Hebrews 1:6 Commentary and Bible Study

This verse now adds a further elucidation. It was enough that the relative worth of the Son and of the angels was described in verse 4, but that left open the question of how they relate to each other. The angels do not just exist alongside the Son of God as equals; they are commanded by God to honour the Son in a way that unambiguously distinguishes between them and sets them on an altogether lower level of being: they are to worship the Son. Now there is no category of being that it is fitting for angels to worship other than deity. The angels are commanded to worship the Son of God in his incarnate state. God gave this command when he brought the first begotten into the world at the incarnation, and what is said here is said not of the Son of God in himself, but of the incarnate Son, the God man, the Lord Jesus Christ, born to Mary. This is something new, and this is the great significance of the passage quoted. Man has been made a little lower than the angels, so how can the angels be required to worship one who is lower than them? Yes, they are to worship one who is truly a man, but they worship him because he is also God, for otherwise worship would be forbidden. This is by the Father’s consent and positively at his command. The Father who so hates idolatry commands that the highest beings in creation bow down and esteem the Son to be God over them, and yet the one they honour in this way is also a man. How great a mystery is the incarnation! It is in his incarnate state that the Son of God is known to the human race and in no other state.There could be no clearer way of establishing the superiority of the Son to angels, a superiority which he possesses by nature. It is clear that Christ does not belong to the order of angels as if he was merely some higher ranking angelic being. No angel may receive worship. When John tries to worship the angel in Revelation 21: …. he is forbidden to do so and told instead to worship only God. But if angels worshipped some being who was different to God, or higher-ranking angels, then the angel who spoke to John could not have spoken with this clarity. The angels worship Christ as God, just as they do in Isaiah 6, where it is the pre-incarnate Son of God who is called LORD and who occupies his high and lifted up throne (John 12:…).