I want to draw your attention tonight to this passage that was read in your hearing, Hebrews chapter 1, going up to verse 4 of chapter 2, and the great question that you all know in verse 3, how shall we escape if we neglect so great salvation? And our salvation is so great because our Savior is so great. Now you know that there is relative greatness and absolute greatness. Snowdon is a great mountain. It's the highest mountain in England and Wales. It's a great mountain. But if you put it down in the Alps alongside Mont Blanc for example, it would be a hill there. Or if you put it in the Himalayas compared to the much climbed Everest, then it would be like a molehill. It's great, but it's relatively great. Everest is absolutely great. It's unique. It's the highest, isn't it? There's relative greatness and there's absolute greatness. We have a mayor in Aberystwyth and I don't even know his name. The mayor in London is always appearing on the news and is speaking out. He's a great man to be a mayor in Avarice for Avarice with people but that's just relative greatness, isn't it? So what the writer to the Hebrews is doing in this first chapter is to show the absolute greatness of Jesus Christ. and he's doing it in order to encourage and strengthen the faith of these Hebrew Christians which is under such pressure. They've been persecuted. When a boy became a Christian and said that the one crucified by the order of the Sanhedrin and their chief priest was in fact the Messiah and the Son of God. They held a funeral service and they never acknowledged his life again when a wife said, Jesus Christ is my Lord and Saviour. The husband divorced her and she was thrown out and they were no longer meeting in the precincts of the temple and going to the feast three times a year and all the gorgeous ceremonies that took place. They were meeting behind locked doors. And as the years went by, it didn't seem to be getting much better. And they were falling away. And they were crucifying to themselves the Son of God afresh because they were saying we were wrong to think he was the Messiah. he got what was coming to him. And there was a spirit of discontent and failure amongst them. And so the apostle writes this letter to them and he writes this letter to cheer them and encourage them not to give up, not to lose heart. And he does so by reminding them of the greatness of Christ that though the temple is great, it's relatively great. Though the high priests in all their finery look great, that's just relative greatness. Absolute greatness is Jesus Christ. And so what he does is to bring a number of comparisons, like I compared Snowden with Mont Blanc or the Himalayas or the Mayor of Aberystwyth with the Mayor of London. And so he does this and the first comparison he makes is with the prophets. He starts off, God who at sundry times and in diverse manners spake in times past unto our fathers by the prophets has in these last days spoken unto us by his son. Now who would be the greatest of the prophets? I suppose we would say Elijah because on the Mount of Transfiguration when the Lord sent a representative of the law and a representative of the prophets to that hill to meet with Jesus Christ just before his death to encourage him, to talk with him about his exodus via death to heaven. He sent Moses, the representative of the law and he sent then Elijah as the representative of the prophets because Elijah was the greatest of the prophets say. On Mount Carmel, taking on 850 prophets of Baal and they shouting and dancing and cutting themselves until they were hoarse And there was no fire from heaven and he prays, Lord God of Israel, Lord God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel, be it known unto us this day that you are the God, you are the living God. And fire falls from heaven and consumes the sacrifice and licks up the water in the trench. The people cry, the Lord, he is God, Jehovah, he is God. And they execute the prophets that have been spreading such iniquitous untruths and false religion through the land. A great triumph. And when Jezebel hears, she says, I'll get you. And Elijah runs. The greatest prophet runs. Runs. A day, two days, out into the desert and collapses under a juniper tree and says, Lord, it's enough. Take away my life. I'm no better than my father's. And God comes to him and he says, what are you doing here? Far from the place of duty. What are you doing here, Elijah? The Lord Jesus was confronted not just with a woman's threats but he was confronted with Pilate and King Herod, the Gentiles and the Jews, the Sanhedrin and the Pharisees and the crowd. But he set his face steadfastly to Jerusalem, greater than Elijah. Or we could say the greatest of the writing prophets would be Isaiah. That wonderful 66 chapter book of his and his pictures of Christ, born of a virgin, His name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. And He shall die on the cross and He was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement of our peace was upon Him with His stripes. We are healed, all we like sheep have gone astray. We've turned everyone to His own way and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all. The greatness of Jesus Christ, and Isaiah spoke of it. But when he saw the Lord high and lifted up on his train, filling the temple, then Isaiah cried, woe is me, I'm under an amount of unclean lips, I've seen, I dwell amongst a people of unclean lips, my eyes have seen the