Is Jesus Relevant

00:01 Greet each one of you in the name of Jesus this morning. Let's give glory to God by saying Hallelujah. It's indeed a privilege to be here again and to be able to open our copies of the Scriptures and to open to the book of Hebrews. And I would invite you to turn there this morning for our text. 00:20 Our text is from Hebrews 1:1-4. 00:26 "God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the worlds; who, 00:45 being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had by Himself purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high; having become so much better than the angels, 01:04 as He has by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they." Some years ago, 01:13 the distinguished publishing house of Grosset and Dunlap brought together about 28 different educators and historians and asked them to select and to list and to name the most significant events of history, then to list those events in order of importance. So after several months of labor, 01:34 the panel who commissioned the study reported that they considered the most significant event of history to be the discovery of America. In second place was the invention of movable type by Gutenberg, the printing press as it developed. 01:56 Eleven different events tied for third place and five events tied for fourth place. The events tying for fourth place were the writing of the Constitution of America, the United States, the development of ether, the development of the X-ray, the discovery of the airplane, 02:17 and the life of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus tied for fourth place out of a whole bunch of other selections. Now I want to ask you the question this morning: Is Jesus Christ relevant? Is He relevant? Does He matter? 02:37 Asking if He's relevant is another way of asking: Does He matter? Does He make any difference? Is it important? Is He important? Is He relevant beyond the first-century personality who walked with men and talked with men and was born and did the things that Jesus did? Beyond that, is He still relevant? Beyond the historical record of Jesus, 03:00 for who can argue with this historical record? The historical record is firmly established not only in biblical history but in secular history as well. So is He relevant beyond that? Is He relevant beyond what the world thinks of Him, betting Him a tie for fourth place after a whole bunch of other things in first, second, and tied for third place? 03:21 Is He relevant beyond what the world thinks, beyond His role as a suffering servant and the suffering Savior, and beyond His role as my own personal Savior, and beyond even His role as the friend of sinners and the lover of souls? Is He relevant beyond that? 03:42 Or is what we have in Christ just a personal religion, a personal experience with Christ that really doesn't go any further than that? And I think you know this is a rhetorical question this morning. And I would venture to say that every one of us. 03:59 Is He relevant beyond just a personal experience with some religious experience? And I know that all of us this morning would say that, or I trust that all of us would say that He is relevant beyond that. And He is of great importance and even of utmost importance. But why is that? And what makes it so? 04:19 Is Jesus Christ in 2022 have an ongoing influence in this world? Is He important? Can He be trusted? Does He have anything to offer a broken world beyond a few dos and don'ts in a holy book? 04:36 And does He have anything to say to us specifically about that relevance today? We look at our text this morning, the opening words of the book of Hebrews. The opening word is God. It reminds us of the opening word of Scripture in Genesis. 04:54 "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." Here we start out with God. He talks about the history of the world. He talks about the ownership of the world. He talks about the eternality of the Son. And He starts with God. 05:09 Now He says in these verses of Scripture that God spoke authoritatively in His law, the prophets, the Old Testament Scriptures. And He at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets. 05:28 Now we just take that first verse and we have a worldview that develops out of that that the world around us knows nothing of. Because we start and end with God. Our view of the world, our view from biblical worldview, and our view of Christ is that God was, that God is, 05:49 and that God will be. In fact, later in the book of Hebrews He says that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. God spoke. Not only does God exist, but that God spoke. We have His word in verse 1. 06:07 "God at various times and in various ways spoke." Do you realize how profound that is? That we have a God who not just draws pictures. He doesn't just speak in symbols, but He speaks in words. He speaks in words that can be understood. 06:28 He communicates a message that is profound and powerful. We understand that the Scriptures do not begin with the book of Matthew. The Scriptures begin with the book of Genesis. 06:42 And so we appeal, He goes all the way back to the beginning, to the times past as God in various times and in various ways spoke in those past times to the fathers by the prophets. Now I will just say this about these first four verses. In the Greek, they tell me that this is all one sentence. 