I’ve been preaching through Hebrews and though we’re only up to the third chapter, I have been repeatedly impressed with how the author treats the scriptures he quotes. Right off the bat the author says “God spoke…by the prophets.” Now, you could read that and think that, sure, he believed that God spoke by certain people but that, in and of itself, doesn’t necessarily say anything about the Bible. But the way that he introduces scripture quotes from there on out shows that he didn’t have only the prophets’ verbal pronouncements in mind but their written communication even more so. For example, in the rest of chapter 1 he quotes various passages, mostly from the Psalms, to support his contention that Jesus is greater than the angels. He doesn’t quote a Psalm and say “As David said” but rather “God said.”

In chapter 2 he does something even more interesting. In verse 11 he attributes the words of Psalm 22 to Jesus when he says, “This is why he is not ashamed to call them brothers, saying…” Now really this makes a lot of sense because the way Psalm 22 begins is with Jesus’ dying words, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The church has seen Psalm 22 as messianic for a very long time so she has long heard that Psalm as Jesus’ words.

Then in chapter 3 the author involves the third member of the Trinity in authoring the scriptures by explicitly bringing in the Holy Spirit. In verse 7 he quotes Psalm 95 and introduces it by saying “as the Holy Spirit says…” When he cites the beginning of that quote again in chapter 4 verse 7 he introduces it with “saying through David…” That’s pretty interesting but how is it Trinitarian? Because of what the author says right after that, “If Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken of another day.” So who authored Psalm 95? God spoke it, the Holy Spirit said it through David. Ah, so God spoke by the prophets just like our author said!

So where do evangelicals get such a high view of scripture? From the Reformers? Sure. From the Church Fathers? You bet. But ultimately we get it from the scriptures themselves. We need to learn how to read the Bible from the Apostles since they learned how to read it from Jesus. Though we don’t know who the author of Hebrews was, we do know that he learned from those who listened to Jesus (Heb. 2:3) and so he is a faithful example of how to understand the Bible. The author of Hebrews was, essentially, evangelical.