king. Jesus never said I'm a man of unclean lips. Jesus said, I always please my father in all that I do. Christ greater than Isaiah. Or if you ask Jesus who was the greatest of the prophets, Jesus would say John the Baptist. None born of woman like unto him. He is the greatest. Jesus won't allow a page of Indian paper to separate him and his testimony from John and his testimony. He stands with him like Siamese twins they are joined together in their summons to repentance and in their analysis of human sin. Jesus loved John the Baptist but when John the Baptist saw him coming for baptism he trembled. He said you need to baptize me not me to baptize you. He said I must decrease, but you must increase. I'm not worthy to untie your sandals. Behold the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world. He who is the greatest of the prophets according to Jesus. Well, he exalted Jesus Christ and magnified his name. And so Jesus is greater, whoever you choose amongst the prophets, amongst the very chief rank of them, Jesus is superior to them all. He is absolutely great as God's final word. No one preached the Sermon on the Mount like him. No one had a great discourse in the upper room like him. No one prayed, no prophet prayed like he did in John 17. Christ, the greatest of the prophets. And then secondly, the comparison is made with the angels. And much of the chapter you will remember, as I read it in your hearing, that chapter was about the angels. And he says, yes, Christ is great. The angels are great, but to which of the angels did he say at any time, thou art my He said that to Christ. Today I have begotten, the eternally begotten Son of God. To which of the angels did he say, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your foot suit. He didn't say that to the archangels, not to Gabriel, not to Michael. He said it only to Jesus Christ. Christ greater than the angels, Christ the creator of the angels, Christ the designer, the one who conceived and thought and planned and made an angel and made an innumerable company like the sands of the seashore vast companies of angels and all made by Jesus. And each day they gather before Him as their Lord and Master and they receive instruction of what they're to do. And one he says, go and do this. And he goes and does it. And to another he says, go and do this. And he goes and does it. And they obey him. It's their joy to fly over land and sea. He says, sir, take this preacher from London and bring him, bring him to this church and the people in the congregation that need to hear of the greatness of Christ, you bring them safely to the meeting place tonight. And so Hailsham has a congregation here and they're hearing of the greatness of Christ because we have benefited from the ministry of angels as we have. And they're with us now. We gather in the presence of our Savior and the angels that always accompany him. They're with us so that every place where we meet in the name of Christ is hallowed ground, hallowed by Christ and his angels. So Christ is great then in comparison to the angels. And then thirdly, Christ is great in comparison to the creation. We are told in the second verse here that, by whom also he made the worlds. And so it ends, verse two. We often have this helpful division. God the Father, his work was the work of creation. God the Son, his work was the work of redemption. God the Holy Spirit, and his work was the work of regeneration, of giving new life, of applying the atonement that was accomplished by Christ to every Christian. And that's a useful distinction. It's a sort of systematic theological distinction that we make. It's not absolute because we're told that God made the worlds by Jesus Christ, by his son. That they work in harmony together, the father and the son, and they plan and make In the beginning, God, the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit made the heavens and the earth. And we can appreciate then something of the beauty of this world because our Savior made it. Driving through Sussex and seeing the fields of bright yellow oilseed rape and the corn beginning to appear and the leaves in full bloom now and the blossom that's now beginning to disappear from the trees. Every prospect pleases us. Only man is vile. All things bright and beautiful. The Lord Jesus Christ made them all. He is the author of all that we see in creation, around it. And you know how children go off to the big school when they are 11 and they bring their bags that were empty going now with their textbooks. Mum, look at this, they say. Mathematics. Physics. Geography, mum. Chemistry. And they're overwhelmed at the new vistas, of pedagogy that lie before them. And we encourage them, oh it's alright, you can study those things, you can. They are a description of the thought patterns of Jesus Christ, our Creator and Sustainer. How we understand it, imperfectly, of how He made the universe. And as the years go by, they correct some misunderstandings that we have. They are not infallible. And so we love the world. We love the sights of it. We love to walk along a country lane, don't we? We have the wonderful parks of London around us. We go through the gardens and we see those magnificent trees from all over the world that are growing there. How beautiful it is to see them all. Our Lord Jesus made them all. And because we know who made them, it isn't to us less attractive, less awesome, less mysterious, less wonderful. We don't