Seven Excellencies of Christ (Part 2)

[0:00] Lesson 5. We're moving quickly.

[0:14] ! Last Monday we actually looked at inspired passages of Scripture found in the opening words of Hebrews chapter 1.

[0:24] ! The entire book of Hebrews is about the spirit of Scripture. The superiority of Christ in all things. We closed last week by considering the seven excellencies of Christ.

[0:40] And actually got to cover the first one, which is called His Heirship. H-E-I-R. That's found in the Hebrews chapter 1, second part of verse 2.

[0:59] This evening we're going to consider some additional excellencies or an excellency, also contained in the opening words of Hebrews. Before I do, I'm going to add a quote in here.

[1:17] Many preachers and theologians have used it over the years. No one seems to know exactly where it originated. I found a couple of names today where credit was given.

[1:30] I'd never heard of them. No one recent, at least probably in the 19th century. And it really sums up the topic and subject of the epistle to the Hebrews.

[1:52] And it goes like this, and I'm sure most if not all of you have heard this. Who is Jesus? He came from the bosom of the Father to the bosom of a woman.

[2:08] He put on humanity that we might put on divinity. He became Son of Man that we might become sons of God. He came from heaven where the rivers never freeze, winds never blow, frost never chills the air, flowers never fade, and one is never sick.

[2:35] No undertakers or no graveyards there for no one ever dies. No one is ever buried. He was born contrary to the laws of nature, lived in poverty, reared in obscurity, only crossed the boundary of the land of his birth once in childhood.

[3:01] He had neither wealth nor influence and had neither training nor formal education. His relatives were inconspicuous and uninfluential.

[3:11] In infancy, he startled a king. In boyhood, he puzzled the wise men. In manhood, ruled the course of nature.

[3:29] He walked upon the billows and hushed the sea to sleep. He healed the multitudes without medicine and made no charge for his services. He never wrote a book.

[3:43] Yet all the libraries of the country could not hold the books that had been written about him. He never wrote a song. Yet he's furnished the theme of more songs than all the songwriters combined.

[3:56] He never founded a college that all the schools together cannot boast of as many students as he has. He never practiced psychiatry and yet he has healed more broken hearts than doctors have healed broken bodies.

[4:13] He never marshaled an army, drafted a soldier, nor fired a gun. Yet no leader had more volunteers who have under his orders made rebels stack arms of surrender without a shot being fired.

[4:28] He is the star of astronomy, the star of geology, the lion and the lamb of zoology, the harmonizer of all discords and the healer of all diseases.

[4:42] Great men have come and gone, yet he lives on. Herod could not kill him. Satan could not seduce him. Death could not destroy him and the grave could not hold him.

[4:57] He laid aside the purple road of royalty as a peasant's gown. He was rich, yet for our sake he became poor. How poor? Ask Mary.

[5:10] Ask the wise men. He slept in another manger. Belonged to another man. He cruised the lake in another boat. Someone else owned it. He rode on another man's donkey.

[5:23] He was buried in another man's tomb. All fail, but never he. The ever perfect one. He is the chief among ten thousand.

[5:36] He is wonderful and merciful. And he is our savior. So that is the person that we are going to study. He is the subject of the book of Hebrews.

[5:50] The next excellency in our list is his creatorship. The creatorship of Christ.

[6:01] Hebrews chapter 1 verse 2. But in these last days, He has spoken to us by His Son, whom He appointed the heir of all things.

[6:11] We already looked at that. Through whom also He created the world. We are going to focus on those seven words at the end of verse 2, which say, Through whom also He created the world.

[6:30] With these words, we see the second excellency of Christ. The fact that He is the creator of all things. And what do we mean by that?

[6:42] And more importantly, what does the Holy Spirit mean by that? Since He is the author of the epistle to the Hebrews. The Father sovereignly chose His Son, the Christ, to be the creative agent through whom the universe and all that is in it came into being.

[7:06] The Lord spoke. And all that is came into being in the creative week. We read about that back in Genesis chapter 1.

[7:20] In that regard, Jesus made everything. He made the toads and the trees. He made lions and lemmings. He made clouds and caterpillars, humans and angels.