07:04 That's divided, I think, into two sentences in our English. But one sentence in the first four verses. And the writer here pulls out all of the stops to try to find the words to describe this God who speaks, this God who spoke, this God who speaks, and this God who has perfect ability to speak. 07:26 His redemption is tied to His creation in this passage of Scripture. He talks about redemption having been purged by our sins. And He talks about creation having made the worlds through God's Son. And so we look back all the way back, not to the beginning of Christ in Bethlehem, 07:46 but the beginning of the world in Genesis. And we find out, however, that God, the God who speaks, speaks, has spoken at various times in various ways. And His spoken word in the past was partial. And then His word is progressive. 08:07 And now His word is perfect. If you get that. His word in the past was partial, various times, various ways, various manners, but in these last days has spoken to us in a perfect way by His Son. Let's unpack this a bit. 08:27 We see that He says God is the subject here, not gods. That's significant. We're not talking about many gods. We're not talking even about three gods. We're talking about one God in Trinitarian form: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And He's speaking, speaking. 08:46 He spoke in the past in a partial message, a little here, a little there, with many portions. He spoke in fragments. He spoke in many parts, piece by piece, many manners. He spoke through dreams. He spoke through visions. He spoke by angels. 09:05 He spoke by the prophets and through the prophets. He spoke by the urine and the tomb, which was on the breastplate of the priest, how they would ask God a question. And certain lights on those gems would light up in giving an answer from God. It was partial. It was fragmentary. But it was God speaking, 09:26 God speaking, a little here, a little there. He spoke by natural events. He spoke by symbols. He spoke by a pillar of fire. He spoke by smoke. He spoke by thunderings and lightnings. He even spoke by a burning bush and an ignorant donkey. God speaking, speaking, speaking, a little here, 09:45 a little there, getting a progressive understanding of His will but still partial. Even when God spoke the law on Mount Sinai, it was a lot at that time, but it was still fragments. It was still not the complete revelation. 10:04 So His word was partial in the past. And His word in revelation has been progressive in the past. A little to Adam, He spoke to Adam and Eve. 10:15 He gave them the initial promise that there would be a son, that there would be a man-child who would crush the head of the serpent and who would destroy the works of the devil. But they only had a little fragment. 10:27 And He spoke to Noah, the Noahic covenant, that Noah would be saved if he believed in the promises of God and in the word of God and followed that in faithful obedience. He spoke to Noah. He spoke to Moses. He spoke a lot to Moses. 10:44 And the Jewish people look at the first five books of the Old Testament written by Moses as the foundation of their faith. And it is really the foundation of the gospel. But it's partial. And it was progressive. And so as time went on, God speaking by the prophets to the forefathers, 11:05 little by little, more and more until something happens in verse 2. He comes through in a perfect speech, a perfect revelation. But this word says that He spoke to fathers, the forefathers, to the ancestors, to the patriarchs in the ancient times, long before now, 11:26 to establish a covenant with them, covenant with Moses, I mean Adam, a covenant with Noah, a covenant with Abraham, 11:36 a covenant with Moses in times past connecting from one generation to the next as God revealed Himself progressively until verse 2 that He has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, 11:56 His Son, the pinnacle or the perfection of God speaking. God spoke perfectly. He spoke. He uttered words using words to declare His mind and His heart, giving us His divine thoughts, His divine revelation. He refers to this as the last days. 12:17 Now it's interesting. We think of the last days as being the days right before the coming of Christ. Actually, Scripture in the New Testament talks about the last days as being everything after the time of Christ, of being the last days. You have the former days. You have the last days. 12:33 "Hath in these last days spoken unto us by His Son." And what we are in today is the last of the last days. So when Scripture talks about the last days, know this: that in the last days, these certain things will happen. It's not always talking about the last of the last. 12:51 It's talking about the period from the time of Christ to the end of the age. And through this, He has spoken to us by His Son, His Son, not just through His Son. He didn't just speak through His Son, but He spoke by His Son. 13:11 There's a difference. God may speak through us, but in Christ, He spoke by Him. 13:18 In other words, the very person of Christ was the revelation of God, not just a message that Christ brought and delivered, but the actual person of God showing up in flesh to reveal to us the heart, the head, the mind, and will of God. 13:40 This is a tremendous passage on Christology, who Jesus is. So we ask the question throughout this message: Is He relevant? Is it relevant that God would speak? Well, yes, it was. And yes, it is. And even more so, it is relevant that in these last days, 13:59 God has spoken by Christ, giving us His fullness of revelation. 