Yesterday we began two weeks of reading the Letter to the Hebrews. Unlike many other Letters in the New Testament we have no known author. More correctly, we have no know human author. Like all of the Bible the ultimate author is God.
The Letter opens by explaining the fundamental distinction between the Old and the New Testament, a distinction that we can often overlook. One of the worst mistakes we can make is to read the Bible as if it were all equal, picking out verses from Old and New that tell us what we want to here.
The Letter to the. Hebrews explains that what we have in the Old Testament is God revealing himself
In partial and various ways
In Greek these are the first words of verse one.
On the other hand, Jesus is the
Refulgence of God's Glory, the very image
In the Old Testament we see lots of little glimpses, in the New the fullness of God is revealed. Jesus is
heir of all things and through whom he created the universe,
We should recognize the words that are in our creed.
With this distinction in mind, as Christians, we read the Old Testament always through the lens of the New. The New is foreshadowed in the Old, the Old is fulfilled in the New. God did not change but with the incarnation of God our capacity to truly understand God was radically transformed.