[7:36] They were all made by Him. Through the Lord Jesus Christ, John told us that in the gospel that bears... This is what John has to say in the gospel that bears His name.

[7:49] John 1.3 All things came into being by Him. And apart from Him, nothing came into being that has come into being.

[8:07] How do we know that Jesus was God in human flesh? Principally by the fact that He could create matter where there was no matter.

[8:18] I didn't put this in the notes here, but I always like when He created the human eye out of the... took some dirt and spit and made a mud ball. And if you're ever at an ophthalmologist, whether he's a believer or an unbeliever, ask him how intricate the human eye is.

[8:36] I asked one one time, he said, we know of at least 150,000 parts to the human eye. And he said, but we haven't drilled down all the way.

[8:50] How did Jesus create the universe? He did it ex nihilo. What does ex nihilo mean?

[9:01] It is a Latin term meaning out of nothing or from nothing. I love it when the atheist or agnostic scientist says, well, the universe was created by the Big Bang.

[9:16] Okay, what exploded? A molecule, an atom. Where did it come from? We don't know. We don't have a clue. But it exploded in everything.

[9:28] The Bible was not written in Latin. It was written originally in Hebrew, the Old Testament, and Greek, the New Testament.

[9:41] Later, there was a Latin translation of the Bible. One thing is certain, the Lord did not need any tools with which to create.

[9:53] He didn't need a hammer or a screwdriver. Anything like that. He didn't run to lows so he could have the appropriate tools to complete creation.

[10:10] He did it all by the spoken word. Through his word, he spoke everything that is material and everything that is spiritual into existence, except, of course, for the Godhead, which has existed for eternity.

[10:26] His creation was good, and it was only later that creation was marred by man's rebellion into sin.

[10:39] And ever since that event, we find this has been happening. Romans 8.22, For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth unto now.

[10:58] And our universe and our earth does groan. I mean, we see evidences of that, don't we? Florida. Oklahoma in tornado season. It groans.

[11:10] drought. Flood. Flood. Even creation groans to be restored to the condition it was in prior to man's disobedience in the third chapter of the book of Genesis.

[11:30] Let me pose an interesting question for us to consider. What exactly did the Lord create when He created the universe and everything in it?

[11:47] And we read about that actually in the first two verses of Genesis. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. We'll get to the rest.

[12:00] And I've said many times that if you can receive and believe by faith those first four words of the Bible, in the beginning, God, everything else falls into place.

[12:13] Everything. I gave a speech at Wesleyan Christian School one time. I didn't know what I was going to say. They kind of caught me by surprise and about 150 people there and I said, the beauty of the teachers here, you guys can teach without fear and unashamedly in the beginning God.

[12:33] And I had a lot of teachers come and say, I never thought about that. We do teach that, but I never thought about it. But by an examination of this verse is most instructive.

[12:47] These words allow us to peer in some small way into the incredible mind of God as the Creator.

[13:01] And to say these words are remarkable is a massive understatement. God says in just a few words in the first verse of the Holy Bible, everything that could be said about creation.

[13:19] It's amazing. These words are precise. They're concise. They're beyond the ability of a mere human to compose it.

[13:32] So let me explain it to you this way. In the 19th century, there was a scientist by the name of Herbert Spencer.

[13:43] Now for you young guys, and I won't look at Derek, but the 19th century means the 1800s. Sometimes I just think the 19th century has got to be the 19th. No, that was the 20th.

[13:55] But there's a scientist named Herbert Spencer. He was born in England in 1820. He died in 1903 just a few years into the 20th century.

[14:10] He was an English philosopher, a biologist, an anthropologist, a sociologist, a sociologist, a sociologist, and he was steeped in the writings of Charles Darwin.

[14:27] He practically memorized Charles Darwin. And after reading Darwin, Spencer originated the expression, survival of the fittest.

[14:40] He's the one that came up with that from the writings of Darwin. And he's a staunch atheist. Rejected any concept of God.

[14:52] Well, he came up with what many heralded in his day as the greatest scientific discovery ever.

[15:08] He said that all reality that exists in the universe is contained in five categories. Some of you have been asked me about this up here.

[15:29] Time. Force. Action. Space.

[15:41] and, not to leave out, matter.

[15:55] So we've got here written up on the board time, force, action, space, and matter. Got to get them all.

