Thank you, you may be seated.
If you have your Bibles, we're in Hebrews chapter one. I think you're already there.
Esop,
the
ancient storyteller told this fable. Who here has heard of Esop's fables? Yeah.
He told this fable
at least by tradition it says this.
Once upon a time a
donkey found a lion's skin.
He tried it on,
strutted around and frightened many animals.
Soon a fox came along and the donkey tried to scare him too,
but the fox hearing the donkey's voice said, if you want to terrify me, you'll have to disguise your prey.
You know what a prey is, right?
He aww.
Esop's moral clothes made the skies a fool, but his words give him away.
You know, we live in a culture where a lot of people are saying a lot of things. If you
like, if you live in a time where you like to hear people talk, you live in a great time in human history.
We have talk radio, we have podcasts,
we have YouTube,
we have
24-hour news.
If you like to hear people talk, you have a wide selection to hear from. And in some ways,
that's an incredibly good thing. There are people out there that are teaching about any number of disciplines and expertise
they have. Anybody ever learn how to fix something on YouTube?
If you haven't,
literally you can be as specific as you want to be. Probably someone has. We had a Toyota Sienna van, a
2004 Sienna van, and the handles kept going off, and I didn't know how to replace the handle, although I thought
it would be way too much to do at the dealership, and so I typed in
replace the
handle on a 2004 van, and then I showed it to Megan and she went and fixed it.
You can find out a lot on YouTube, amen. Praise the Lord for handy wives, amen.
You can find all kinds of things out. You can really get an education
through the spoken word. If you don't even like to read, you can learn a lot from just the spoken word, and that's an amazing thing.
Through books and podcasts, all kinds of online and offline media,
we can learn so much and integrate so much into our lives. For the first time in human history,
the spoken word is as
distributable as the
written word has been.
Think about that. It's pretty amazing.
But along with that reality has come something else.
There's a real problem that has always been a problem that I believe has been made more evident and it's been exacerbated now.
That problem is the problem of trustworthiness.
Who do you trust? You know not everything on the internet is true.
Abraham Lincoln once said, not everything on the internet is true.
Not everything on television is true.
In our culture, there's a shared,
there's a shrinking amount of shared values, and as a result there are shrinking amounts of shared facts.
Truth and trust, as the bible says, really is dying in the streets, and as a result so is the concept of authority.
Respect for institutions and authority are at a low point in our country in my opinion.
It's hard to know who can be trusted.
Have you guys felt that?
Who do you trust?
There was a time in our country where the news cycles were limited to newspapers being distributed in the morning and in the evening.
And then you had the evening news from two or three channels at night that had about an hour worth of news.
And there was an attempt at such a thing called journalism to only publish facts when there are verified sources.
But now we have 24 hour news cycles that are often driven by money.
We have a social media as a place where so many people get their news and the idea of so many people online becoming journalists themselves.
Everybody's got a phone in their pocket and they editorialize on all kinds of things.
Everyone can have a platform and everybody can make claims.
And as a result it's difficult to know who to trust.
It's in this cultural context that we come today to begin our study in the book of Hebrews.
I believe we're going to be in it for some time and I'm super excited about it.
Because God's word is so, this book of the Bible is so rich and we're going to try to mine everything we can out of its pages.
And it starts out, this book of Hebrews starts out with this incredible claim.
It starts out with verses one through four which are one sentence in the Greek.
Our translation, the King James translation that we are reading from today puts it in one sentence too.
Some translations put it in several sentences.
But in the original language it starts, it's one sentence.
So it's just, he starts out right from the gate just putting all kinds of truth,
compacting it into one sentence and I'm only going to get to preach about half the sentence today.
And it's all kind of centered around basically this clause,
God spake and God hath spoken.
Can you say that with me? God spake, God hath spoken.
What an incredible truth.
There is a God.
And this God has revealed himself in the past and this God has revealed himself to us.
It's an important claim to know that God has spoken.
Now human beings, we live in a world that's limited to time, space and matter.
Okay?
Don't lose me on this.
I'm going to get kind of heady but I want you to think about this.
We experience everything naturally.
We exist inside of time and space and matter.
We experience time.
We can only go to the past in our memories and we can only go to the future in our hopes and dreams
and sometimes we go to the future in our worries.
Anybody ever do that?
We all only truly experience the present.