14:07 Now what's interesting to me is that a lot of people want to go back and have God still speak through the like He did in the Old Testament, through dreams and visions and signs and wonders and through smoke and 14:22 miracles and so on. And we forget that the greatest revelation and the greatest message that God could give has already been given in Jesus Christ and, of course, in His holy word spoken by Christ to the apostles. 14:45 Now this leads us to see that the whole of Scripture can and must be interpreted through the person of Christ. We really will never understand the Bible until you look at Christ. 15:03 You will never understand the mind of God, the heart of God until you look at Jesus Christ, His Son. And so all of the Scripture from the Old Testament, the history of the Old Testament, 15:22 the wisdom literature, the prophets, even the New Testament, the epistles, the gospels, and especially even then the book of Revelation, none of it makes any sense unless God has spoken about it by Christ. And we understand it by Christ. 15:45 He is the fountainhead of all wisdom and knowledge. And He is the central figure around which all the gospel fits together. Christ brings about a comprehensive understanding of the world, of the past, of the future, of the present, 16:04 of His dispensation of grace, of His dispensation of law. It all comes together in the understanding of the person of Jesus Christ. So we've seen God's word here in verse 1. In verse 2, we see God's Son. Now what is His Son like in verse 2 and 3? 16:26 "He has spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things." He has appointed Him or set Him in place. The word appointed means to put into place. He is the cornerstone of the church. He is the fountain of living water. 16:48 He is the essence of God's dealings with man, Christ appointed, set in place as heir of God, the heir, the heir. 17:04 You remember the account when Jesus said that the husbandman or the farmer field, owner of the field, rented or gave out his vineyard to rented it out and to caretakers. And they abused the field and so on. 17:25 And He went to get some profit from that field. And they beat up the prophet that came. They beat up the person that came as the owner's representative. And then He said, "Well, they're beating up all my servants. Surely they will respect my Son. I will send my Son." And so He sent His Son as the heir. 17:46 And what did they say? "Let us kill this heir and let's take possession of this field ourselves." That's what Satan's desire has been, to destroy the heir, Jesus Christ, and to take His kingdom away from Him and make it His own. 18:05 But you and I know that that's not going to happen because God has appointed Christ heir of all things. Spurgeon said it like this: "Heir of all things, Christ is Lord of all the angels. Not a seraph spread his wings except at His bidding. 18:26 As for all things here below, God has given the power over all flesh. All must willingly or else unwillingly submit to His sway for His Father has appointed Him." Colossians 1:15-16, "He is the image of the invisible God, 18:47 the firstborn over all creation. For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. 19:01 All things were created through Him and for Him." And so we have here God appointing Him as heir of all things and making the world, the universe, the worlds through the Son, Jesus being the Son who made the worlds, 19:21 the universe as the partner to God, God creating through the Son. It's interesting here that He says, "Through whom He made the worlds, by whom He spoke." So you have those two prepositions. 19:40 He spoke by Him, but He worked through Him. So His revelation is Christ. The agent of creation is Christ. He produced it. He brought it forth. He authored this creation, both visible and invisible, 20:01 seen and unseen, material and spiritual. He made it all. He produced it, the material world as well as the angels. Now when He says here that He made the worlds, that also means not only the creation that we see but the ages of time. 20:22 He created the ages of time. So He is the one who created both the seen and the unseen. 20:30 "And He Himself is the brightness of the glory of God." We look in verse 3, "Who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person and upholding all things by the word of His power." There's a lot in there. So we're talking about the person of Christ. 20:50 Who is He? He is the brightness of the glory of God, the radiance, the splendor of the glory of God, the eternal glory of God. I think this is a picture of Christ being eternal. He is eternal. For if you have an eternal glory, you must have an eternal light, something that embodies that glory. 21:12 And so the glory was not given to Christ when He died. The glory was not given to Christ when He rose. The glory was not given to Christ when He ascended. The glory was already given to Christ with the glory that He had with the Father before the world was created. So is He relevant? 