[16:05] And Spencer came up with this. And he was the most invited guy to speak at dinners. And they said, you're the genius of the age.

[16:19] Because he came up with that. But I want us to think about it tonight. This is actually a very logical sequence.

[16:30] As you think about it, I want you to go back to Genesis 1.1. In the beginning, that's time.

[16:44] God, that's force. Created, that's action. The heavens, that's space.

[17:00] And the earth, that's matter. I hate to say this to Mr. Spencer, I'll probably never meet him, but he didn't come up with any of that.

[17:13] He thought he had. I will say this too, Moses didn't come up with this. This statement of truth came from the eternal mind of the triune God.

[17:28] Moses wrote it down. The Holy Spirit inspired him to. Jesus created everything in the universe, time, force, action, space, and matter.

[17:44] He created everything to make the universe function in an orderly fashion. I've heard it said many times, the universe is a timepiece. It's like an intricate clock.

[17:55] work. And dare I say, the Lord did it all without effort. He didn't have to wipe his brow when he was through.

[18:12] One of my favorite pictures was that taken a number of years ago now by the Hubble Space Telescope. the astronomers on the project decided for fun, they were going to point the Hubble into a black void of space and they were going to leave the cameras on for ten days to see what image they captured.

[18:41] That would be the equivalent of holding, I meant to bring these objects and I didn't. The picture they took, if you held a grain of rice, lengthwise, in your fingers, two fingers, or thumb and finger, and held it up, Hubble took everything behind that grain of rice.

[19:10] That's what they captured. In the night sky, they took everything behind that grain of rice. And Hubble was on maximum magnification.

[19:24] Well, the scientists developed the film not knowing really what they would see and they were absolutely astonished. And one of the scientists said, my goodness, there's over 10,000 stars in that picture.

[19:42] And the head of the project said, those are not stars, those are galaxies. each galaxy in the picture contained between 100 and 200 billion stars.

[19:55] And no matter where you held the grain of rice, they discovered, you could move it a little bit. A whole different set of 10,000 galaxies, another 10,000, another 10,000, and go all through the sky every time they took a picture.

[20:12] that speaks not only of the vastness of space, but the infinite power of the Creator, Christ Jesus.

[20:26] I had a guy, an agnostic guy one time was criticizing, he attacked me because he couldn't get to Jesus. And he said, you know, he said, kind of a waste of space.

[20:38] I mean, we can't go visit those places and it seems to me like if he really created that, he was kind of a waste of time. I said, he was showing you a small example of how powerful he is.

[20:51] He spoke all that into existence. I debated whether to include the following information in our study.

[21:06] At my age, I'm convinced this will be the last time I teach the book of Hebrews. And with that in mind, I decided to put it in the study. Oh, by the way, let me back up just for a moment.

[21:20] Hubble's pretty much obsolete now. Now we have the James Webb and they did one of those magnifications and it's a million miles out. And they said the scientists stood there in amazement and one of them said, I think we're seeing the fingers of God.

[21:43] It was so magnificent. I debated whether not to put this in, but I decided to. Since we're talking about the Creator, I want to offer some additional information.

[21:58] I want us to consider the question as to the vastness of the universe created by Christ Jesus in a moment of time.

[22:12] And by the way, the following came from Wilmington's Guide to the Bible by Dr. H.L. Wilmington. That's getting some age on it. I've had my book, I guess, 30, 40 years. He started with the question, though, he said, how vast is our universe?

[22:31] Dr. Wilmington said, it is so vast that it takes a beam of light which travels some 700 million miles an hour over 100,000 years just to cover the distance across the Milky Way galaxy.

[22:46] That's our galaxy. 100,000 years speed of light. Of course, our galaxy is only one of billions, multiple billions in the known universe.

[23:00] So to illustrate the size of our universe, I want to consider these examples. The paper model, and you take the thickness of a sheet of paper, that's the thickness, and let's say the thickness of a sheet of paper represents the distance from the earth to the sun.

[23:21] That's 93 million miles. To represent the distance to the nearest star, we would need a stack of paper 71 feet high.

[23:31] that's the nearest star to the sun. To cover the diameter of the Milky Way galaxy would require a stack 310 miles high.