We exist as matter and live in time and space and I'm not saying there's not something spiritual to us.
I believe there absolutely is something spiritual to us.
Everybody knows it.
The Bible says God has put eternity in our hearts.
He has.
And so we know that there's something that exists outside of time, space and matter.
We know that.
We feel that.
But we exist inside that box.
Just imagine a box.
We live in this box of time and space and matter.
And inside the box you could label that natural.
This is the natural box.
Now, we cannot get outside of that natural box.
With the evidence that's being observed now that shows that the universe is expanding.
Many scientists are confirming, although many of them confirming reluctantly,
that the universe, because it's expanding,
it makes you think that if it's expanded, then if you go back in time,
the universe must have had a beginning.
If you, for our universe to exist, time, space and matter had to begin all at once.
Okay, am I going too fast?
Time can't exist outside of space and matter.
Matter can't exist outside of space.
Are you with me?
That's what's going on.
For there to be time, space and matter, something must have caused these things to come to be.
But whatever created time and space and matter must be timeless,
spaceless, and immaterial.
Don't lose me.
Whatever created wood, whatever brought wood into existence,
couldn't itself be made out of wood.
Okay?
So whatever created time, space and matter had to be timeless,
spaceless, and immaterial.
It also must be wise, powerful, personal, and bigger than what was created.
Do you know what the Bible reveals about the beginning of time, space, and matter at once?
It does.
It reveals the beginning of time and space and matter at once by a timeless,
spaceless, immaterial, powerful, personal, and all wise pre-existent being.
It does this in the first verse of the first chapter, in the beginning time.
God created the heavens, space, and the earth matter.
Amen.
Am I blowing anybody's mind this morning?
It's pretty cool.
So we as created beings are bound to the natural world that God created.
We are in this natural box with no way to get out of it.
We cannot get to the eternal on our own in this life.
Religion is an attempt to get outside of the box, to get to the supernatural, to get to the eternal.
That's what religion attempts to do.
Mankind has always been trying to get to God and to get there on His and His way.
You guys remember the Tower of Babel?
Genesis 11, one says,
And the whole earth was of one language and of one speech.
And it came to pass as they journeyed from the east, and they found a plane in the land of Shinar,
and they dwelt there, and they said one to another,
Go to, let us make brick and burn them thoroughly, that they had brick for stone and slime for mortar.
And they said, Go to, let us build a city and a tower whose top may reach under the heaven,
and let us make us a nameless we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
What were they trying to do?
They're trying to get to God.
They're trying to escape that natural box to get to heaven in some kind of human effort,
and the truth is, we can't get to God, not on our own.
For mankind to connect with God, a supernatural, eternal being that exists outside of time, space, and matter,
He had to come to us.
We cannot get to Him on our own.
And what I want you to know today is that right here in the first two verses,
God tells us that that's exactly what He did.
God has gotten to us.
God communicating to us, God commuting Himself to us is called Revelation.
God has revealed Himself to us in our time and in our space.
Now, Hebrews begins and reads in large part like a sermon,
and it makes this claim so crystal clear to us.
God has revealed Himself to us.
God hath spoken.
We know that God did reveal Himself to us through creation, right?
Psalm 191 says, the heavens declare the glory of God and the earth showeth His handiwork.
The firmament showeth His handiwork.
The heavens are declaring, there is a God.
There's a God.
Why is there something rather than nothing?
There's a God.
Paul makes this argument that the created world declares God's existence in Romans chapter 1,
where it says in verse 20, for the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen
being understood by the things that are made, even as eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.
When you come into the world and you look around and you see the order that's there,
when you see the water cycle, the sun warming us, the moon controlling the tides,
all the things we could talk about, somebody, listen, anybody have kids?
Who knows that kids teach us that stuff doesn't stay clean on its own?
We're not going from order to disorder, right?
That's what we're doing, we're going from order to disorder, not disorder to order.
You don't blow up and make a F-150.
You don't blow something up and make a Ford F-150, right?
When stuff blows up it, we call that entropy, right?
It goes from organized.
If there is organization, if there is design, there must be a designer.
If there's painting, there must be a painter.
We know that.
And so when we see design in the world, we realize there must be a designer.
That's all Paul's saying.
We understand that from the things that are made that there is a God.
We know that God's existence has been made known by the natural world.
