Father Mike Schmitz

And God was with them the entire time.

When we go through persecution, we will survive it because God will be with us until the very end, all the way through the very end.

Now, quick note on letter to the Hebrews, which is, I think this is just unfair.

that um we've set this up so that the two most complicated books of the bible i would say hebrews in the book of revelation are the last two books and we have like a thousand chapters every day but that's just me whining what we have because i can't say as much as i want to say about it what we have is letter to the hebrews and we don't know who authored it for years people thought it was saint paul who authored it and maybe it was but maybe it's someone else but

Who he's writing to, it seems really clear, even from the opening pages, it seems really clear that the audience of Letter to the Hebrews were Hebrews, of course.

They were Jewish people who knew the Old Testament very well, who had come to know Jesus Christ.

In fact, who themselves had experienced a degree of persecution and maybe were even, according to Hebrews chapter 13, maybe were even tempted to turn back to their former ways of worshiping God.

So there's this temptation there in the midst of persecution.

There's this desire to say, wait, who is Jesus really?

And that's why at the very beginning of these chapters, talking about, okay, wait, let's establish this.

Before we go any further, Jesus is superior to the angels.

So we know angels are incredibly powerful, incredibly incredible.

Jesus is superior to them.

They're making the case that Jesus is God himself.

In fact,

Chapter one, verse three, it says this.

He reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature.

And that is in Hebrew.

Basically, that is saying, oh, yeah, he reflects the glory of God.

Basically, he is to the sun as the rays of the sun are to the sun.