Hebrews 1:1–2 (WEB) God, having in the past spoken to the fathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, has at the end of these days spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom also he made the worlds.
Hebrews begins with a fact that sits underneath everything that follows: God has spoken. Christianity is not presented as humanity’s long and occasionally successful attempt to discover God. Abraham did not spend enough evenings staring at the stars until he eventually worked out the
Abrahamic covenant. Moses did not climb Sinai with a blank notebook and return after brainstorming ten particularly good rules. Isaiah was not simply an unusually insightful religious thinker, and Jeremiah did not invent the New Covenant because he thought the old arrangement could use an update. The movement is consistently in the other direction.
God reveals Himself. God makes promises. God gives commands. God interprets His actions. God tells His people what He is doing. If we know God, it is because God has made Himself known.
The author is also more specific than simply saying that God has spoken. God spoke to the fathers, through the prophets, at many times and in various ways. Each part matters. “The fathers” places this revelation within the history of God’s people. “The prophets” identifies the instruments through whom He communicated. “At many times” reminds us that this revelation unfolded across generations, while “in various ways” reflects the remarkable variety we actually encounter when reading the Old Testament. God spoke through direct declarations, dreams, visions, promises, law, poetry, wisdom, prophecy, and historical acts that He then interpreted for His people. He revealed Himself through covenants, priesthood, sacrifice, sanctuary, kingship, judgment, deliverance, exile, and restoration. The Bible does not present revelation as one enormous information dump delivered to one man on one Tuesday afternoon. God unfolded His purposes across history.
That also means Hebrews 1:1 is considerably more concrete than the loose way the phrase “God spoke” is sometimes used among Christians.
The author is not talking about Bob in Ohio getting a strong feeling last Thursday and announcing that God gave him a word. Bob may be a lovely man. We have nothing against Bob. But Hebrews is pointing us toward an identifiable history of divine revelation given to God’s people through His prophets and preserved in the Scriptures the author is about to quote repeatedly. When Hebrews says God spoke, it is not asking us to treat every internal impression somebody attaches God’s name to as another installment of biblical revelation.
Nor did every prophet receive the entire picture. Abraham received genuine promises from God, but he did not possess everything later revealed to Moses. Moses received genuine revelation, but he did not know everything
God would later reveal to David. David received promises concerning his royal line that would become enormously important to Israel’s hope, while prophets living centuries after David continued receiving revelation about where those promises were heading. Jeremiah could stand within the covenantal history established through Moses and announce that God would one day establish a New Covenant. Each stage was true revelation from God, yet each generation inherited what had already been given while receiving additional pieces of the picture.
This is where Bible study becomes much more interesting than collecting isolated verses. Imagine standing a few inches from an enormous mural and spending all afternoon studying a painted nose. You can examine its shape, color, texture, and individual brushstrokes with extraordinary precision. Everything you say about that nose may be completely accurate, but you still do not know what you are looking at. The nose belongs to a face. The face belongs to a person. The person belongs to a scene, and the scene belongs to a mural far larger than anything visible from six inches away.
The answer is not to stop studying the nose. That would simply create the opposite problem. Details matter. Words matter. Grammar matters.
Historical setting matters. Authorial intent matters. If we back away from the wall without first paying attention to what is actually painted there, we can imagine whatever mural we would like. Good Bible study requires us to do both: examine the individual piece carefully and then back away far enough to understand where that piece belongs.
Hebrews is particularly suited to teaching us how to do that because its author constantly reaches backward into earlier Scripture. When he quotes another passage, we are not going to treat that quotation as a decorative cross-reference and hurry onward. We will go there and read it as though it were the passage we originally sat down to study. We will ask what it meant in its own historical and literary setting and what its author was communicating to his original audience. If that passage itself reaches backward to an earlier passage, promise, covenant, or historical event, we will follow the chain there as well. Only after we understand those pieces in their own places can we work our way forward again and ask why the author of Hebrews chose that particular Scripture for his argument.
That method matters because the opening sentence already tells us that the pieces did not arrive all at once. God spoke “at many times and in various ways.” The diversity of the Old Testament is not evidence that God kept changing His mind. It is what an unfolding revelation looks like. A promise to Abraham, a priesthood established under Moses, a king enthroned in Jerusalem, a Psalm written by David, and a covenant promised through Jeremiah can initially look like separate pieces when viewed up close. Back away far enough, however, and patterns begin to appear. The pieces remain what they originally were, but we begin to see that they belong to something much larger.
Hebrews begins by affirming all of it. The former revelation was not defective simply because more revelation followed. God really spoke to the fathers. He really spoke through the prophets. Their words carry authority precisely because the ultimate speaker was God. Whatever contrast the author is about to make between the prophets and the Son cannot mean that the prophets were false, mistaken, or disposable. The contrast is that God had not finished speaking.
The next words make that contrast explicit: God, who had spoken to the fathers through the prophets, “has at the end of these days spoken to us by his Son.” Before we hurry toward the Son, however, the phrase “at the end of these days” deserves some attention because it is remarkably easy to read two thousand years of Christian expectations back into a phrase before asking what the author himself meant by it.