21:33 You answer the question. Is He relevant? We believe that He is. The brightness of His glory, the radiance, the splendor, the eternalness aspect of God, the exact representation of His nature. 21:48 Look at that phrase, "The express image of His person." Now I don't know if God has DNA. I doubt it because God is a spirit. But whatever DNA defines the essence of God, Christ has that same essence. 22:10 He is not something different than the Father. He is the express image of the Father. Oh, yes, He's different in the sense of function and role and person, but He is the representation of the Father. 22:29 This is hard for us to explain. But He is the representation of His image. The word here means something stamped or engraved like a letter or a sign, like an image stamped on a coin. Christ bears the very stamp of the nature of God. 22:50 So what we have here in Christ, get this this morning, friends, is not something that appears like God, but what we have in Christ is someone that is God. He doesn't just look like God. He doesn't just appear to be God. He's not just a phantom God, 23:12 a ghost God. He is a real expression of God, the express image of the person of God. Now does that make Him relevant? Absolutely, absolutely, the precise reproduction of His essence. 23:35 That's His person. What about His power? What about His power? Well, this says that He upholds all things by the word of His power, upholding, upholding. That word has the idea of carrying it. 23:51 And it's not carrying it or resting on His shoulder in the sense of a weight that weighs Him down that He can barely carry. No, the sense here in this word of upholding is to rest it on His shoulder and to move it to where it belongs. 24:10 Ah, our Lord Jesus is not just carrying the weight of the world on His shoulder like we would carry weight, where if you get too much on there, we collapse. How much weight can you carry? Lincoln, you're a young man here. How much weight can you carry? Well, we won't ask Him. We won't ask Him to respond. But think about it. 24:29 How much weight can't you carry? So if we give you 100 pounds, you might be able to carry that. Give you 120, give you 130, give you 150. Anybody here be able to carry 200 pounds, 300? No, there would come a place where we would collapse under the weight. Not Christ. 24:49 He is upholding all things according to His powerful word. He bears up under the world and governs all things in the universe. He is in charge of all things as part of this upholding. 25:08 It means also to govern and to be in charge of. If He has the power to create and He has the power to sustain, then He also has the power to destroy. Do you not remember what Jesus said on the cross? 25:24 "Do you not know that I could call my Father and He would send legions of 12 legions of angels to destroy this world?" One word from Jesus would have unleashed destruction on every living being and on the cosmos itself. 25:45 One word. He upholds all things by His powerful word. Mueller says it like this: "The power to create brings with it the power to preserve and to destroy. He does so by the word of His power or His powerful word, 26:07 His verbal commands, His omnipotent decrees, 26:10 and His spoken instruction." So we see in this verse, these two verses, His person, His power, and His purger. Well, that's kind of not quite proper English but had to have another P in there. He is purging of our sins. 26:32 And so this powerful expression of the revelation of God in Christ, who is the heir of all things, who made the worlds and is representing God in His brightness of His glory and His person and His image and upholding the world, has by Himself purged our sins, 26:51 who sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high. Nobody else has ever been in that position. Let me tell you, nobody else ever will be in that position. He has that position given to Him as God's Son, 27:12 as heir of the Father. And no one else will ever take that position at the right hand of God. So what about the sheep and the goats? Well, we'll be over on the right, but we're not going to be at the right hand. 27:33 We're not going to be the one who He says, "This is the one who has been anointed to represent me and to do all that I have given to Him to do." He's the purger of our sins. He Himself, He by Himself purged our sins. He didn't need anybody else to purge them for us. 27:54 He purged them by Himself. And He did it completely, not just in the sense of a ceremonial cleansing, which the Old Testament did, the ceremonial cleansing and the ritual washings. 28:08 But this actually removed the stain of sin, removing not only the sin from the impurity of the body but the impurity of the soul and heart of man has been purged of his sins completely and totally 28:27 purged once and for all. So that Christ, as a high priest - and we'll see this later on through the book - when He had finished doing His high priestly duties, sat down at the right hand of God. Now, the priests did not sit down. 28:46 There was no chair in the temple. There was no chair in the tabernacle. There was no place for them to rest their weary feet while they were on duty. They worked, they worked, they worked, they worked. They did their duties. They went. They came back. They did their duties. There was no place for lounging in the tabernacle and the temple. 