worship them. We don't have sacred trees or sacred animals. But we worship the one who made the zebra and the orangutan and the whale. All the beauty the Lord made in the world. How beautiful God the Creator must be if his creation is like this. So Christ is great in relation to prophets, in relation to angels, in relation to the creation. And the fourth comparison he makes is he's seeking now to magnify Jesus Christ to these stumbling, limping Jewish Christians. He says to them, Christ is great in his relation to God. He says, let me tell you who Jesus is. He is the brightness of God's glory and the express image of his person. Let me tell you that at the beginning of this letter. Who are you dealing with? the brightness of his glory. It's not that when Jesus came into the world there was a little candle in the darkness of this world and that was Jesus and this candle moved about and winds blew it and it fluttered and almost went out and was almost extinguished. It was not like that. Christ was the brightness of God's glory. When he preached the Sermon on the Mount, what glory? when he raised Lazarus from the dead and the widow of Nain's son and Jairus' daughter, what glory. When he kneeled down and took a jug of water and a basin and a towel and washed 24 feet, dried between the toes, got the donkey dung off them, kneeled down, did it. Oh, what glory of the humility of God the servant. who did not come into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved. When he hung on the cross and wouldn't come down, though taunted to come down, there was no more God-like thing that Jesus Christ ever did. That when he hung there all those hours in the darkness, absorbing, standing under the wrath of God towards all that's the antithesis of all that God is and took the judgment on himself there. The brightness of the glory of God is seen in Jesus Christ and he is the express image of his person. He is the transcript of his person. You remember in the office when you finally got your new photocopy Two engineers came with a trolley and they moved in and they set it up. The other one was jamming and it was dirty and, oh, you longed to get a new photocopy and this brand new came in and they unscrewed it and they plugged it in and they got a piece of paper and they put it down and they covered it and they pressed the button and within a second, out from the other side, There came the copy and then they picked up the original and they said, now, which is the original and which is the copy? And you couldn't tell. Now I know you get a magnifying glass and you'll be able to tell in time, of course you could. But you couldn't tell any difference between the divinity of the father and the divinity of the son. God the Father, God the Son, equal in power, equal in glory, equal in their being. A son is everything that a father is, isn't he? When you go along to the hospital and you've got a new baby and you look through the glass screen at the little cribs that are there and a couple of other fathers are with you and you're looking through. One father doesn't say to the other, My son's 97% human. And the other father doesn't say, mine's 98% human. They don't say that, do they? Their children are 100% human. They're as human as their fathers. The son of God. He is as divine as his father. I and my father are one, he says. You know, for the first four centuries after the resurrection, the church was thinking now and considering who Jesus Christ was. And the best minds in the world, God saved them. great church fathers, the leaders of the church. I read Nick Needham's daily Bible extracts last year. Each year he chooses, each month he chooses one of the great fathers like Augustine or Tertullian or Chrysostom. He prints extracts for the 30 days of the month. And so I read the writings of people I don't know much about. The great church fathers of the first four centuries. It was really profitable. And they had to wrestle with this subject. Who is Jesus Christ? How can he be in the beginning with God and in the beginning God? How can there be God with God? And there was a great Greek word that they used. And the word that the early church fathers used to describe the relation of the son to the father was this word, homoousios. Homo means the same, you know, ousios. It means being, the being. the essence. He was the same being as his father. In heaven there are not three clouds. There's just one great cloud of being in the beginning was God. There are not three thrones in heaven. There's one throne, there's one sovereignty in heaven of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. They're different persons. The father loves the son and the son loves the father. There's no more lovable son and there's no more loving father than the father and son in heaven. But they have the same glory. They have the same power. They have the same eminence. They have the same status. They have the same name. Jehovah Jesus, the Lord Jesus. Now the one thing that characterizes us as Christians when we gather together on a Sunday night here, what we do is we worship Jesus Christ. We say, come, let's join our cheerful songs with angels from the throne, 10,000, 1,000 other tongues all day joy, worthy that are who died. We cry to be exalted. That's worthy of the Lama. Let's reply. He was slain for us, we exalt. If Jesus Christ is not God, it's blasphemy for us to gather here and sing his praise and say how wonderful he is, how glorious, that he is