Depending on the English translation sitting in front of us, the wording may be more familiar as “in these last days.” The underlying idea is the same, but the first thing we should notice is almost embarrassingly simple: the author includes himself and his readers in those days. God has spoken to us at the end of these days. Whatever period Hebrews is describing, its original audience was already living in it. That creates an immediate problem for the popular habit of treating “the last days” primarily as a label for whichever generation happens to be reading the newspaper. Christians have been identifying wars, earthquakes, political instability, moral decline, new technology, suspicious barcodes, and unusually annoying politicians as proof that we must finally be the people living in the last days. The author of Hebrews could have saved us a considerable amount of chart paper. He believed the decisive period had already arrived.
To understand why, we need to hear the phrase as someone steeped in Israel’s Scriptures would have heard it. The prophets had repeatedly looked forward to a future period when God’s purposes for Israel and the nations would reach a decisive stage. Isaiah opens one such window:
«Isaiah 2:1–4 (WEB) This is what Isaiah the son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem.
It shall happen in the latter days, that the mountain of Yahweh’s house shall be established on the top of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; and all nations shall flow to it.
Many peoples shall go and say, “Come, let’s go up to Yahweh’s mountain, to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths.” For the law shall go out of Zion, and Yahweh’s word from Jerusalem.
He will judge between the nations, and will decide concerning many peoples. They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.»
If we were studying Isaiah rather than Hebrews, we would resist the temptation to grab the phrase “latter days,” define it using a modern prophecy chart, and then drag that definition backward into Isaiah. Isaiah is describing the future from his own location in redemptive history. He sees a time associated with Zion, the reign and instruction of Yahweh, and the nations being drawn toward the God of Jacob. The phrase points forward from Isaiah toward an anticipated era in which God’s purposes would advance beyond the circumstances Isaiah and his immediate audience could presently see. The same forward-looking expectation appears elsewhere in the prophets, although the language is not always identical. Jeremiah speaks of a coming covenant unlike the covenant made when God brought Israel out of Egypt:
«Jeremiah 31:31–34 (WEB)
“Behold, the days come,” says Yahweh, “that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah; not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which covenant of mine they broke, although I was a husband to them,” says Yahweh. “But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days,” says Yahweh: “I will put my law in their inward parts, and I will write it in their heart. I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
They will no longer each teach his neighbor, and every man teach his brother, saying, ‘Know Yahweh;’ for they will all know me, from their least to their greatest,” says Yahweh, “for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”»
Jeremiah does not use the exact expression “last days” in this passage, so we should not pretend that he does. What he does give us is the same basic prophetic orientation toward a coming stage in God’s covenantal work. There was a covenant God had genuinely made with the fathers when He brought them from Egypt, and Jeremiah announced that days were coming when God would establish a New Covenant. That distinction will eventually become central to Hebrews itself. In fact, Hebrews will quote this passage at length rather than merely borrowing the phrase
“new covenant,” which means we will have plenty of opportunity to come back and let Jeremiah speak for himself. Joel gives us another piece of the prophetic expectation:
«Joel 2:28–32 (WEB)
“It will happen afterward, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh; and your sons and your daughters will prophesy. Your old men will dream dreams. Your young men will see visions.
And also on the servants and on the handmaids in those days, I will pour out my Spirit.
I will show wonders in the heavens and in the earth: blood, fire, and pillars of smoke.
The sun will be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of Yahweh comes.
It will happen that whoever will call on Yahweh’s name shall be saved; for in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there will be those who escape, as Yahweh has said, and among the remnant, those whom Yahweh calls.”»
Joel calls this period “afterward.” He describes the outpouring of God’s Spirit across boundaries that would ordinarily have mattered enormously: sons and daughters, old and young, servants and handmaids.
He associates that outpouring with the day of Yahweh, salvation for those who call upon Yahweh, and deliverance connected with Zion and Jerusalem. Joel is looking forward.
Then we reach Acts, and something extremely important happens. Peter does not merely quote Joel because he thinks Joel sounds vaguely similar to what happened at Pentecost. He tells the crowd what they are witnessing:
Acts 2:14–21 (WEB) But Peter, standing up with the eleven, lifted up his voice and spoke out to them, “You men of Judea, and all you who dwell at Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to my words. For these aren’t drunken, as you suppose, seeing it is only the third hour of the day. But this is what has been spoken through the prophet Joel: ‘It will be in the last days, says God, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh. Your sons and your daughters will prophesy. Your young men will see visions. Your old men will dream dreams.
Yes, and on my servants and on my handmaidens in those days, I will pour out my Spirit, and they will prophesy.
I will show wonders in the sky above, and signs on the earth beneath: blood, and fire, and billows of smoke.
The sun will be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and glorious day of the Lord comes.
It will be that whoever will call on the name of the Lord will be saved.’”»
It is worth stopping here because this connection is surprisingly easy to miss. Joel promised that a time would come when God would pour out His Spirit, and Peter explicitly identifies what is happening at Pentecost with that promise: “This is what has been spoken through the prophet Joel.” Peter even renders Joel’s “afterward” as “in the last days.” He is not standing at Pentecost telling his audience to watch for the promised outpouring thousands of years later. He tells the people standing in front of him that they are watching Joel’s words come to pass.
