Hebrews 1:10

Is Hebrews 1:10: A Challenge to Our Teaching That the Son of God Began in the Womb of Mary?

Hebrews 1:10, read out of its immediate context, outside the context of Psalm 102 which it quotes, and read apart from the rest of Scripture, might challenge the Christology presented by this magazine. It is claimed that Jesus is here presented as the creator of the Genesis creation. We read here that the Son of God “laid the foundation of the heaven and the earth.” How can that be if Jesus came into existence some 2000 years ago?

This question requires some careful investigation. There are three “proof texts” addressed to the Son in Hebrews 1:8-12. They are introduced by the words: “But of the Son He says…” There is no hint in the text that they refer to someone other than the Son. Verse 8 is explicit: “But of the Son He [God] says…” Then follow three different quotes. The subject changes to the angels only in verse 13: “But to which of the angels did He [God] ever say…”

Verse 8 uses the term “God” of Jesus in a secondary sense, quickly adding that as “God” he has a God, that is his Father. The NAB properly writes “god” with a lower case in Psalm 45:6 which Hebrews quotes.

Much of chapter 1 of Hebrews compares the Son of God with angels, showing that the Son was never an angel and is superior to them. This proves a) that the Son cannot be God! It is not necessary to prove God superior to the angels. It is obvious b) that the Son cannot be an angel or archangel as maintained by Jehovah’s Witnesses. Both angels and archangels are angels!

What then of Hebrews 1:10? In what sense is Jesus, the Son, the founder of the heavens and earth?

How can this be since Jesus nowhere claimed to be the Creator and it was not Jesus but God who rested on the seventh day (Heb. 4:4)? “God [not Jesus] made them male and female” (Mark 10:6) and “the Lord God [not Jesus] formed man of the dust of the ground” (Gen. 2:7). Fifty Bible texts say that God created the heavens and the earth. Luke 1:35, Matthew 1:18, 20 and 1 John 5:18 (not KJV) say that the Son did not exist until he was created/begotten in Mary. Was Jesus both six months younger than John the Baptist and billions of years older? Was Jesus 30 years old when he began his public ministry and yet really billions+30 years old? What part of Jesus was 30 and what part was billions of years old? Jesus cannot be so divided up, split in two. Mary bore a human being. She did not bear an angel. She did not bear GOD. She did not bear “impersonal human nature” as Trinitarian theory says. God cannot be begotten, and the Son of God was begotten. God cannot die (1 Tim. 6:16). The Son of God died. God cannot be tempted by sin, and yet Jesus was tempted. Not to observe these category differences is to throw away precious biblical instruction.

Hebrews 1:1-2 says that God did not speak through a Son in the Old Testament times. Hebrews 1:5 speaks of the coming into existence of Jesus, the Son: “Today I have begotten you.” The same verse speaks of 2 Samuel 7:14’s promise that God “will be a father and he will be a son.” That promise was given to David and it referred to the Messiah who was to come as a biological descendant of David. The beginning of Messiah’s existence (“today I have begotten you [brought you into existence]”) is the moment when God becomes the father of the Messiah. This is exactly what we find in Luke 1:32-35 and Matthew 1:18-20 (“that which is begotten in her is from the holy spirit”).

Isaiah 44:24 says that God, unaccompanied, unaided created the Genesis heavens and earth. He was entirely alone. “There was no one with me.” There was no Son with him (cp. Heb. 1:1-2).

God did not speak in a Son until the New Testament. So then, who said, “Let there be light”? It would be a flat contradiction of Hebrews 1:1-2 to say it was the Son. The God of the Old Testament is quite distinct from His unique Son. The latter had his genesis in Matthew 1:20 (“the genesis of Jesus was as follows”). The Bible becomes a book of incomprehensible riddles if God can have a Son before He brought him into existence! Luke 1:35 describes how the Son of God came to exist. He was begotten. To beget in Hebrew, Greek and in English is a word which of all words denotes a “before and after.” Therefore the Son had a beginning. There was a time before he was begotten, before “he was.” If he already existed, these testimonies in Matthew 1 and Luke 1 are nonsense.