He has written His law on our hearts so that we know innocence right from wrong by our conscience.
But God did not stop His revealing there.
Aren't you glad for that?
Paul is out the case in Romans chapter 1 that just that amount of revelation, the created world and the conscience,
His law written on our hearts is enough to condemn us.
Because we don't know, we don't do even the things that we know we ought to do.
That's His argument, but I'm not here to preach Romans, I'm here to preach Hebrews.
I want you to know not only did God reveal Himself naturally, God has revealed Himself supernaturally.
He has revealed Himself authoritatively.
And I want you to see something unique about this supernatural revelation that is made clear in the first two verses of Hebrews chapter 1.
Here's the sermon in a sentence.
It's essential that we understand how God has chosen to reveal Himself to mankind.
He has supernaturally revealed Himself in these two ways that we're going to read about today.
Hebrews 1, chapter 1, let's read it again. Here's what it says.
God, who at sundry times and in diverse manners, spake in time's past unto us by the prophets, will stop there.
Let me say this. The first way God revealed Himself to us is God's partial word.
Speaking of the Old Testament.
The first way that God revealed Himself is ascribed here in verse 1.
In both of the ways that God has revealed Himself to mankind supernaturally, we're going to see four aspects of this supernatural revelation.
This part is not in your bulletin notes, you'll have to take it extra.
In both the first point, God's partial word, and then the second point that I will yet reveal, there are four aspects that He talks about.
He talks about the era.
If you're writing it down, I'll give it to you slowly.
The era, the recipients, the agents, and the means.
Here talking about God's partial word, let's talk about the era.
He says here, God who at sundry's times and in diverse manners, spake, here's what it says, in times past.
Do you see it? In times past.
The main thought here, like I've said, is God spake, God hath spoken.
In times past, supernaturally, God spake.
Spake here is in the past tense.
If you weren't clear about it, it says in times past.
The writing of the book of Hebrews happens after the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus as we shall see.
So it's pretty clear that He is speaking of the Old Testament itself.
You'll clearly see that not only in this era of God's partial word, you'll also see it in the recipients of God's partial word.
He says, He spoke in times past unto who?
Under the fathers.
The fathers here speaks to the patriarchs of the Jewish nation.
God spoke to Moses and Abraham and David and Solomon and Isaiah and others.
He spoke to the nation of Israel and even at times spoke to other nations in the Old Testament.
He spake in times past unto the fathers.
This would include everybody who was under the Old Covenant and anyone else that were included in the reach of the revelation that God gave to the Jewish people.
Folks, the Old Testament is the word of God.
It is.
There are some that would say we ought to unhitch ourselves from the Old Testament.
Listen, you can't believe, write doctrine if you don't understand the Old Testament.
If you don't get anything from Hebrews, you're going to get that.
The study in Hebrews is as much a study in Leviticus as it is in Hebrews.
So this is a big deal.
We're going to have a lot of fun doing this.
At least I will.
Will you stay awake and come with me?
It'll be fun.
So the era of God's partial word is in times past and who did he give this to?
He gave it unto the fathers.
Now we're going to talk about this next week, but Hebrews is written largely to a Jewish believing audience.
Okay?
And so when he says unto the fathers, he's referring to those who got God's revelation in times past specifically the Jews.
He's talking to Jews about the Jews that received God's Old Testament revelation.
Who were the agents of God's partial word?
Well, it says here he's spaking times past under the fathers.
What does it say?
By the prophets.
When the Bible uses the word prophets here, he's speaking of all those that spoke on his behalf in the Old Testament.
And only God did God speak to Moses, Abraham, David, Solomon, Isaiah, and many, many more.
He gave them messages to give to the fathers.
God used human means.
We'll talk about this later, but he used often human means to declare his revealed word to those in times past.
God revealed himself by these men and they spoke for him to the people.
You know what the main message of the prophets was?
Thus saith the Lord.
But look at the means.
Here's the last one.
We've talked about the era.
We've talked about the agents.
We've talked about the recipients.
Now let's talk about the means.
This Hebrew letter starts off with two words in the Greek.
I'll tell you them in a second.
Here we come to this idea for which I said the Old Testament is God's partial word.
Here he says at sundry times and in diverse manners.
There are two words here that rhyme in the Greek language, Polymeros and Polytropos.
