“My days are like a lengthened shadow, and I wither away like grass. But You, O LORD, abide forever, and Your name to all generations” (Ps 102:11-12).
It is often claimed that the Jewish writers of the New Testament could not and would not have believed that Yeshua was truly and fully and completely God. The doctrine of the full deity of Jesus was, so they say, the distorted fruit of a later Greco-Roman Christianity. I’m not so sure that the Jewish writer of the letter to the Hebrews ever got this memo. In order to appreciate the author’s beliefs about Yeshua’s divine identity, we must consider the original message of Psalm 102 and the author of Hebrews’ application of this psalm to Yeshua.
In the original context, the psalmist compares his own mortality with the LORD’s divine eternality (compare Ps 102:3, 11, 20, 23-24 with 102:12, 25-27). Not only was the LORD at the beginning, but he was also before the beginning (v. 25). Not only will he be there till the end, but he will be there beyond the end (v. 26). Psalm 102, in context, is a theological confession of a divine attribute that only and truly and uniquely belongs to the LORD God of Israel. “You, O YHWH, abide forever!” (v. 12).
Not only will he be there till the end, but he will be there beyond the end
Now let’s consider the author of Hebrews’ citation of this psalm in Hebrews 1:10-12:
“YOU, LORD, IN THE BEGINNING LAID THE FOUNDATION OF THE EARTH, AND THE HEAVENS ARE THE WORKS OF YOUR HANDS; THEY WILL PERISH, BUT YOU REMAIN; AND THEY ALL WILL BECOME OLD LIKE A GARMENT, AND LIKE A MANTLE YOU WILL ROLL THEM UP; LIKE A GARMENT THEY WILL ALSO BE CHANGED. BUT YOU ARE THE SAME, AND YOUR YEARS WILL NOT COME TO AN END.”
Not only does the author of Hebrews explicitly identify Yeshua as the LORD of Psalm 102, he does so without any reservations, equivocations, or caveats.
If you ask me how the author of Hebrews was able to see the Messiah in Psalm 102, I am not sure I am able to tell you (yet). But one thing I know: The author took a psalm about YHWH from the Hebrew Bible and applied it directly to Yeshua in the New Testament. And by virtue of the fact that the letter of Hebrews became a part of the New Testament canon, we can say with absolute certainty that the original Messianic Jewish recipients of Hebrews had absolutely no problem with the extraordinarily high (and completely Jewish) Christology as well!
And because Yeshua is God in the fullest, highest, and most eternal sense of the term, he is able to offer eternal, never ending, forever and ever salvation to everyone who puts their trust in him.
“But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things to come, He entered through the greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, that is to say, not of this creation; and not through the blood of goats and calves, but through His own blood, He entered the holy place once for all, having obtained eternal redemption” (Heb 9:11-12).