That may sound obvious once the passages are placed beside each other, but many Christians have been taught to associate the promised “outpouring of the Spirit” primarily with much later revival movements, particularly modern Pentecostal and charismatic movements. Whatever conclusions we eventually reach about those movements, Acts 2 does not allow us to relocate Joel’s promise there. We do not need a newspaper, a revival history, or a story about what happened at a church meeting in the early 1990s to identify the event Joel was describing. Peter already identified it for us.
This does not by itself answer every question about the work of the Holy Spirit after Pentecost, nor does it settle every debate about spiritual gifts.
Those questions have to be answered from the passages that actually address them. It simply means we should allow Peter to interpret the event Peter is discussing. Joel looked forward to the outpouring of the Spirit; at Pentecost the Spirit was poured out; and Peter stood up and said, in effect, “This is that.” Sometimes following the biblical chain produces a complicated argument.
Sometimes an apostle just points at the mural for us. That gives us something firmer than speculation about what “last days” ought to mean. Isaiah looked forward to the latter days. Jeremiah looked forward to the days of a New Covenant. Joel looked forward to the outpouring of the Spirit. Peter stood after the death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ, watched the Spirit being poured out, and announced that the promised last-days reality had arrived. Hebrews stands within that same New Testament world and says that God has spoken to us at the end of these days.
The phrase therefore cannot simply mean “the last few years before planet Earth ceases to exist.” The New Testament writers were already living within the period they described this way. The dividing line is not a modern war, technological development, natural disaster, or particularly convincing end-times conference. The dividing line is Christ. The arrival of Christ had brought redemptive history into the age toward which the prophets had been looking.
That does not mean everything promised by God had already reached its final consummation. Hebrews itself still looks forward. Its readers are waiting for promises, seeking the city that is to come, anticipating Christ’s appearing, and looking toward realities they do not yet see. The New Testament can therefore speak of something having arrived while still expecting its completion. The arrival of the last days does not eliminate the future; it tells us where the authors believed they stood within God’s unfolding story. Hebrews will eventually sharpen the covenantal dimension of that transition considerably. When the author quotes Jeremiah’s promise of a New Covenant, he will conclude that by calling the covenant “new,”
God had made the first covenant old, adding that what was becoming old and aged was near to disappearing (Hebrews 8:13). That statement is particularly important because Hebrews was written to people who were not merely studying the Mosaic covenant as ancient history. The temple order, priesthood, and sacrifices still formed part of the world around them. Christ had accomplished the work to which those institutions pointed, yet the old covenantal structure had not simply vanished from sight the morning after the resurrection.
That historical overlap helps explain why Hebrews contains such urgent warnings against going backward. The readers could still see the old system. Priests still served. Sacrifices were still offered. The temple still stood. The tangible religious world of the Mosaic covenant remained available in a way that can be difficult for modern Christians to appreciate.
Hebrews is addressing people living during the transition between what Christ had already accomplished and the approaching removal of an order the author explicitly describes as obsolete and near to disappearing.
This is one reason the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in AD 70 matters when thinking about the historical setting of Hebrews. The letter never says, “The temple will be destroyed in AD 70,” so we should not pretend it does. Neither should we turn Hebrews into a coded prediction of that event. Yet the author repeatedly describes the Mosaic covenantal order as temporary, surpassed, obsolete, and approaching disappearance while speaking from a world in which its institutions still appear to be functioning. When that order was physically dismantled with the destruction of the temple, the historical world in which Levitical sacrifice could continue was decisively changed. Understanding “the last days” against that covenantal background therefore makes considerably better sense of Hebrews than treating the phrase as a generic prediction that the planet was about to end. The author and his readers stood at the end of one covenantal age and the establishment of another. The Mosaic order had served the purpose for which God gave it, but the realities it anticipated had arrived in Christ.
There would be no need to repair the old system after Christ had fulfilled what its priesthood, sanctuary, and sacrifices were pointing toward. You do not fix the car and then keep fixing it as though it were still broken.
That does not make the Old Testament irrelevant. It makes the Old Testament enormously important, because without understanding what came before, we will not understand what Christ fulfilled. Hebrews is going to spend much of its argument taking the old covenant seriously enough to show precisely why Christ is greater. The shadows matter because they show us the shape of the reality that cast them. The priesthood matters because it prepares us to understand the High Priest.
The sacrifices matter because they prepare us to understand the sacrifice. The covenant matters because it prepares us to understand the New Covenant. God had spoken across generations through the prophets, progressively revealing His purposes within the covenantal history of His people. Now that history had reached its decisive turning point. God had spoken in the Son.
The wording deserves to sit in front of us again because the contrast is easy to flatten: “God, having in the past spoken to the fathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, has at the end of these days spoken to us by his Son” (Hebrews 1:1–2 WEB). Hebrews does not say that God formerly spoke through false teachers but has finally sent a true one. The prophets really did speak for God. Nor does the author criticize the many ways in which God had revealed Himself, as though the Old Testament were a long series of failed communication attempts.
The contrast is between genuine revelation given through God’s servants and the climactic revelation that has now come in His Son.