And that's literally the first two words of the book of Hebrews.
If you go look in the Greek, it starts out.
Polymeros, Kai, Polytropos.
Polymeros, Polytropos.
What is he saying?
The prefix poly, we know even in our language, means many or diverse, right?
If you're polytheistic, you follow many gods, right?
So poly means polytheistic means many.
Poly means many.
Theistic means gods, many gods.
Here you have here Polymeros, Paulos and Meros.
Poly means many and Meros means divisions or portions.
You have also Polytropos, Paulos and Tropos.
Tropos is translated in the Scripture as ways or manners or means.
It literally is translated in other places.
That smaller word, Polytropos is two words.
Tropos literally means ways or manners or means.
The idea here is that God spoke in fragmented, incomplete and varied ways and portions.
It was partial.
It was fragmented.
It was scattered and it was diverse.
Now that isn't to say, please don't hear me say that God wasn't doing it on purpose.
And also don't hear me say that it wasn't true.
It was true.
There are many portions in the Old Testament, aren't there?
Anybody know how many books there are in the Old Testament?
39.
You get a bend book. Very good.
39 portions in the least.
God chose to reveal himself progressively over that time.
And there are various means in which God revealed himself to the fathers by the prophets.
Many believe that the first written Scripture was the book of Job.
That contains narrative and poetry.
You have the Torah, the Pentateuch.
In it you find historical narrative.
You find law, right?
That was written by Moses.
You have in the Old Testament all kinds of literature.
There's narrative and law and wisdom and wisdom literature and poetry and prophecy and apocalyptic literature.
So you have God revealing himself progressively.
A little bit here, then a little more there, then a little more here, then a little more there.
And you have him doing it in a bunch of different ways.
You have God revealing himself through dreams and visions.
I mean, you guys remember a story in the Bible of God coming to people and dreams and visions.
You have God speaking audibly to men.
You have God revealing himself in all kinds of different ways.
We also know that God moved everything that is recorded in the Scripture through the Holy Spirit moving men.
Second Peter chapter 1 verse 20 says this,
knowing this first that no prophecy of the Scripture is of any private interpretation.
For the prophecy came not in the old time by the will of man,
but holy men of God were moved as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.
You know what that means?
God wasn't up in heaven looking at what Moses happened to be writing down and going,
you know what, that's good.
I think I'll include that in my word.
These men didn't come and put this on their own.
They spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.
You know what that means?
This right here is supernatural.
If you let it, it'll change your life.
God hath spoken.
And in times past, he did it under the fathers by the prophets.
Every word that they uttered out had their source in God, the Holy Spirit.
God chose the very words that he breathed out, the anus stops.
And in the times past, he did this in many portions and in many manners.
So in the time of the Old Testament before Christ, God revealed himself progressively.
But here we, what I say, this is so important you get.
The Old Testament does not progress from less true to more true.
It's all true.
It does not progress from less true to more true.
It does not progress from God's kind of God's word to fully God's word.
No, it's all God's word.
It's all true.
It does not progress in truthfulness.
It progresses in completeness.
You see the Old Testament and God's revelation of himself.
It is God's revelation of himself, but it was incomplete.
There are types.
There are shadows.
It's pointing to something that's coming.
There are prophecies, some that are, have not been fulfilled, many that have been.
There are pointing to something that was yet to be.
And so the writer of Hebrews starts out with a bang.
He said, God who at sundry times and in diverse manners,
spake in times, pass unto the fathers by the prophets.
Here's the cool part.
Hath in these last days spoken unto us by his son, by his son, whom he at the point of error of all things,
by whom he also made the words.
World.
So we go back to the same thing.
Era, recipients, agents and means.
Do you see it in the verse?
The era of God's final, God's final word.
Here's the second way that God reveals number two, God's final word.
God's partial word is the Old Testament.
God's final word is the person of Jesus Christ.
That's amazing.
What was the era of God's final word?
He says, hath in these last days.
The era in verse one, speaking of the Old Testament, is in times past.
The era here is in these last days.
Well, there's a couple ways to interpret this phrase.
Did it happen in recent history to the writing of this book of Hebrews?
Of course it did.
This book of Hebrews clearly was written after Jesus' death, burial and resurrection.
So these last days could mean he's talking about, it just happened.
Which is amazing.
Could you imagine living back then?