29:07 But Christ, the reason for that is because their work was never done. There was always more sacrifices to present. There was always more sins to confess. There was always more, more, more, more prayers to offer because the sin had not been fully dealt with and cleansed. 29:29 But Christ sat down at the right hand of the Father, having removed the stain of sin and now is at His right hand interceding for us, yes, preparing a place for us, yes. 29:48 We don't know how He's doing all of that. But I know if He can hold this world with His spoken word and He could create the world with the spoken word in six days, think of what He's been creating with His spoken word for 2,000 years. 30:05 Sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high, having become so much better. 30:14 Here we have God's word, God's Son, and God's inheritance, verse 4, "As He has by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they." One of the things that we inherit from our fathers is our name. We inherit it from our fathers. 30:33 We inherit our name, not just our first name but our last name. It's important that inheritance that comes from a godly father and a godly grandfather and a godly great-grandfather and a godly greats and greats and greats and pass that name on down. 30:54 Name means something. And it means something in Christ, in Christ, a better name, a more excellent name than any of the angels. Well, you know the name of probably about two angels, Micah, yeah, Micah the archangel and Gabriel, probably, 31:15 well, and Lucifer before he fell. We don't know the names of the other angels. But whatever they are, they do not come close to comparing with the name of Jesus the Christ, Jesus Christ, not even close. 31:33 God's inheritance is because of His position. He sat down. His work was done. He sat down on the right hand, that place of authority. And then we see His comparison, the comparison with the angels. 31:48 Brother Dwayne's going to be preaching on this next Sunday, "The Son exalted above the angels." To which of the angels did He ever well, anyway, that's verse 5. You can take it from there, Dwayne. More excellent name. This is a comparison. The name spoke for the whole person and the character of a person. 32:10 We use names to identify people, to distinguish people from this person to that person to this person to that person. It gets confusing even in the church when you have two people by the same name. Sometimes I look around and say, "Oh, they're talking about Todd Miller." Sometimes I hear my voice and they say, "Todd." "Okay, that's me. I'm supposed to answer that." We distinguish people. 32:30 But in scripture, the name of a person was more than just how to distinguish them from someone else. It was the representation of their character. So what kind of a name does He have? 32:41 He has a name that represents His character as the Son of God, the Vine, the Master, the Christ, the Messiah, the Morning Star, the Faithful Witness, the Firstborn from the Dead, the Alpha and the Omega, 33:00 the Rulers over the Kings of the Earth, the Beginning and the End, the First and the Last, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, He that was dead and now is alive. 33:10 It all reflects in that name, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, better, more excellent than any other name to be given among men. There is no other name by which we must be saved. Acts 2:36, 33:30 "Therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly that God has made this Jesus whom you crucified both Lord and Christ." So is He relevant? Is He relevant? Is He important? Does He matter? 33:50 Can He be trusted? Is He real? Is He true? 33:55 I want to share a word of testimony this morning, not my testimony, but a testimony of someone that I read. His name was Deacon Eberhardt. The word named Deacon Eberhardt probably doesn't mean anything to you. It didn't mean anything to me. But his story tells this story very well. 34:16 Because what we have in here, in Hebrews 1:1-4, is a decisive transition from the old partial - it was perfect, but it was incomplete - to the new, which is now fully complete and developed. 34:40 Deacon started out in the Episcopal Church, went to seminary in Berkeley, California, in the '70s. That would not be a good place to go to seminary, even in the 2020s. And he created his own religion. He called it godianity because he believed there was a God. 35:00 But he found this person of Jesus to be rather weird. Then something happened to Deacon. He married a Jewish atheist. That's an interesting combination as well. Then something happened to them. They had a baby, their first daughter. 35:21 And as they held that baby, 35:24 they realized that there is no way you can be an atheist and look at a baby. And God began working their hearts as they saw this beautiful, perfect creature as a gift from God. And his wife's atheism, he says, bit the dust. Her new God belief was now Jewish. 35:45 Okay. Five years after that, he was laying on a hammock one day with his little girl, five-year-old daughter. And his godianity was challenged. And his daughter looked at him and said, "Daddy, I know there's a God." Don't you love the sincerity of faith of a child? 