Even the way Hebrews describes Jesus is striking. The WEB says God has spoken “by his Son.” The Greek is even more compact: en huiō, literally something like “in Son.” There is no Greek definite article before “Son” in the phrase. That does not mean Jesus is merely a son among many, as though Hebrews has introduced one more messenger to add to the prophetic roster. Quite the opposite. The construction places weight on the character or status of the One through whom God has now spoken.
Formerly, God spoke in the prophets; now He has spoken in Son. The difference is not merely that God has chosen another spokesman. The identity of the spokesman has changed the character of the revelation.
That distinction becomes clearer if we resist the temptation to reduce revelation to spoken sentences. A prophet could stand before Israel and say, “Thus says Yahweh,” deliver God’s message, and remain distinct from the content of that message. Jesus certainly speaks the words of God, but the New Testament’s claim about Him goes much farther. His identity, actions, death, resurrection, kingship, and priesthood are themselves revelatory. God has not merely handed Jesus a new paragraph to add after Malachi. In the Son, God has entered the story toward which the prophets had been pointing.
This is why the common description of Jesus as simply another prophet, even a very great prophet, cannot survive the opening of Hebrews. Jesus certainly functions prophetically; He speaks God’s truth and announces God’s kingdom. But Hebrews deliberately places Him on the other side of the comparison. There are the prophets, plural, through whom God spoke across many times and in many ways, and there is the Son through whom God has now spoken climactically. The prophets belong among the servants and messengers of God’s house. Hebrews will eventually make precisely that distinction when comparing Jesus with Moses: Moses was faithful in God’s house as a servant, while Christ is faithful over God’s house as a Son (Hebrews 3:5–6).
Calling Jesus “Son” also means we cannot simply pour whatever meaning we associate with that title into Hebrews and move along. We need to ask what biblical world the author expects that word to evoke. Fortunately, Hebrews does not make us guess for long. Only a few sentences later the author will quote a passage in which God says, “You are my Son,” and that quotation comes from Psalm 2. Since Hebrews itself sends us there,
Psalm 2 gets to speak before we decide what Hebrews means by using it. Psalm 2 (WEB) Why do the nations rage, and the peoples plot a vain thing? The kings of the earth take a stand, and the rulers take counsel together, against Yahweh, and against his Anointed, saying, “Let’s break their bonds apart, and cast their cords from us.” He who sits in the heavens will laugh. The Lord will have them in derision. Then he will speak to them in his anger, and terrify them in his wrath:
“Yet I have set my King on my holy hill of Zion.” I will tell of the decree: Yahweh said to me, “You are my Son. Today I have become your father.
Ask of me, and I will give the nations for your inheritance, the uttermost parts of the earth for your possession. You shall break them with a rod of iron.
You shall dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.” Now therefore be wise, you kings. Be instructed, you judges of the earth. Serve Yahweh with fear, and rejoice with trembling.
Give sincere homage to the Son, lest he be angry, and you perish on the way, for his wrath will soon be kindled. Blessed are all those who take refuge in him.»
Psalm 2 begins with a world in rebellion. The nations rage, their peoples plot, and their rulers gather together against Yahweh and against His Anointed. The word translated “Anointed” is mashiach, the word from which we get Messiah. In the immediate world of the Psalm, this is royal language. Israel’s king is Yahweh’s anointed king, and the nations’ rebellion against that king is presented simultaneously as rebellion against Yahweh who established him. The kings of the earth want the cords removed because they do not want to live beneath Yahweh’s rule. Their confidence is somewhat undermined by God’s response. He laughs.
That is not because rebellion against God is harmless or because judgment is amusing. The laughter communicates how utterly incapable the gathered nations are of threatening God’s purpose. From the ground, an alliance of kings might look formidable. From the throne of heaven, the idea that they can overthrow what Yahweh has decreed is absurd. They gather, scheme, and announce their independence; God does not call an emergency meeting.
He tells them that He has already installed His King. The King then speaks and tells us the decree behind his enthronement:
“Yahweh said to me, ‘You are my Son. Today I have become your father.
Ask of me, and I will give the nations for your inheritance, the uttermost parts of the earth for your possession’” (Psalm 2:7–8 WEB). Before we bring Hebrews back into the conversation, we need to let those words remain where they originally belong. In the world of the Psalm, “Son” is royal language. God has installed His anointed king on Zion, and the king stands in a unique covenantal relationship to Yahweh as His appointed ruler.
That language did not appear from nowhere. Psalm 2 belongs to a larger biblical chain concerning God’s covenant with David, and if we are going to understand why a Davidic king can be called God’s son, we need to back up again. David wanted to build a house for Yahweh, but through the prophet Nathan, God turned the conversation around. David was concerned with building God’s house; God announced that He would build David’s.
2 Samuel 7:8–16 (WEB) Now therefore tell my servant David this, “Yahweh of Armies says, ‘I took you from the sheep pen, from following the sheep, to be prince over my people, over Israel. I have been with you wherever you went, and have cut off all your enemies from before you. I will make you a great name, like the name of the great ones who are in the earth. I will appoint a place for my people Israel, and will plant them, that they may dwell in their own place, and be moved no more. The children of wickedness will not afflict them any more, as at the first, and as from the day that I commanded judges to be over my people Israel. I will cause you to rest from all your enemies. Moreover Yahweh tells you that Yahweh will make you a house. When your days are fulfilled, and you sleep with your fathers, I will set up your offspring after you, who will proceed out of your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He will build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be his father, and he will be my son. If he commits iniquity, I will chasten him with the rod of men, and with the stripes of the children of men; but my loving kindness will not depart from him, as I took it from Saul, whom I put away before you. Your house and your kingdom will be made sure forever before you. Your throne will be established forever.’”