God. Because he's God, we have the right to worship him. He's at the right hand of God. He's there. He is identified as being with God, equal in glory. He has all the functions of God. He's got the whole world in his hands. He's got your life and my life. He's working all things after the counsel of his will for us, all the things that happen to us. Our native place and time, all ordained by him. the life of loved ones that he gives to us and takes from us. He does it kindly and wisely. And one day we will know how God has done it. He upholds all the movements of history. He determines when prime ministers shall fall and new prime ministers are appointed. He's behind all the movements of the galaxies. and the stars and the meteors and every particle. This is the great Savior. He's upholding all things by the word of His power. So I have told you four things about Jesus Christ to magnify Him like the writer of the Hebrews does. I've told you he's great in comparison to prophets, great in comparison to angels, great in comparison to the creation itself, and great in comparison to God. He is great. His greatness is up there. A divine greatness. And that builds up a picture of a magnificent savior, of his grandeur, of his awesomeness, of his very essence, the otherness. He's not like us. A tremendous gulf exists between himself and ourselves. I've given you an almost unreachable saviour, an almost inaccessible saviour and that's where the danger now lies, that we feel we lose contact with him. we feel there's no continuity between ourselves and him, that he's too remote, that he's too incomprehensible to understand us, to sympathize with us, to be touched by the little troubles that momentarily explode and seem so big at the time and then a month or two later we've forgotten about them. Now very often in Christian history, this has happened. The church exalted Jesus Christ. Christ in glory, Christ in majesty. That's how they dealt with him, to exalt him. And people felt, well, he doesn't know about me. My little troubles, the little pressures I'm under, he doesn't know about me. And so the church said, ah, he's got a mother. And you can go to his mother. And his mother is very understanding. And his mother will put a word in for you. Speak to his mother. And we'll help you to speak to her. We'll give you some beads. And you can run them through your fingers. And we'll give you a prayer to pray, Holy Mother of God, hear us sinners now and in our hour of need, Holy Mary. And they've made this sort of female goddess. And one of the reasons why they did this was because they had exalted Jesus Christ exclusively. And so I can't stop where I've stopped with these four points. I can't say to you Christ is great in comparison to prophets and angels and creation and as great as God. I can't stay there. I have to say one more thing. He is great in his sympathy. I have to say that. Great in his compassion. And we have to jump outside Hebrews 1, we have to go a few chapters on to chapter 4, don't we? In the famous last verses of Hebrews chapter 4, where we are told, we have not a great high priest who cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, but one who was made in all points as we are, and yet without sin. You know the great double negative, two negatives make a positive, we are told. We have not a high priest who cannot be touched with the feeling of our, in other words, we have a high priest who can be touched by the feelings, my feelings, of my infirmity, of how weak I am, of how I struggle and fall and fail. And I get worried about a pimple and a lump, and about an interview, and about paying the bills, and about providing for the children, and about the future, and my relationship with my neighbors. And I'm troubled by all those things. And here is someone who is touched. Touched by those feelings that he is not so far away. When we gather, he is there and he's brought us together to tell us how deeply he loves us and cares for us and that we matter to him and that our feelings matter to him too. The one who is the brightness of God's glory and the express image of his person is touched by our weaknesses. He doesn't just feel for us but he feels with us. He's yoked to us and he's touched. We touch because we're yoked together. And he feels when we are sniffing and weeping and wailing and beating our breasts because he has taken our nature. That's why. He has taken the seed of Abraham. He has come into all its weakness and into all its vulnerability. Not into a garden now, but into a groaning world. He's pitched his tent in the valley of the shadow. That's where he is. Where men crucify other young men. He's come there. where they blaspheme and gamble. And that's where he's come, where they cast a woman at his feet with jagged rocks ready to crush her face and kill her for her immorality. And he's come there, and he's seen it, and he has known it. Christ has a human body, a human physiology, a human nervous system, human sensitivities to our physical nature. A human psychology, a human mind, human affections, human emotions, a human will, the human way of making decisions by asking, who touched me? Where have you laid him? And he's taken that nature as a tested human nature. Not just walking with God at the close of the day in an unfallen world, but in a groaning world. In a world where they trick him out and test him with questions and try to throw him off a cliff. And in that world Christ has come. And