I think it would have been incredible to be a part of the early church.
Short of all of the killing of Christians, it was awesome to be able to...
Who thinks it would have been cool to be able to see Jesus?
To experience his ministry?
To hear and preach and teach?
That would have been amazing.
And I think we'll have an opportunity for that one day.
I believe that with all my heart.
I believe though, here, that the phrase, these last days, sparked the interest of the Jewish audience to which the book is addressed.
They would have understood that this word of these last days,
that was a common phraseology talking about the future coming of the Messiah.
They would have understood the Messianic tone to what he's saying when he talks about these last days.
And the truth of the matter is folks, we live in the last days.
We do.
Since the coming of Jesus, even till now, these are the last days.
Jesus could come back at any time.
So they would have understood it as talking about the last days that we are now currently in.
That's how the woman of the well saw it.
Remember what she said to Jesus before she even understood him to be the Messiah?
John 4.23 says, she asked Jesus, some say that Jerusalem ought to be the place we worship.
Some say she was a Samaritan.
My forefathers say on this mountain is where we ought to worship.
And Jesus said, the hour cometh, and now is when the true worshipper shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth,
for the Father seeketh such to worship him.
God is a spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.
The woman saith in him, I know that the Messiah cometh who is called the Christ,
and when he is come, he will tell us all things.
She said, hey, he's coming in those last days.
Here he comes.
Jesus saith unto her, I that speak unto thee, am he.
Jesus certainly has changed history, hasn't he?
The writer is telling us that the Messiah has come.
God has revealed himself now through the Messiah, through his son.
Jesus Christ coming has just happened, and this is what is so monumental about what he is saying.
Jesus Christ, a man that did not live beyond 33 years and that left his earth with 120 assembled in the upper room.
This is the man.
This is the God man that splits history.
Whenever you write a check, anybody ever still do that?
Who writes checks anymore?
But when you write down that date on that check and you write down 2022,
you're saying something went down 2,000 years ago.
We're still telling time by him.
The era of these last days, the recipients, who did he come to?
In times past, he came to the fathers, but in these last days, he's come to us.
Isn't that what it says?
Hath in these last days spoken unto us.
The recipients of God's partial word were the fathers.
The writer proclaims something incredible here.
God has spoken unto us.
If you're here today and it's your first time in church or first time in a long time, maybe you're not believing.
Even if you are believing, I want you to know God wrote a book and he wrote it so that you could know him.
He's revealing himself to you and he's revealed himself to you through his son.
The writer proclaims something incredible.
God has spoken unto us.
The audience, including us, gets to understand his revelation, not just as prophecy in times past,
but as history in these last days and we get to see it.
So you have the era.
You have the recipients.
The era is these last days.
The recipients are us.
The agents of God's final word, he says, by his son.
The agents of God's partial word in the Old Testament in times past were the prophets, but God has spoken.
God hath spoken.
God hath spoken by his son.
He is the full end of all of God's revelation.
And the means here is assumed.
The means is assumed.
In the Old Testament, it was in various portions and in various ways, at sundry times and in diverse manners.
Here it's just one way.
How did God reveal himself?
Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life.
No man comes to the Father but by me.
You guys are going to get a short message today, but I want you to go to one more passage.
Are you ready?
Go to Matthew.
Matthew chapter 17 and look at verse one.
This is pretty incredible.
Matthew 17, one.
And after six days, Jesus taketh Peter, James, and John, his brother, and bringing them up into a high mountain apart.
This is something Jesus did at least a few times.
You know, he spoke to crowds at times.
He had the hundred and twenty at the end.
There were more than the twelve that were there.
Then there were the twelve that he poured his life there.
He ordained the twelve that they would be with him and that he might send them forth to preach.
But there's times where he just included the three, Peter, James, and John.
It happened four or five times.
This is one of those times.
So it says that Jesus takes Peter, James, and John and they go up to this mountain apart.
And he, talking about Jesus, was transfigured before them.
And his face did shine as the sun and his raiment was as white as light.
Here you find Jesus taking his inner circle up on the mountain.
And in a moment that we can only imagine, the veil of his humanity was pulled back in the sense that all of who he actually was in his deity,
or at least some of it, was radiant, showing in his glory as light.
It must have been incredible.
I'm sure it wasn't fully what he could have been displayed as because if it had fully been it, they'd all been dead.