Now the “Son” language of Psalm 2 has a history beneath it. God promised David that his offspring would succeed him, build a house for God’s name, and sit upon an established throne. God then described His relationship with that Davidic king in explicitly familial terms: “I will be his father, and he will be my son.” At the most immediate level, Solomon plainly belongs to this promise. He is David’s biological descendant, he succeeds David as king, and he builds the temple David had wanted to build.
But Solomon does not exhaust the promise. The language stretches beyond one successful building project in Jerusalem. David is promised a house, a kingdom, and a throne established “forever.” The history that follows creates an obvious tension. David dies. Solomon dies. The kingdom divides. David’s descendants repeatedly fail, Jerusalem falls, the temple is destroyed, and eventually no Davidic king sits on the throne at all. Yet the promise does not quietly disappear from Israel’s Scriptures when the monarchy collapses. The prophets continue looking forward to a coming Davidic ruler precisely because God’s promise remains unresolved.
Psalm 2 stands within that royal and covenantal world. Yahweh has an Anointed One, a King established on Zion, and that King is addressed as His Son. The language is not initially a philosophical statement about the metaphysical relationship between the Father and the eternal Son. If we began there, we would be importing later questions into the Psalm before allowing the Psalm to make its own point. The Son in Psalm 2 is God’s Davidic King, appointed to rule under Yahweh’s authority and carrying the promise associated with David’s royal line.
Then the Psalm does something enormous with his inheritance. God does not tell the King merely that Judah belongs to him, nor even that the twelve tribes belong to him. He says, “Ask of me, and I will give the nations for your inheritance, the uttermost parts of the earth for your possession.” The rebellious nations from the beginning of the Psalm are the very nations promised to the Son. The rulers gathering against Yahweh’s Anointed are plotting against the One God has decreed will inherit them.
That makes the ending of the Psalm especially important. The kings who began by plotting rebellion are told to become wise, accept instruction, serve Yahweh with fear, and give homage to the Son. The Psalm does not merely celebrate Israel having a king. It presents Yahweh’s chosen King as the ruler before whom the kings of the earth themselves must ultimately answer. Their alternatives are not competing political arrangements.
They can continue their rebellion and face judgment, or they can take refuge in the King God has established.
Now we can begin working our way forward again. Second Samuel gives us God’s covenant with David: “I will be his father, and he will be my son.”
Psalm 2 takes that royal sonship language and places God’s Anointed King on Zion, with the nations and the ends of the earth promised as His inheritance. The Davidic monarchy eventually collapses, but the promise of a Davidic ruler does not collapse with it. Israel is left waiting for the King who can actually carry the weight of the promise.
That is the biblical history sitting underneath the word “Son.” The prophets continue carrying that promise after the Davidic kingdom has begun to fail. Isaiah, writing into a world where David’s royal house still existed but had given Israel plenty of reasons not to confuse the present kings with the final fulfillment of God’s promise, looks forward to a ruler whose reign reaches far beyond anything Solomon or his descendants accomplished.
Isaiah 9:2–7 (WEB) The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light. Those who lived in the land of the shadow of death, on them the light has shined.
You have multiplied the nation. You have increased their joy. They rejoice before you according to the joy in harvest, as men rejoice when they divide the plunder.
For the yoke of his burden, and the staff of his shoulder, the rod of his oppressor, you have broken as in the day of Midian.
For all the armor of the armed man in the noisy battle, and the garments rolled in blood, will be for burning, fuel for the fire.
For a child is born to us. A son is given to us; and the government will be on his shoulders. His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Of the increase of his government and of peace there shall be no end, on David’s throne and on his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from that time on, even forever. Yahweh of Armies’ zeal will perform this.»
Isaiah does not abandon David’s throne when he looks toward Israel’s future. He doubles down on it. A Son is coming whose government will increase without end, who will sit upon David’s throne and establish that kingdom with justice and righteousness forever. The promise in 2 Samuel has not been discarded because David’s descendants proved incapable of fulfilling it permanently. Their failure makes the unresolved portion of the promise more obvious. God had promised David a throne established forever, and Isaiah still expects God to keep His word.
Later Isaiah describes the same hope using the image of a tree that appears to have been cut down.
Isaiah 11:1–10 (WEB) A shoot will come out of the stock of Jesse, and a branch out of his roots will bear fruit.
Yahweh’s Spirit will rest on him: the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of Yahweh.
His delight will be in the fear of Yahweh. He will not judge by the sight of his eyes, neither decide by the hearing of his ears; but he will judge the poor with righteousness, and decide with equity for the humble of the earth. He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth; and with the breath of his lips he will kill the wicked.
Righteousness will be the belt of his waist, and faithfulness the belt of his waist.
The wolf will live with the lamb, and the leopard will lie down with the young goat; the calf, the young lion, and the fattened calf together; and a little child will lead them.