36:05 "I know there's a God." He said, "How do you know there's a God, sweetie?" She pointed at the leaves of the tree. She said, "There's a God because the wind, even though you can't see it, makes the leaves on the trees move. And God, even though you can't see Him, makes people move." Wow. That's profound for a five-year-old. 36:26 Reminds me of what Jesus said in John 3 about being born of the Spirit, "For the wind bloweth where it listeth, and now hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth. So is everyone that is born of the Spirit." "You can't see God," she said, "but you know He's there." And then she asked her daddy a question, "Daddy, what do we believe?" Wow. 36:48 Profound. He challenged his beliefs at that moment. And him and his wife had a conversation immediately thereafter. She was no longer an atheist. He was whatever he was. And they decided that they would raise their family as Jews, Reformed Jews, 37:08 Old Testament, Old Testament, Reformed Jews. Yet he teetered back and forth with still being restless in his faith. And during the services, one evening on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, God spoke to Deacon and said, 37:26 "If you should desire to come to Me, My door is open to you." Right away, he says, "I knew I needed to become a Jew myself." And three years after that, his conversion to Judaism was complete. 37:39 But him and his wife found something in the Reformed Jewish community that while they say they believed the Old Testament and the Torah, the first five books, the Law of Moses, they were very selective in how they practiced it. So they would practice the things that they wanted. But the stricter things of the law, they would not practice. 38:01 And this confused them. 38:03 And they were confused by that and a bit disillusioned by that. And they moved to a place where they were living across the street from a little Baptist church. The Baptist people would invite them to their church and said, "If you ever want to know more about Jesus, we know you're Jews. But if you ever want to know more about Jesus, 38:23 come on over and we'll tell you more about Him." And so one day, he crossed the road to the church that Sunday morning. And the pastor preached from 1 Timothy. He said he was astounded that Baptist preacher preached from the Old Testament message references in his message and was attuned to even the Hebrew nuances in the Old Testament. 38:44 Him and the pastor began to speak and have Bible study week after week. And she began to get involved in the women's Bible study. And several months later, about nine months later, he said they were convinced that Jesus was the Messiah. Now, here's what I want to get to. 39:04 He said, "They knew the Passion story. But it occurred to them that maybe, just maybe, that story might be real. And if it were, then everything would need to change, relevance, relevance. If Jesus is who Hebrews says He is, then everything must change. 39:24 There is nothing that can stay the same. 39:27 Instead, their Torah-based lives would be as dead and ineffectual as godianity." Instead, he said, "We would give our souls to the personal love of the incarnation, the God-man who dwelt among us." Now, get this. This is His word. 39:47 "We realized that the Old Testament begged for the climax of the New Testament. 39:55 It begs for it as the fulfillment of what God spoke to the forefathers through the prophets." He said it took them nine months and an appropriate duration for a rebirth before they committed themselves to Jesus. He came to faith in Christ. 40:16 Three months later, his wife came to faith in Christ. And two of their younger children followed after that. And what he closes his article by saying is, "I had assumed that when I heard the voice of God, He was beckoning me into Judaism. 40:31 Little did I know He was actually calling me to Christ." That's what this does. It does not beckon us to become Jews. It beckons us to come to Jesus. So is He relevant? 40:50 Is breathing relevant to the body? I think yes. Is the brain relevant to the nervous system? Is the heart relevant to our circulatory system? Is an engine relevant to a vehicle? 41:11 Is hydrogen and oxygen relevant to water? 41:15 You say, "Of course." That's what Hebrews 1:1-4 says, "Of course, He is relevant. He is exalted." Let's pray. Lord, what a wonderful, marvelous passage of scripture this morning. 41:35 We have felt very unqualified 41:40 to proclaim because of His magnificence, the magnificence of the language by which is used to describe Christ. But even more than that, the magnificence of Christ. Lord, when You spoke in the Old Testament, we cherished those words. 41:59 They are the words of God. They are words of scripture. They are words of truth. David, over and over in the Psalms, glorifies the words of God, the law of God, the revelation of God. But, oh, Lord, in Christ Jesus, it all makes sense. It all comes together to completion, 42:20 to a complete word by the Son from God. Lord, I pray that we will take to heart that when we grasp this truth, everything else changes. Nothing can stay the same. So to that end, 42:39 dear Father, make us eternally grateful. Through Christ, we pray. Amen.