God Had Spoken By His Son

What this episode covers

Athanasius: Constantine Augustus and his sons wrote letters to St. Anthony seeking divine wisdom. Anthony told his disciples: “Do not be astonished if an emperor writes to us, for he is a man. Wonder rather that God wrote the law for man and has spoken to us through his own Son.” The first coming of Jesus was the climax of redemptive history and his second coming marks its culmination. This hybrid sermon-letter opens with a comparison between Christ and the prophets. Hebrews skips the preliminaries of the letter to highlight the main point: God has spoken by His Son! • Author: Holy Spirit through someone closely acquainted with apostolic ministry. • Audience: Jewish Christians in Rome living under increasingly intense persecution. God repeatedly sent prophets who were rejected by a rebellious community. Hebrews 11 highlights their astonishing perseverance and faith. The result of this divine revelation, to every generation, was a remnant of believers. Natural man is incapable of rightly receiving God’s word regardless of the messenger. We would expect this audience of Jewish believers to be under tremendous familial pressure to return to the practices of the old covenant. But, according to Hebrews, any Jew who rejects the Christian faith never rightly understood the Jewish faith. In the midst of heightened temptation to compromise, the author of Hebrews is calling his readers to a deeper and lasting response of faith. Read Heb 1:1-4. “Last days” is an idiomatic expression found in several OT passages in the LXX (Num 24:14; Jer 23:20; 49:39; Dan 10:14). This phrase had become an expression of eschatological anticipation. “Last days” refer to this new covenant age (Christ’s resurrection > return 1 Cor 10:11; Gal 4:4; Eph 1:10; Heb 9:26). Dispensationalists have the tendency to read this language as a reference solely to a short period of time just prior to the Christ’s return. However, John MacArthur acknowledges that is not what the author of Hebrews is referring to here. Rather, he writes, “In the last days promises would stop and fulfillments begin. The Old Testament age of promise ended when Jesus arrived.” I would argue that the normal scriptural usage of the phrase “the last days” speaks to the gospel age. Christ’s first coming inaugurated the age, and his second coming concludes it. OT prophesies about the coming Messiah were partially fulfilled in Christ’s earthly life, death, and resurrection. They will culminate upon his return. This leads to a challenge for those on the opposite end of the eschatological spectrum. John Owen held to a common view of partial-preterism, which essentially sees the vast majority of eschatological references in both the Old and New Testaments as finding their fulfillment in AD 70 (praeter = past in Latin). They still acknowledge that Christ’s return and the resurrection of the dead as future events, but almost everything else has already taken place. Instead of reserving the bulk of the end times events for a period just prior to Christ’s Return, they see those same events as having already taken place just prior to the destruction of the Jewish temple (Mt 24:1-34). According to Owen, and most partial-preterists, “these last days” specifically refer to the end of the Judaic church and state. He says the same regarding terms found elsewhere “the latter days,” or “the last hour” (2 Pt 3:3; 1 Jn 2:18; Jude 18). Owen actually understands the last days of this age to be identical to the New Heaven and New Earth (which is apparent from his interpretation of 2 Pt 3:13). “On this foundation I affirm, that the heavens and earth intended in this prophecy of Peter, the coming of the Lord, the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men, mentioned in the destruction of that heaven and earth, do all of them relate, not to the last and final judgment of the world, but to that utter desolation and destruction that was to be made of the Judaical church

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