Mary bore a human being, not God or an angel. That is what all human mothers do. The notion that the Son of God was in fact God would make a charade out of his whole struggle in obedience to God and on our behalf as Savior and model. The whole point of a High Priest is that he must be selected “from among men” (Heb. 5:1). He is the “man Messiah Jesus” in contrast to his Father, who is the One God (1 Tim. 2:5). The Father in John 17:3 is “the only One who is truly God.” If God is the only One who is God, no one else is God except the Father, which is exactly what Paul declared when rehearsing the creed in 1 Corinthians 8:4-6: “There is no God except the One God the Father” (combining v. 4 and 6). Jesus himself went on record as agreeing with the Jewish creed that “the Lord our God is one Lord” (Mark 12:29).

If the Son were God, it would produce the notion that there are two Gods. To call Jesus God and the Father God amounts of course to two Gods and this is not monotheism, however much the label may be applied.

In Hebrews 1:10, there is a complication due to the fact that the writer quotes Psalm 102 from the Greek version (LXX) of the Old Testament and not the Hebrew version. The LXX has a different sense entirely in Psalm 102:23-25. The LXX says “He [God] answered him [the suppliant]…Tell me…[God speaking to the suppliant]…Thou, lord…[God addressing someone else called ‘lord’].” But the Hebrew (English) text has “He [God] weakened me…I [the suppliant] say, ‘O my God…’”

Thus the LXX introduces a second lord who is addressed by God and told that he (the second lord) “at the beginning founded the earth and the heavens.” The writer to the Hebrews had open before him the LXX reading and not the Hebrew reading.

F.F. Bruce in the New International Commentary on Hebrews explains:

“In the LXX, Septuagint text, the person to whom these words (‘of old you laid the foundation of the earth’) are spoken is addressed explicitly as ‘lord.’ God bids him acknowledge the shortness of God’s set time for the restoration of Jerusalem (v. 13) and not summon Him [God] to act when that set time has only half expired, while He [God] assures him [the suppliant] that he and his servants’ children will be preserved forever.”

There is a footnote to B.W. Bacon’s discussion in 1902: “Bacon suggested that the Hebrew as well as the Greek text of this psalm formed a basis for messianic eschatology, especially its reference to the shortness of God’s days, i.e. the period destined to elapse before the completion of His purpose. He found here the OT background to Mark 13:20 and Matthew 24:22 and Ep. Barnabas: ‘As Enoch says, “For to this end the Master [God] has cut short the times and the days, that His beloved [Jesus] should make haste and come to his inheritance”’ (Kingdom).

Bruce continues: “It is God who addresses this ‘lord’ thus. Whereas in the Hebrew text the suppliant is the speaker from beginning to end of the psalm, in the Greek text [which your English Bible does not show] the suppliant’s prayer comes to an end in verse 22. And the next words read as follows: “He [God] answered him [the suppliant] in the way of His strength:[1] ‘Declare to Me the shortness of My days. Bring me not up in the midst of My days. Your [the suppliant’s] years are throughout all generations. You, lord [the suppliant, viewed here as the Lord Messiah by Hebrews] in the beginning laid the foundation of the earth…’

“This is God’s answer to the suppliant (v. 23ff in the LXX)…But to whom a Christian reader of the LXX might well ask could God speak in words like these? And whom would God Himself address as ‘lord’ as the maker [or founder] of heaven and earth?”

Reading the LXX the Hebrews writer sees an obvious reference to the new heavens and earth of the future Kingdom and he sees God addressing the Messianic Lord in connection with the prophecies of the rest of Psalm 102 which speak of “the generation to come” and of the set time for Yahweh to build up Zion and appear in His glory: This is a vision of the coming Kingdom.