The cow and the bear will graze. Their young ones will lie down together. The lion will eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child will play near a cobra’s hole, and the weaned child will put his hand on the viper’s den.
They will not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of Yahweh, as the waters cover the sea.
It will happen in that day that the nations will seek the root of Jesse, who stands as a banner of the peoples; and his resting place will be glorious.»
Calling him a shoot from the stock of Jesse is important. Jesse was David’s father. Isaiah does not picture the royal house as a magnificent tree growing uninterrupted toward greater glory; he pictures new growth emerging from what looks like a stump. The Davidic line can be brought low without God’s promise being brought to nothing. From Jesse’s apparently ruined house comes the ruler upon whom Yahweh’s Spirit rests.
Once again, the horizon extends beyond Israel. Psalm 2 promised the nations to the Son as His inheritance. Isaiah says the nations will seek the root of Jesse. These are not identical passages saying identical things, and we should not flatten them into one giant prediction, but they belong to the same developing expectation. God’s promise to David produces hope for a coming Davidic ruler, and as the prophets develop that hope, his reign repeatedly reaches beyond Israel to the nations.
Jeremiah carries the same promise through an even darker period. By his day, judgment upon Judah is no longer a distant possibility. Jerusalem is heading toward catastrophe, and the Davidic monarchy appears to be approaching its end. Yet Jeremiah can speak into that collapse and still say:
«Jeremiah 23:5–6 (WEB)
“Behold, the days come,” says Yahweh,
“that I will raise to David a righteous Branch, and he will reign as king and deal wisely, and will execute justice and righteousness in the land. In his days Judah will be saved, and Israel will dwell safely.
This is his name by which he will be called: Yahweh our righteousness.”» The monarchy can collapse. Jerusalem can burn. David’s descendants can disappear from the throne. None of that permits Jeremiah to conclude that God has abandoned His promise. He still expects a righteous Branch from David, a King who will actually rule with the justice and righteousness that Israel’s kings so often lacked.
By the time we return to Psalm 2, then, “You are my Son” is no longer sitting alone on the wall. Behind it stands God’s covenant with David: “I will be his father, and he will be my son.” Around it stands the royal Psalm in which Yahweh installs His Anointed King and promises Him the nations as His inheritance. Ahead of it stands the prophetic expectation that David’s throne will yet be occupied by a righteous ruler whose kingdom endures and whose reign reaches the nations.
Now we can return to Hebrews without treating the word “Son” as though the author dropped it onto the page without any biblical history behind it.
Hebrews has just told us that in these last days God has spoken in the Son.
And then it tells us that this Son has been appointed “heir of all things.”
That description should sound considerably less isolated now. Psalm 2 did not merely call God’s Anointed King His Son; it immediately connected that sonship with inheritance: “Ask of me, and I will give the nations for your inheritance, the uttermost parts of the earth for your possession”
(Psalm 2:8 WEB). Hebrews opens with the same categories sitting beside one another. God has spoken in the Son, “whom he appointed heir of all things” (Hebrews 1:2 WEB). The language has expanded from the nations and the ends of the earth to “all things,” but the connection between Son and inheritance was already sitting in Israel’s Scriptures waiting for us.
This is where following the chain protects us from reading “heir” as little more than a religious way of saying that Jesus owns a lot of stuff. Inheritance in Psalm 2 belongs to kingship. The Son is God’s appointed King, and the nations that rebel against His rule are nevertheless promised to Him as His possession. Hebrews takes that royal expectation and places Jesus directly inside it. The One through whom God has now spoken is not simply a better messenger with a more complete sermon. He is the promised royal Son whose inheritance encompasses everything.
There is an interesting tension in calling Him an heir, because inheritance ordinarily makes us think of someone receiving property that previously belonged to someone else, often after the former owner dies. That obviously cannot be pressed woodenly into the relationship between the Father and the Son. God does not die and leave Jesus the universe in probate. Biblical metaphors are allowed to communicate what they are intended to communicate without being forced to walk on all fours. Here the language of inheritance communicates the Son’s rightful possession and royal authority. What the Father has appointed for the Son belongs to Him.
Hebrews will keep returning to inheritance, but it will not reserve the idea for Christ alone. Later the author will tell believers to imitate those
“who through faith and perseverance inherited the promises” (Hebrews 6:12 WEB), describe Noah as becoming “an heir of the righteousness which is according to faith” (Hebrews 11:7 WEB), present Abraham living as a foreigner in the land he was called to receive as an inheritance, and speak of those who are called receiving “the promise of the eternal inheritance” (Hebrews 9:15 WEB). That makes the order here important.
Before Hebrews starts talking about what God’s people inherit, it tells us who the heir is. Christ comes first. Our inheritance cannot therefore be understood independently of His.
Whatever God’s people receive, they receive as people belonging to the Son who is Himself heir of all things. Hebrews will eventually take us to Abraham living as a stranger in the land of promise, to faithful people confessing themselves strangers and pilgrims on the earth, to a better country, to a city whose builder and maker is God, and finally to a kingdom that cannot be shaken. Those themes do not appear from nowhere halfway through the letter. The opening sentence has already planted the seed.