They'd all been dead.
Matthew here describes Jesus' face shining like the sun.
And the disciples, can you imagine being one of those disciples?
I mean, they had seen them do some supernatural things.
They had seen them heal the sick.
They'd seen them teach like nobody had ever taught.
They'd seen them, I don't know exactly, I didn't look at it where this is in Matthew at this point,
but certainly the disciples saw Jesus do all kinds of things like calm the storm.
They're calling into discipleship was, hey, throw your nets on the other side because you haven't caught fish all night.
So they throw their nets on the other side and through that draw to fish that came up that weighed their boats down,
Jesus financed his training of them for the next two or three years by all those fish.
Isn't that amazing?
So they had seen Jesus do some incredibly supernatural things.
But here now they see him in this incredible way.
He's shining like the sun.
But look at who else was there.
Look at verse three.
And behold, there appeared unto them Moses and Elias talking with him.
Now I'm not the first to point out that Moses wrote the law, the first five books of the prophets of the Old Testament.
And Elijah was that great prophet and his representative of the prophets.
The people in times past, the fathers in times past would refer to the canon of the Old Testament as the law and the prophets.
The law and the prophets, the law meaning those first five books, the Torah, the Pentateuch and the prophets being the rest of the Old Testament.
And here you have Jesus radiant in his glory and then you have the representatives of the law and the prophets standing there.
In times past, do you get the point? In times past, prophets in these last days, the sun.
You get it?
In times past, prophets in these last days, the sun.
You have it here in a moment.
Who's glad for Peter?
I'm glad for Peter because I think he makes all the mistakes that I would have made.
And if you sit and read the New Testament and you're like, those disciples were dumb, guess who you are in the story?
You ain't Jesus.
Are you with me?
Verse four, then answered Peter and said unto Jesus, Lord,
it is good for us to be here.
No problem there, right? How cool it would have been to see that.
If thou wilt, let us make here three tabernacles.
One for thee, one for Moses and one for Elijah.
Let's honor Moses and Elijah. Let's honor you. At least he got the order right. He put Jesus first.
But let's do it in a way, Jesus, I got a plan. Let's honor all three of you.
And let's do it in a way where you're all equal.
Let's do it in a way where we're honoring you and we're honoring Moses and we're honoring Elijah.
Let's do it in a way that's equal in its recognition. Three tabernacles, one for each.
And in that moment, while he yet spake, behold a bright cloud overshadowed them,
while he's saying the phrase, do you get it? I just woke somebody up.
While he's saying the phrase, God begins to speak from heaven.
What does God's voice sound like? Probably not like Mike Tyson.
And God said, like, no, are you with me?
This is a big deal.
A behold a voice out of the cloud which said, this is my beloved son
and whom I am well pleased, hear ye him.
This wasn't a moment to recognize the Old Testament prophets like this.
God's voice was clear and unmistakable. And if you don't get anything else from this sermon, get this.
Jesus is greater. Jesus is greater.
Look what happened. And when the disciples heard it, they fell on their face.
Man that we would fall on our faces with an understanding of who Jesus really, truly is.
They were sore afraid. And Jesus came, I love this, you have the glory of God and the majesty of God.
And then you have the glory of Jesus and the authority of Jesus and how much better he is
than even those Old Testament prophets. But then you have the love of Jesus.
Look at what happened. Verse 7, And Jesus came and touched them and said, arise, be not afraid.
And when they lifted up their eyes, they saw no man save Jesus only.
This really is the point of the book of Hebrews. Jesus is greater. Jesus is better.
I told you that two words function to sum up the book of Ephesians. Do you remember what those two words were?
In Christ.
Do you remember that? Well, one word seems to sum up the book of Hebrews and that word is better.
Better. Jesus is greater. Jesus is better. He is better than the angels. He's a better priest.
He's a better sacrifice. We have a better covenant. We have a better revelation.
The Old Testament came in fragments and pieces. Each part true. Micah tells us where he would be born.
Daniel tells us when he would be born. Malachi tells us about the forerunner that would come before him.
But when Jesus comes, he is so much better. He doesn't just tell us about God. He is God in the flesh.
He is greater than any prophet of the Old Testament. He is the embodiment of all truth.
Now some might say, but didn't the other people prophesy after Jesus? What about the apostles?
