Stay Faithful To The One Who Is Faithful Series

Hebrews 3: 1 – 19

Stay Faithful To The One Who Is Faithful

1 Therefore, holy brethren, partakers of the heavenly calling, consider the Apostle and High Priest of our confession, Christ Jesus, 2 who was faithful to Him who appointed Him, as Moses also was faithful in all His house. 3 For this One has been counted worthy of more glory than Moses, inasmuch as He who built the house has more honor than the house. 4 For every house is built by someone, but He who built all things Is God. 5 And Moses indeed was faithful in all His house as a servant, for a testimony of those things which would be spoken afterward, 6 but Christ as a Son over His own house, whose house we are if we hold fast the confidence and the rejoicing of the hope firm to the end. 7 Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says: “Today, if you will hear His voice, 8 Do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion, in the day of trial in the wilderness, 9 where your fathers tested Me, tried Me, and saw My works forty years. 10 Therefore I was angry with that generation, and said, ‘They always go astray in their heart, and they have not known My ways.’ 11 So I swore in My wrath, ‘They shall not enter My rest.’ ” 12 Beware, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief in departing from the living God; 13 but exhort one another daily, while it is called “Today,” lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin. 14 For we have become partakers of Christ if we hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast to the end, 15 while it is said: “Today, if you will hear His voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.” 16 For who, having heard, rebelled? Indeed, was it not all who came out of Egypt, led by Moses? 17 Now with whom was He angry forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose corpses fell in the wilderness? 18 And to whom did He swear that they would not enter His rest, but to those who did not obey? 19 So we see that they could not enter in because of unbelief.

So far the author of this awesome book has shown that The Lord Jesus Is both the very likeness of God and His glorious Messiah, and therefore far superior to the angels. And that the reason that He humbled Himself and became man, and was established as ‘the second man’ (crowned with glory and honor), was in order to die to save men and women and raise them to new heights in ‘the world to come’, that new world which had now come in Him, and which would continue forever. And that He Is our Sanctifier, our Glorious Leader, and our Great High Priest. He calls on his readers to consider Him for what He Is, the One Sent Forth (Apostle) and High Priest to Whom we point and to Whom we confess.

If you have a chance and know a Jewish person ask him or her who was the greatest Jewish person that ever lived? You will probably get one of these answers –Moses, Abraham, or David.

We see here that Moses was picked along with his successor Joshua, the architects of Israel’s great deliverance, and the very foundation stones of the Jewish faith. It is almost impossible to overstate the importance that was placed on Moses by the Jews. The angels were seen as hugely important, but they were in Heaven and we are on the earth. Here, however, was one on earth who above all had proved himself the very friend of God, and had delivered Israel from bondage in Egypt, and had brought to Israel the great covenant of Sinai, commencing a theocracy which had established them as a people with Yahweh as King. And they placed their faith totally without reserve in the Instruction (Torah) that Yahweh had given them through Moses, remembering that it had come through him by the mediation of angels. He above all had been the true servant of Yahweh, the God-appointed man for the reception of God’s unique word, followed immediately by Joshua (the only two who were ever specifically titled ‘the servant of Yahweh’). Thus those who would follow the Messiah Jesus needed to see Him in relation to those two great figures, those two giants of their faith.

1 Therefore, holy brethren, partakers of the heavenly calling, consider the Apostle and High Priest of our confession, Christ Jesus,

Because of all he has said about the superiority of our Great God Jesus the writer now calls on his ‘holy brothers and sisters’ to consider Him. ‘Holy’ reminds us of His act of sanctifying (making holy) them and making them brothers and sisters (2.11). If they are His, He has made them ‘holy’, set apart for God by the power of His working. We read in Ephesians 2.19, ‘Now, therefore, you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.” The writer thus confidently hopes that he is speaking to those who are true believers.