[23:44] To reach the edge of the known universe would demand a pile of papers, paper sheets, 31 million miles high. And then Dr. Wilmington came up with the orange and grain of sand model.

[24:00] Here an orange would represent the sun. The grain of sand is the earth circling the orange at a distance of 30 feet out, about from here to the wall, I guess.

[24:13] Pluto, and that was when it was considered a planet, I still do. Go on your computer tonight and look up images of Pluto. You know, when they had the flyby, that was the last planet, and they didn't call it a planet.

[24:26] That's the most beautiful celestial body in the Milky Way I've ever seen. And intricate, it's gorgeous. Look it up. Pluto, the most remote planet in our solar system, is another grain of sand.

[24:42] It's circling the orange at 10 city blocks away. Alpha Centauri, the nearest star, to our sun, is 1300 miles away from the orange.

[24:58] And then there's the hollow sun illustration. If the sun were hollow, you could put 1.3 million earths inside, and a couple of million moons.

[25:10] A star named Antares, if it were hollow, could hold 64 million of our suns. Antares. In the constellation of Hercules, there's a star which could contain 100 million stars the size of Antares.

[25:27] And so far, the largest known star, Epsilon, could easily swallow up several million stars the size of the one in Hercules. Thus, we get a feel for the vastness of the universe created by the Lord Jesus Christ.

[25:44] But we should also remember that Jesus also created the smallest things in the universe. So consider these for just a moment. How minute is our universe?

[25:58] Well, simply stated, it's unbelievably small. Consider the following. All material in the universe consists of atoms. Atoms in turn are made up of three building blocks.

[26:13] Which are protons, neutrons, and then you've got the nucleus, and then there's electrons, which circle the nucleus as our earth does the sun.

[26:26] On the tip of a ballpoint pin, there are so many atoms that if they were carried by an army marching for a breast, an atom to a man, it would take over 20,000 years for them to march past.

[26:42] It takes 25 trillion protons laid side by side to span a linear inch. There are as many protons in a cubic inch of copper as there are drops of water in the oceans of the world or grains of sand on the seashores of the earth.

[27:01] the size of an electron is to a dust speck as the dust speck is to the entire earth. The space between an electron and the nucleus, remember you got this little tiny deal there and these things are buzzing around?

[27:21] The space between an electron and the nucleus is 10,000 times as great as the size of that nucleus. show you how long ago this was done.

[27:33] For example, if the outer shell of the electron is an atom and it was in the Houston Astrodome, the nucleus would be a size of a ping pong ball in the center of the stadium.

[27:47] I don't know if the Houston Astrodome is still there. They tore it down. If most of the atoms in empty space, most atoms are made up of empty space, this thing here has got holes in it.

[28:03] Massive amounts of holes, more holes than atoms. Then why when I push on it, doesn't my finger go through it?

[28:14] Because it's mostly space. Well, the surface of the table like the tip of one's finger consists of a wall of electrons belonging to the outermost layer of atoms in both objects.

[28:28] Both the speed and force attraction of these electrons prohibit our fingers from going through the table just like if you cranked up a bicycle wheel and said, okay, now I'm going to put my fingers through the spokes and bring it out without being hurt.

[28:43] That's not going to happen. When Jesus created the universe, He also created energy. So let's consider this question.

[28:53] How much energy exists within our universe? protons and neutrons within the nucleus of an atom are held together with a density of 1 billion tons per cubic inch.

[29:07] A billion tons. That's around 40 pounds of energy between each proton. This energy force is stronger than regular gravitational forces by a factor of 1 followed by 38 zeros.

[29:22] How big is that number? It's over 100 trillion times larger than the number of grains of sand on the Earth's seashores. German physicist Otto Gale had calculated a single drop of gasoline if totally utilized in an automobile would be sufficient for 400 journeys around the world.

[29:44] That's 10 million miles. Albert Einstein said that the total amount of energy released from one drop of water could easily lift 200 million tons of steel one mile above the Earth.

[29:59] The various stars and galaxies were created by the conversion of energy into mass. It has been determined the amount of energy used in the creation of only one gram of matter, one four hundred and fiftieth of a pound, is equal to 2.5 times the amount of energy generated by Niagara Falls in a day.