They spoke. Yeah, but you know what they spoke about? Jesus.
They spoke about Jesus. All of their prophecy, all of their revelation centered around Jesus.
Just like Jesus said it would. In John 16, 13, he says to the disciples,
how be it, he says, I'm going, how be it when he, the spirit of truth, has come.
He will guide you into all truth for he shall not speak of himself.
But whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak. Hear from who? Hear from God the Father.
Hear from God the Son. What will he speak? He will show you things to come.
What is he going to talk about? He shall glorify me.
He shall glorify me talking about Jesus. What's the spirit going to talk about after I leave?
He's going to talk about Jesus. Isn't that what we find in the rest of the book?
The New Testament is, the Old Testament is about Jesus.
It's in fragments and portions and then God shows up in the human flesh.
And he reveals to us all that he is. Jesus said, he'll glorify me for he shall not receive in mind
and he shall show it to you. And then he says, he's not going to speak of himself.
He's not going to speak about me. And you know what that means?
That means that you cannot afford to neglect taking a position about Jesus.
A lot of people say, I believe in God. That's great. The devils believe in tremble.
What have you done with Jesus? What have you done with Jesus?
He is the embodiment of everything that's true. He came to earth and died for you so that you could be made right with God.
And what it comes down to is this. Do you believe this? Jesus Christ is Lord. Jesus Christ is Lord.
Declare that now.
God who at sundry times and in diverse manners, spake in times past unto us by the prophets,
hath in these last days spoken unto us by his son.
And you know what Jesus said as the reason he came? He said, I've come to seek and to save that which was lost.
The Old Testament reveals to us our need for a redeemer. It reveals to us God's standards, God's law.
And what we find about God's standard and God's law is that it's a school master teaching us that we cannot keep the law.
We can't keep it. I was talking to Melana last night. We were having kind of a deeper conversation.
And I was telling her about what the Bible says about forgiveness and that the Pharisees, oh, she's in here. Sorry, Melana.
I'm warning if you're a pastor's kid, you could end up in an illustration.
But I told her that the Pharisees taught that you had to forgive somebody three times.
And you know what she said? I thought it was hilarious. These guys obviously didn't have kids.
That's like one day's worth of forgiveness is what she said. I thought that was hilarious.
Where was I going?
Jesus said, if you think about it, on the cross, Father forgive them for they know not what they do.
See, Jesus came. The Old Testament, that's where I was headed. The Old Testament tells us God's desire, God's law.
And like Melana says, we can't keep any of His law for a day. We can maybe keep some of it.
But the Bible says if you break one of His laws, you've broken them all.
So this Old Testament that comes in portions and in fragments, but what it does reveal to us is our need.
We cannot keep the law. The law tells us you're not good enough.
But even in the beginning, God, there's a scarlet thread that runs through that whole Old Testament that says, hey, God's going to provide Himself a redeemer.
Isaac says, I see the fire. I see the sticks. I see the stone. But where's the lamb?
And Abraham says, God will provide Himself a lamb.
God says to the serpent, the seed of the woman is going to crush the head of the serpent.
The serpent will bruise his heel, but the seed of the woman, Jesus, is going to crush the head of the serpent. Satan.
Have you read the back of the book? He wins.
The whole book's about Jesus. At sundry times and in the divider's matters, He spoke unto us by the prophets.
In these last days, He's spoken unto us by His Son. Jesus came and lived a perfect life and died on the cross as a perfect sacrifice
and rose from the dead to prove that because He can rise, He can raise us as well, that His sacrifice was approved by God,
and that because He lives, we shall live also. This is what God supernaturally spoke to us.
And so the question for us today is this, what will you do? What have you done with this Jesus?
Would you bow your heads and close your eyes with me?
Who's thankful for the scripture today? Amen.
God loves you. God loves you. He knew that you're in that box and you can't get to Him on your own.
You can't. You can't take care of your own sin yourself.
You need a righteousness that's alien to you. You need a righteousness that only Jesus can provide.
And God loves you so much that He knew that although you could not keep that law, He could.
And He sent His Son to keep the law on your behalf and then to die the death that you and I deserve to die,
so that if you would place your faith and trust in Him, if you would repent and turn to Christ for forgiveness and sins,
He says this, whosoever shall call in the name of the Lord shall be saved.