Word in human flesh.
The Son’s Inheritance—and Ours
The author of Hebrews begins his exhortation to Christians who, as we’ll see, are struggling and ready to throw in the towel by pointing them to Jesus. He says, “Look at him—he made all things, he sustains all things, he’s going to inherit all things. And yet he’s concerned for you.”
He himself made purification for your sins. He isn’t a God who speaks from afar—he gets right up close to us, in our very nature, and he makes purification for sins. Then he sits, showing that his work is finished. There’s no more cleansing left to do.
This is the gospel, and it’s why the gospel is good news—the best and final news. It’s not a list of things for you to do so that God will accept you. It’s the Son of God saying to you: “I have done it all. I have won for you the inheritance. Come and join my family.”
This is what God says to you through his Son.
This is an excerpt from our brand new Bible study on Hebrews. Learn more here.
[1] This definition comes from BDAG, a Greek-English lexicon of the New Testament, p. 1051.