[30:19] That's about 10 million kilowatts. Then finally, how complex is our universe? Here we refer to life itself.

[30:31] The wonders of the atom and the glory of the galaxies are but a drab tinker toy when compared to the miracle of living organisms. In light of all of the above, surely we can join the apostle Paul as he offers up his great tribute of promise to our glorious creator in Romans 11.

[30:55] Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God. How unsearchable are his judgments and his ways past finding out. For who hath known the mind of the Lord, or who hath been his counselor, or who hath first given to him, and it shall be recompensed unto him again.

[31:15] And then my favorite verse, for of him and through him and to him are all things to whom be glory forever.

[31:27] Amen. The maker of the universe and all that is contained therein is the Lord Jesus Christ. He planned it, he made it, and he sustains it.

[31:42] Thus we see the creatorship of God in Christ. I'm going to mention one of our excellency tonight.

[31:55] In the third verse of Hebrews 1, he is the radiance of the glory of God.

[32:07] And we honestly don't use the word radiance in our daily vocabulary every day, so I decided I'd look that up, and I actually did in 60 different English Bible translations.

[32:21] Several of them use the exact language, so I don't have 60 versions, but this is what I was able to piece together. Jesus is the brightness of God's glory.

[32:35] Jesus is the effulgence of God's glory. glory. The sun is the only expression of God's glory. Jesus is the sole expression of the glory of God.

[32:51] The sun is the light of God's glory. The sun is the radiance of the Shekinah. The sun shows the glory of God.

[33:02] The sun reflects, radiates, and shines forth the glory of God. God. The sun is a reflection of God's glory. Jesus reflects the brightness of God's glory.

[33:17] God's sun shines out with God's glory. The sun perfectly mirrors God. The sun shines, S-O-N, with the shining greatness of the Father.

[33:34] Jesus is the one imprinted with God's image and shimmering with all His glory. And then the last one, Jesus is the refulgence of God's glory.

[33:47] I had never heard of that word. Never had I heard it. So I looked it up, and it's actually a word. And I looked up the synonyms of the refulgence, and good news, I'm not going to read them all.

[34:03] There were 47 of them, synonyms. I'm going to literally randomly select a few. Shining, light, brilliant, blazing, dazzling, glittering, twinkling, shimmering, luminescent, radiant, fluorescent, shiny, polished, glittering, and I'm not sure I should read these, lambent.

[34:35] I don't know what that is. 47 synonyms, and I got them all in the handout if you want it. Now let's talk about briefly, and we're going to close, the greatest tragedy in the world is the fact that the majority of people on planet earth have no desire to see or live in God's light.

[34:55] they could care less. In other words, they want nothing to do with the Creator, Christ Jesus. Why do most people reject the light sent by God into the world?

[35:13] Well, a passage on 2 Corinthians chapter 4 gives an explanation for that. This is verse 4. In their case, the God of this world. Anybody know who the God of this world is?

[35:24] Satan. By the permissive will of God for right now. In their case, the God of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.

[35:50] God sent His light into the world and Satan moved in to blind the eyes and the minds of fallen man so that they would not look at nor even seek the light.

[36:05] I want to suggest to you fellows that that blindness is increasing. Is exponential a good word? It's increasing.

[36:18] What does God's word have to say about those who are being saved? well, you've got to skip down two verses to 2 Corinthians 4-6. For God who said, let light shine out of darkness, has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God, and I love this, in the face of Jesus Christ.

[36:42] We see the glory of the Father in the face of Jesus Christ. that is what happens when God comes into the life of one of His chosen vessels.

[36:56] So this evening we've seen the creatorship of Christ. He spoke everything that exists into being, and I'm going to close where we kind of started in John's Gospel, chapter 1, verses 1-3, in the beginning was the Word.

[37:17] And the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made.

[37:35] In the Holy Bible, the phrase God said appears 589 times. In the book of Genesis, God said appears 93 times.

[37:52] In the first chapter of Genesis, God said appears 10 times. So how does one speak? We've been talking to each other tonight.

[38:04] How do we do that? We use words. We communicate with words. words. And that gives us, I think, an idea as to why the Creator, Christ Jesus, is called the Word.

[38:25] Because He spoke everything into existence in a moment in time. Thank you.