How is Jesus Christ the Revelation of God? What does it mean that Jesus is the revelation of God? This article shares some light to these questions by showing how Christ reveals God, and how this fulfills the Old Testament. The author discusses Hebrews 1:1-3.

Source: Reformed Herald, 2011. 4 pages.

The Revelation of God in Christ Reflections on Hebrews 1:1-3

The Various means of God’s Revelation🔗

God has many different tools in His toolbox. He is not limited to just one or two ways of revealing Himself. We know He reveals Himself through nature, through His creation, through human history, through our own con­sciences. But the highest revelation of Himself is in His Word.

Even here, though, we see variation. God’s verbal revelation is not all the same. God revealed Himself in ancient times through prophets, visions, and dreams. He told Moses that He would speak in visions and riddles to most of the prophets. But to Moses He would speak face to face, clearly, in a way that He wouldn’t again until the great prophet that God would raise up had come. And that great prophet is Jesus.

Jesus certainly is the pinnacle of God’s revelation to His people. But this does not mean that we should ignore all the other revelation that God has given us and read only the New Testament. The book of Hebrews, making the very point that Jesus is the preeminent revelation of God, quotes the Old Testament con­stantly. The New Testament ties all of the Old Testament together, provides its full meaning and proper perspective, and enables us to go back to the Old Testament and read it rightly.

But we will be greatly aided in our quest to understand the Old Testament when we realize that God has revealed Himself in different ways. Stories like those found in Genesis or 1 Samuel will be read a certain way; wisdom literature such as Ecclesiastes or Proverbs, how­ever, is different. We read a book like Jeremiah one way and a book like the Psalms another way. They’re all the word of God, and they’re all inspired and au­thoritative. But God reveals Himself in various ways, and we have to learn to be sensitive to that, to read the different books of the Bible in the way that they present themselves without trying to force them into particular molds. Many of the so-called contradictions of the Bible can be resolved and understood if we understand the different ways in which God presents Himself to us in His Word.

The linchpin of God’s Message🔗

But Jesus really is the linchpin, the pinnacle, the completion of all of it. All of Scripture progresses to Christ, but there is no progression after Christ. There is nowhere else to go. And that is what Hebrews tells us in this passage.

He is the “brightness of His glory,” for starters, which is really a remarkable statement. Jesus was a man, a human being who was basically indistinguish­able from other people. The Sanhedrin needed Judas to pick Him out of a crowd for them; he was not a distinctive looking person. And yet when one had eyes to see, one saw God walking among men. Jesus told Philip, “He that has seen Me has seen the Father.” And when the disciples or some other person saw a glimpse of the glory and majesty that was in Christ, we read that they were afraid and worshiped Him (as when they saw Jesus walking on the water or stilling the storm).

God often displayed His glory in the Old Testament. He showed Himself to Moses as a burning bush and as a pil­lar of cloud and fire in the desert. He showed Himself as a man glowing like amber and burning fire to Isaiah and Ezekiel. But when God was ready to demonstrate His glory in a way that was greater than any other, He sent His Son to become a man, a person, just like any of us. The glory of God in Jesus was con­cealed to a certain degree, and for a time. His glory was not fully revealed until af­ter His earthly ministry. But it was what He did during His earthly ministry that was truly glorious, that paved the way for the future glory and victory. His work of preaching the truth, of purging us from our sins, of gaining the victory over sin and death, of revealing God’s mercy and grace to His people — these are the great glories of Jesus’ earthly ministry. They demonstrate God to us in a way not revealed anywhere else. God’s great­est glory is not seen with the eye of the natural man, but by faith.

Further, Jesus is the “express image of His person.” Some translations like the New American Standard have that translated “exact representation of His person,” which is also good. Jesus is a perfect revelation to us of God. Another remarkable truth! Jesus Himself, the man, is a better revelation of God than those very dramatic visions and dreams that Ezekiel, Daniel, or Isaiah saw. That unassuming, unremarkable man was a clearer message of who God truly is than the pillars of cloud and fire, or the burning hand writing on tables of stone.

This is the great reason why we don’t use pictures of Christ at all — not be­cause we downplay the incarnation or think it unimportant. On the contrary, it is of the highest importance. In Jesus was the fullness of the Godhead bodily. His followers worshiped Him in the body, in His flesh, kissing His feet and bowing down before Him, and He ac­cepted that worship. His incarnation was the perfect revelation of God, the way God chose to give the perfect mes­sage to the world of who He is. When we see Him in eternity, we will worship Him in His flesh, in His body.

But we don’t know what He looked like. The Bible withholds that informa­tion from us. Paul tells us in 2 Corin­thians that “we know Him no more after the flesh.” And so we cannot worship Him in the flesh. If I had a picture that someone made, and I said that it was a picture of Jesus, I would have to wor­ship that picture. It is the only proper re­sponse to Jesus, who was and is God in the flesh. But I wouldn’t be worshiping Jesus; I’d be worshiping an artist’s con­ception, based on his own imagination, of what Jesus is like. It’s not that we are not to worship Christ in the body — on the contrary, we must worship Christ in the body. What we must not do is worship something that somebody just made up.

So for now, we worship Him in spirit, in our hearts, bending our worship to the invisible truths of who He is, and longing for the day when we will see Him with our eyes and bow down be­fore Him, the express image, the exact representation, of God Almighty.

The Completion of God’s Purposes🔗

Further we see that Jesus’ ministry and work achieve the completion of God’s purposes.