There is an important article in the Zeitschrift fur Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft of 1902 (B.W. Bacon, Yale University, alluded to by Bruce above) where the author makes the fundamental point: “The word ‘lord’ is wholly absent from the Hebrew (and English) text of Psalm 102:25.”

“With the translation in the LXX ‘He answered him’ the whole passage down to the end of the psalm becomes the answer of Yahweh to the suppliant who accordingly appears to be addressed as Kurie and creator of heaven and earth...Instead of understanding the verse as a complaint of the psalmist at the shortness of his days which are cut off in the midst, the LXX [quoted in Hebrews, of course] and the Vulgate understand the utterance to be Yahweh’s answer to the psalmist’s plea that He will intervene to save Zion, because ‘it is time to have pity on her, yes, the set time has come’ (v. 13). He is bidden to prescribe (or acknowledge?) the shortness of Yahweh’s set time, and not to summon Him when it is but half expired. On the other hand he [the Messianic lord] is promised that his own endurance will be perpetual with the children of his servants.”

This is exactly the point, and it can only be made clear when we see that 1) the Hebrews writer is reading the LXX and finding there a wonderful prophecy of the age to come (Kingdom, restoration of Israel) which fits his context exactly and that 2) there is a Messianic Lord addressed by Yahweh and invited to initiate a founding of the heaven and earth, the new political order in Palestine, exactly as said in Isaiah 51:16. This is exactly the point the Hebrews writer wants to make about the superiority of Jesus over angels. Jesus is the founder of that coming new Kingdom-order on earth. The Hebrews writer in 2:5 says that it is about “the inhabited earth of the future that we are speaking.” He himself points to the future founding of a new order on earth, the Kingdom of God which Jesus will inaugurate.

This is really not so difficult when this difference in the LXX is explained. Both Psalm 102 and Hebrews 2:5 and indeed the whole of Hebrews 1 refer to the new order of things initiated by Jesus, and it would not matter whether we think of the new order as initiated by the ascension: “all authority in heaven and earth has been given to me,” or at the second coming.

Note: Psalm 102 is all about the coming age of the Kingdom and the restoration of Jerusalem in the millennium (see vv. 13-22). The writer looks forward to the restoration of the city when God appears in His glory (v. 16). The Psalm is written for the “generation to come” and a newly created people. Jesus will come in the glory of his Father.

Isaiah 51:16 also speaks of an agent of God in whom God puts His words and uses him to “plant the heavens and earth.” The Word Bible Commentary says: “This makes no sense if it refers to the original [Genesis] creation…In other instances God acts alone using no agent (Isa. 44:24). Here the one whom He has hidden in His hand is His agent. Heavens and land here refers metaphorically to the totality of order in Palestine. Heaven means the broader overarching structure of the empire, while ‘land’ is the political order in Palestine itself.”

Thus Hebrews chapter 1 speaks, as he says in Hebrews 2:5, of the “economy or world order to come.” That is his concern in Hebrews 1:10. Jesus is the “father or parent of the age to come” (Isa. 9:6, LXX). Jesus is at present the co-creator with the Father of the new order now in preparation and to be manifested fully in the future.

Finally in Hebrews 9:11, the writer speaks of the “good things to come”[2] as the things “not of this creation.” By this he means that the things to come are of the new, future creation (see Heb. 2:5). That creation is under way since Jesus was exalted to the right hand of God where he is now co-creator, under the Father, of the new creation and has “all authority in heaven and earth.”

Once again, eschatology is the great factor in revealing the truth. God is producing a new creation in Jesus, and we are to be new creatures now in Christ (2 Cor. 5:17). We must resist the temptation to be looking backwards to Genesis when the whole book of Hebrews bids us look forward to the “inhabited earth of the future” (Heb. 2:5). Note that in several places Hebrews speaks of the redemption, inheritance, covenant, judgment, salvation and spirit “of the age [to come]” (aionios).