This also keeps the biblical idea of inheritance from collapsing into the prosperity preacher’s favorite definition: things I would like God to give me before Friday. The inheritance of Hebrews is not a promise that faith will eventually produce the house, promotion, bank account, or comfortable life we have decided ought to belong to us. Some of the people Hebrews later presents as models of faith receive extraordinary victories; others are tortured, imprisoned, destitute, mistreated, and killed. Apparently nobody told them that being an heir meant God was required to upgrade their camel. Their confidence rests somewhere much deeper. God’s promises are secure because the inheritance ultimately belongs to the Son, and the Son’s claim does not depend upon the changing circumstances of His people. A believer can die without having seen everything promised and still die in faith because God’s promise has not died with him. Abraham will become one of Hebrews’ great examples of that kind of confidence.
There is also something beautiful about the direction of the promise once
Psalm 2 is allowed to remain in view. The nations begin the Psalm raging against Yahweh and His Anointed. They want His rule removed. Yet those same nations are promised to the Son as His inheritance. The New Testament will eventually show the gospel going precisely where Psalm 2 taught us to look: outward from Israel toward the nations, calling people who once stood in rebellion to take refuge in God’s King. The Son is heir of all things.
Then Hebrews says something even larger about Him: God made the worlds through Him.
“Through whom also he made the worlds” (Hebrews 1:2 WEB) takes us from the Son’s relationship to the inheritance of all things to His relationship with the beginning of all things. The Son is not introduced halfway through the biblical story as though He came into existence when Mary gave birth to Jesus. Before Abraham received a promise, before David received a throne, before Moses received the Law, before there was an Israel to receive any of them, the Son was already there. Hebrews places Him on the Creator side of the Creator-creature distinction.
The WEB’s “worlds” may sound at first as though Hebrews is talking about God creating multiple planets or universes through Christ. The Greek word is aiōnas, the plural of aiōn, a word whose range includes an age, an era, or the world understood across its ages. English readers are more accustomed to seeing that family of words translated with language such as “age” or “ages,” although context determines its meaning. Here the claim reaches beyond Jesus helping manufacture physical objects. The ordered reality in which history unfolds exists through the Son. The One who entered history at its decisive point is also the One through whom God brought the world and its ages into being.
That sends us to the beginning of Scripture, because creation is not an idea Hebrews invented in order to make Jesus sound impressive.
Genesis 1:1–5 (WEB) In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and empty. Darkness was on the surface of the deep and God’s Spirit was hovering over the surface of the waters.
God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw the light, and saw that it was good. God divided the light from the darkness. God called the light “day”, and the darkness he called “night”. There was evening and there was morning, the first day.»
The opening line of Scripture establishes God as Creator without offering an argument for His existence first. Much like Hebrews, Genesis simply begins with God. The heavens and the earth are not eternal rivals standing alongside Him. They are created reality. Everything the biblical story will subsequently describe happens within a world that owes its existence to God. Genesis also repeatedly describes creation occurring through God’s speech. “God said” becomes one of the rhythms of the chapter. God speaks, and what He commands comes to be. Light does not negotiate.
The waters do not request clarification. Creation responds to the word of its Creator because the One speaking possesses the authority to call into existence what was not there before.
We should not force Hebrews 1 back into Genesis 1 and pretend an ancient reader of Genesis would have stopped at “God said” and immediately explained the doctrine of the eternal Son in Nicene terminology. That would violate the very method we have committed ourselves to using.
Genesis needs to say what Genesis says before later revelation is allowed to add clarity. Genesis tells us that God created the heavens and the earth and that His creative activity is repeatedly expressed through His word. Hebrews, standing much later in the unfolding revelation, tells us something Genesis by itself did not spell out: the Son through whom God has now spoken is also the One through whom God made the worlds.
That is not the only place the New Testament makes this connection. John’s Gospel deliberately opens with language that makes it nearly impossible not to hear Genesis behind it:
John 1:1–5 (WEB) In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him. Without him, nothing was made that has been made.
In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness hasn’t overcome it.»
John does not merely say that the Word existed before Jesus began His public ministry. He places the Word “in the beginning,” distinguishes the Word as being “with God,” and simultaneously says that the Word “was God.” Then he makes the creation claim as comprehensive as language reasonably allows: “All things were made through him. Without him, nothing was made that has been made.”
That final sentence closes an important loophole. If everything that has been made was made through the Word, then the Word cannot belong to the category of things that have been made. You cannot put Him inside the box marked “created things” when John has just said that everything inside that box came into existence through Him.
Hebrews and John are therefore making closely related claims from different directions. Hebrews says God made the worlds through the Son. John says all things were made through the Word and that nothing made came into existence apart from Him. Neither allows us to reduce Jesus to the highest creature in God’s hierarchy. However exalted we might make such a creature, he would still belong among the things that were made. The Son does not. He is there when the making happens.
Paul gives us the same creation pattern while making the Son’s relationship to creation even more explicit:
Colossians 1:15–17 (WEB) He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created in the heavens and on the earth, visible things and invisible things, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things are held together.
