God's Last and Loudest Word

By the time this letter was written, Paul's young friend Timothy had been thrown in prison and let out again. Near the very end, the writer stops to pass on the news: "Our brother Timothy has been set free!"

(Whoever wrote this letter never signed it. Paul? Apollos? Barnabas? Nobody knows, and the letter does not seem to mind.)

It went to Jewish believers in Jesus who were having a hard time. Their neighbors had jeered at them in the street. Some of them had been locked up. Others had come home to find the door broken and their things carried off.

Now some of them were tired, and the old way looked easier: the temple, the priests, the lambs on the altar, the way their grandparents had always done it. "Maybe we should just go back," someone might have said. "At least people left us alone then."

So the letter came, and in a crowded house someone stood up to read it.

"Long ago," it began, "God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets, at many times and in many ways."

Everyone in that room knew those ways. God spoke to Moses out of a bush that burned and burned and never burned up. He spoke to Elijah in a soft whisper, after a wind that split the rocks, an earthquake, and a fire. He even spoke through Balaam's donkey, and the donkey had a few complaints of its own. "What have I done to you," it asked, "that you have hit me three times?"

Every one of those words was true. But no prophet was given all of it. Moses heard one part, Isaiah another, Jeremiah another, like a long letter sent one page at a time over a thousand years.

"But in these last days," the reader went on, "God has spoken to us by his Son."

The room went still.

"God has promised everything to him, and through him God made the world. The Son is the shining of God's glory, and the exact stamp of who God is."

(When a coin was made, a metal stamp was pressed into it, and the coin came out with the stamp's picture on it, every line the same. That stamped picture is the word the letter uses.)

"He holds everything up by his powerful word. And after he made us clean from our sins, he sat down at the right hand of God in heaven. He is as much greater than the angels as the name he was given is greater than theirs."

Sat down! Back in the holy tent, and later in the temple, the priests stood to do their work. Day after day they offered the same sacrifices, because the job was never finished. (God's instructions for the holy tent listed a golden chest called the ark, a lampstand, a table, two altars, a big washbasin, and not one chair.)

Go back to the old way? The old way had been God's own gift, but it was a way of waiting. The prophets carried God's words faithfully, one after another, and then the voices stopped, and for a long time the people waited for the next word. Moses himself had promised that God would raise up another prophet like him, and said, "Listen to him."

Then the Son came. The prophets had carried God's messages. He was God's message, walking the roads of Galilee in sandals. The voice from the burning bush now spoke from a fishing boat. He died on a cross to make people clean, once, and rose from the dead, and went home to his Father and took the seat the holy tent never had.

He is sitting there now, his work finished. Whenever this letter is read aloud, God is speaking his last word again, and his last word is Jesus.