in all points He's tested as you will be this week and for the rest of your life until you see Him. So you have this Christ. A Christ who knew physical pain. A Christ who knew emotional pain of loneliness and fear. A Christ who was mocked. A Christ who was misunderstood by His own family. Christ who knew spiritual pain, forsaken by God, when he most needed him. Why wasn't God answering when he said, why? Why? It's not a sin to say to God, why? Why has this happened? Christ said, why? Why have you forsaken me? There's a marvellous word in Psalm 103, you know. The psalmist tells us, he remembers we had us. He remembers. It's not because he's omniscient and knows everything. He knows what dust is. He remembers it because he was dust. Adam made from the dust of the earth. That's in the same way. Christ in the same way. He's been in situations where he felt, am I able to cope? Can I handle this? He's been in a situation where he's wondering why God isn't listening to him. And he remembers it. You know, there are no memory cells that are dying in Christ tonight. He remembers as vividly as when it happened. How they stripped him and whipped his back until it ran with blood. He remembers the pain. He remembers how weak he was, carrying the cross, wondering if he could go any further, falling under its weight. He remembers it. He remembers the pain of the nails through his hands and feet, the spear in his side. He remembers it. He remembers the pain of the men running off and leaving him. He remembers the pain of Peter denying him, I don't know that blasted man. He remembers the darkness. So when he sees you in your struggles, when he sees you in your physical and emotional pain and social pain and dereliction, his heart beats for you. He sympathizes with you. He turns to the father and he says, father, I know exactly what that woman in Halesham is going through. I know she feels the cancer is spreading and she's upset. Strengthen her, father. Be near her, father. Uphold her, father. Keep her, father. At this time, the father sends the spirit into her life because he ever lives to save us. There are many people who are crying, why? In Halesham, in Britain, why? Why is this happening to my children? Why? Why the pain? Why the deep calling to deep? And they talk to their friends and they write letters to agony aunts in the newspapers and no one understands. I'm saying to you tonight there is no degree of pain or loss that Jesus Christ doesn't understand. No emotional pain, no social pain, no spiritual pain, no darkness. He doesn't understand. That's why he is so great. So magnificent a God. I can't understand how you could come here tonight and you could hear of the greatness of Jesus Christ. Great in comparison to prophets and angels and creation. Great, as great as God. Great in His compassion. And then say, yes, but Did you dare say that? Yes. And go away just as far from Christ as you were when you came in. Can't understand it. I showed you the magnificence of Jesus. I've told you He's here and He's brought you here to hear of Him and His beauty and His power and His desire to help you and save you. And I can't understand how you think, well, yes, but would you dare say that? Every mouth stopped. And when He gives us permission to speak, we say, Father, I wish it wasn't me. I rue the wasted years. I grieve over what I've been. I wish it wasn't me. Can you forgive me? Can you yoke yourself to me? Can we be joined together? Can you be my Lord and my Saviour? And you start to talk to Him. That's what you've got to do. You've got to start talking to Jesus now and in the foreseeable future. You've got to. Until you know He's heard you. Until you know He's answered you. You've got to start speaking to Jesus. It doesn't matter what you say, as long as you know you're speaking to God. You're speaking to this wonderful, sympathetic, loving God. And you're saying to him, Lord, help me now. Help me. I don't know what to pray for. I don't know if I know you. I don't know myself. Please help me. Please, if you can become my Lord and Savior, it would be wonderful. Oh, if you could, could you take me and you keep praying like that, you keep speaking, please, please talk to Jesus. That's what we're here for, to encourage you, so we can put words in your mouth in the hymns that we sing. But that's not the same as you using your whispering, stammering tongue, saying to Jesus, help me, help me to see your greatness, take the veil from my face. Show me a glimpse of your loveliness and help me to love you in return. He said, keep saying it. Let's pray. Lord, we thank thee for Jesus Christ, so great, so magnificent, so stupendous. Adjectives just fail us to describe. the glory of the uncreated one, the eternal and blessed one, the word was in the beginning with God and was God from everlasting to everlasting. Omnipotent Lord, thank you for enabling us to magnify your name together in this place. Oh, that everybody here had you. And that you had everybody here. and that though their faith was so thin, as thin as a spider's thread, as long as it was lodged in you, as long as they were joined to you, as long as they were speaking and speaking and speaking and speaking to you, oh, have mercy on us all. Make us speaking children of God and give us that assurance that you are our Lord and Saviour. Humble us, we pray, Lord, and lift us up and make us a blessing in living useful lives, in serving Thee, the Lord. We ask in Jesus' name, Amen.