The word “firstborn” has caused plenty of trouble when it is pulled away from everything Paul immediately says about it. If “firstborn of all creation” meant that Christ was the first creature God made, the next sentence would be a rather strange explanation: “For by him all things were created.” Paul then deliberately expands “all things” so we do not quietly remove inconvenient categories from it. Things in heaven and things on earth, visible and invisible, thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers all owe their existence to Him. Christ is not one member of the created order being given a particularly impressive résumé. Paul places the entire created order beneath His creative agency.
The Old Testament background of “firstborn” also keeps us from assuming the word must mean “first thing produced.” Scripture can use firstborn language for rank and inheritance rather than birth order alone.
David provides an especially useful example because we have already been following the Davidic chain beneath Hebrews’ language of Son and heir.
Psalm 89:20–29 (WEB) I have found David, my servant. I have anointed him with my holy oil, with whom my hand shall be established. My arm will also strengthen him. No enemy will tax him. No wicked man will oppress him. I will beat down his adversaries before him, and strike those who hate him.
But my faithfulness and my loving kindness will be with him. In my name, his horn will be exalted. I will set his hand also on the sea, and his right hand on the rivers. He will call to me,
“You are my Father, my God, and the rock of my salvation!” I will also appoint him my firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth.
I will keep my loving kindness for him forever more. My covenant will stand firm with him. I will also make his offspring endure forever, and his throne as the days of heaven.»
David was not Jesse’s firstborn son. When Samuel came to Jesse’s house in 1 Samuel 16, David was the youngest and initially was not even brought in with his brothers. Yet Psalm 89 has God saying, “I will also appoint him my firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth.” The Psalm itself tells us how the title is functioning: firstborn is associated with supremacy, royal rank, covenant, and inheritance. David is appointed firstborn in the sense that God exalts him above the kings of the earth.
That makes Paul’s language in Colossians much less mysterious. Christ is the “firstborn of all creation,” and Paul immediately explains His supremacy over creation by saying that all things were created by Him, through Him, and for Him. He is “before all things,” and all things hold together in Him. The title does not drag Christ down into creation; in Paul’s argument it announces His supremacy over it.
Following that chain also brings us back into territory Hebrews has already opened. Psalm 89 speaks of David calling God Father, God appointing him firstborn, his exaltation over the kings of the earth, an enduring covenant, and a throne established forever. Second Samuel 7 gave us “I will be his father, and he will be my son.” Psalm 2 gave us the Son installed as King with the nations as His inheritance. Psalm 89 combines fatherhood, firstborn status, covenant, kingship, and an enduring throne. These are not random theological words scattered through the Old Testament. They belong to a developing royal pattern centered upon God’s promise to David.
Then the New Testament identifies Jesus as the One in whom that pattern reaches its fullness while simultaneously saying something about Him that could never be said of David. David belongs to creation. Jesus is the One through whom creation came to be. Hebrews therefore has already done something remarkable before completing verse 2. The title “Son” carries us into the Davidic promise and royal Psalms. “Heir of all things” fits the Son whose inheritance reaches to the ends of the earth. Yet just when we might be tempted to understand Jesus as merely the final and greatest Davidic king, Hebrews pushes farther back than David, farther back than Abraham, farther back than Adam.
Before there was a throne in Jerusalem for the Son to inherit, there was a world for the Son to create.
That movement from inheritance to creation gives the opening of Hebrews an enormous sweep. The Son stands at both ends of the story. All things come into existence through Him, and all things are appointed as His inheritance. Creation is therefore not merely the stage upon which Jesus happens to appear for thirty-some years before returning to heaven.
The biblical story begins with Him already there, and history moves toward everything being placed under His rightful rule.
Paul makes that second direction explicit if we allow the Colossians passage to continue:
Colossians 1:18–20 (WEB) He is the head of the body, the assembly, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things he might have the preeminence.
For all the fullness was pleased to dwell in him, and through him to reconcile all things to himself by him, whether things on the earth or things in the heavens, having made peace through the blood of his cross.»
Paul does not say merely that everything was created through Christ. Everything was created for Him. Creation has a destination as well as an origin. The One through whom all things came into existence is also the One toward whom they are directed. That fits remarkably well beside Hebrews’ description of the Son as “heir of all things.” Neither writer gives us a picture in which Jesus arrives late to a story fundamentally about something else.
Paul then carries creation directly into redemption. The One through whom all things were created is the One through whom God reconciles all things, “having made peace through the blood of his cross.” Creation, redemption, and kingship are not separate résumés for three different versions of Jesus. They belong to the identity and work of the same Son.
Hebrews’ choice of aiōnas also fits the enormous scope of what it has just said. The Son stands behind the created order and the ages through which God’s purposes unfold. Later the letter will say that Christ “has been revealed once at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself” (Hebrews 9:26 WEB). We should not turn aiōn into a secret code where every occurrence automatically means “covenant.” Words do not work that way. But the connection is still striking. When Hebrews later describes Christ appearing at the culmination of the ages, the author is not introducing Him as someone trapped inside a timeline larger than Himself. The ages themselves exist through Him.
That makes the incarnation more astonishing, not less. The Son through whom the ages were made entered one of those ages. The One through whom the world came to be stepped into the world. The One for whom all things exist entered the history of rebellious creatures who did not recognize Him, and He did so not merely to deliver another message from God but to accomplish something within that history that no prophet could accomplish.