Of course, He was there from the be­ginning. Echoing statements from John and Paul, Hebrews says that God made the worlds through, or by means of, the Son. The creation happened by the spo­ken word of God, and the second Per­son of the Trinity is the Word of God. The word translated “worlds” is aioonas, meaning the cosmos, the universe, ev­erything there is. Then in verse 3 of Hebrews 1, the writer says that all things are upheld by His power. Therefore we see the totality of this creative force­ not just putting everything in place, as if that wasn’t enough, but by His creative power bringing into existence all that was, is, and will ever be. The whole of the creation throughout its history is put in place by God, through Jesus. Je­sus is the mediator — the bridge of God’s power to the creation, in all aspects of that power.

We also read that He is the heir of all things. God has made Christ the heir of everything that God has, which is of course everything. But wait, you may say. Isn’t Christ God? If so, doesn’t He already have everything? God is equal in glory and majesty in each of His three Persons. No Person of the Trinity can change or gain in power, possessions, or authority, or else that Person would not be immutable God.

But Hebrews here speaks of His hu­man ministry, His human Messiahship. Jesus then becomes the means by which God accomplishes the original creation mandate, that man should have dominion over all things. In Christ, that is accomplished. In Christ, the perfect man, humanity’s kingship over creation is restored. And as He is the firstborn of many brethren, the head of the body of the church of God’s people, that do­minion over creation is restored to all of us, His people, in Him. Because He has been granted dominion by God over all things, we all have dominion over all things, in Him.

This leads us, of course, to His work as a savior, that He purged our sins away (v 3). He has cleansed us and res­urrected us and begun in us a new work of creation which will be restored in our salvation. It is of course only this work of salvation that makes our participa­tion in Jesus’ ministry possible. Jesus, by Himself, accomplishes the completion of God’s purposes in creation. But by redeeming us from our sins He brings us into these plans and purposes and grants us to share in that redemption and dominion.

So we truly see Jesus’ ministry as the capstone to everything that God desires to accomplish in creation. He is the in­strument of the creation’s existence in the first place and becomes the instrument by which that creation is restored to its purpose. We human beings, as the best and highest part of that creation, share in that redemption by faith in Je­sus Christ, and are likewise restored to our true purpose.           

The introduction to Hebrews ends with a statement that shows the finality, the completeness, of Jesus’ work. He sits down at the right hand of God, in a place of honor and privilege, with the on-high majesty. He is by that act declared to be in a position of unparalleled majesty and glory Himself, and to have finished the great work to which He was called. It is there that we have access to Him, there that He is our mediator, advocating for us with the Father, continuing to apply all of the benefits of His great saving work, in real time, to His people.

All of this in Christ! It is no wonder then, that the writer of Hebrews calls our attention to Him. For all the diverse ways that God has, in His wisdom, re­vealed Himself to us, He completes them all, fulfills them all, perfects them all in Christ. The Old Testament proph­ets themselves had an imperfect revela­tion, not that it was in error, but it was incomplete. But with Christ’s coming, far from becoming obsolete and irrel­evant, those Old Testament revelations become perfected and glorified. Moses, David, Daniel, and the rest become far greater than they ever were, when they are seen in Christ. And Paul, Peter, John, and the rest build on the solid foundation of the Old Testament, illuminating and extending it as they explain and en­lighten with the light of Christ. And all of us, as we read the Old and the New together, do so in the great and glorious light of Christ, the light of the world.

It is no accident that Christ Himself did not personally write a single sen­tence of the Bible. If He had, idolatrous man might have selected just that part of the Bible and discarded the rest. Or in our arrogance we might say that we learn Christ as the beginning, and then add to Him the revelations of Peter, Luke, Hosea or Jeremiah. But when we see that He is truly the author of the entire Bible, all of God’s revelation, de­spite never having put pen to paper, how much greater is that glory! How much higher and deeper and fuller becomes our understanding and appreciation for all of Scripture!

The book of Hebrews is a call to rec­ognize the completeness of our salvation in Christ, to realize the superiority of Christ over everything else. The writer is particularly focused on how Christ is the fulfillment of everything the Old Testament pointed to, because his par­ticular audience is struggling with this issue. They are former Jews who are thinking that perhaps they made a mistake converting. Some of them appear to be drifting back into Judaism. And the writer is showing them that it is truly going backwards to return to Judaism, since everything — the sacrifices, the Sabbaths, the whole thing — all point to Christ. In order to make his points effectively, the writer teaches us many wonderful truths about the proper way to view the Old Testament administra­tion and about the relationship between the covenants of God.

But ultimately, whether the believer is tempted with a return to the Old law as in Hebrews, or with a flirtation with pagan mysticism as in 1 Corinthians, or with wealth and status as in James, or with immorality and societal acceptance as in 1 Peter, the answer is always the same. Look to Christ. If I have Christ, and I think I need something else, then I do not have Christ as I ought. All is in Him. All of God’s revelation throughout history finds its completion and its full meaning in Him. No knowledge is true knowledge unless it is combined with the knowledge of Christ. No experience is true experience until it is combined with the experience of Christ. No love is real love unless it is combined with the love of Christ.

Progress for the believer is always learning to embrace Christ more fully, more truly, more sincerely. We con­tinue to plumb the depths of that deep, deep well, learning to apply the truths of Christ more fully to our marriages, to our work, to our friendships, to our physical health, to every part of our lives.

Jesus is the brightness of His glory, the express image of His person. Christ is the fullest revelation of God to man that ever was or ever will be. Man was created to glorify God, to know God, and to enjoy God forever. And there is no better way, really no other way at all, for us to accomplish this purpose than to know Christ.

One day we will again see Him in the flesh, like the disciples did. One day that knowledge will be immediate — we will stand before Him and worship Him on His throne. But for now, we have the Scriptures, combined with the teaching power of the Spirit of God. And, there­fore, let us diligently apply ourselves to learning, and pray for faith to believe, all that God has to tell us about His Son in His Holy Word.

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