Hebrews 3:1-6

We kind of get used to um we get used to the way Paul talks.

We get used to the way that John writes.

You know, you read through John's um gospel, it's so different from the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Or Matthew, Mark, and Luke, right?

And they influence the way that we think about following Jesus, right?

So you think of like um a computer where you've got inputs and outputs, you're putting in to the computer like the book of Matthew, and then if your life, like what's the output having read through Matthew, it's gonna give you a um it's gonna give you a real emphasis upon um Jesus and the kingdom and Jesus as the king and his ministry and his and God's work and fulfillment through and like the crescendo through the Jewish story of having the Messiah, Jesus as the Jewish King.

You read through Paul, it's gonna produce in you um a love of grace, right?

The idea of grace you know, being that like sufficient power to do life.

But if you all you read was Paul, you would come away from your discipleship experience, maybe a little bit anemic on family life.

Because who was Paul?

What was the emphasis of Paul?

I'm going for it, I'm charging.

I wish some of you all were single like me, so you didn't get tied down in marriage, right?

Like if you were just discipled by Paul, which is all Holy Spirit material, it's gonna give you some emphasis, right?

Paul was an intense dude, right?

That's one of the reasons why I had so much fun going through Peter, because Peter's take on Christianity is like this revival of the Sermon on the Mount.

And it's so different from being discipled by Paul.

Imagine that you were um had grown up doing one particular type of martial arts, right?

And after you know, five, six, seven years of training, you decided you want to move from one type of martial art over to another.

You're still in the body of martial arts, but your sensei it has a different take.

Your the proximity that you stand towards the potential threat may be different.

The positioning of your feet, what the body parts you use and how you use them may be slightly different based off of kind of jumping into a different martial art.

If you're familiar with the Bible and you're decades into your spiritual journey, what you're gonna find is that the book of Hebrews just presents Christianity differently.

It presents the idea, it's still still about following Jesus, but the um the uh the distance that you may feel as we study through Hebrews is it's a gesture, it's written by somebody different.

And it is um very uh grandiose, and it's sweeping, and it it's a use of metaphor, and um the way that it uses alliteration in Greek, it's just different from Paul's writing, it's different from the gospel, and sometimes it's hard to like put um handles on the ideas that we're looking at in Hebrews.

It's it's I like this idea of cross-training, right?

Where you may be good at like maybe you're a swimmer, but what we do when when we cross-train as a swimmer is we're doing other types of exercise and knowing that it'll benefit us as a swimmer, right?

It's a cross, going across disciplines to improve.

And this this is why I want to commend Hebrews to you.

And I'm like preaching to myself in this like Hebrews is hard for me to wrap my head around.

It's hard for me to know, like, because I'm used to hearing Paul, like it's familiar, I'm used to the gospels, it's familiar.

But Hebrews, it's just different.

And so, what I'm gonna pray here, as we um get ready to look at these first six verses, I'm gonna pray that the Bible as a living book would wrestle with us, like the angel wrestled with Jacob, and that the Bible would win and that we would somehow have that spiritual experience beyond just the words on the page, but that it would win over our will and it would cut in and intersect with our life, and that the Spirit of God would use this material to teach us.

But before I pray, let me just give you a really quick recap.

Hebrews is a written sermon, different from a letter.

It is a written sermon by a pastor.

I will probably make the mistake and refer to the writer who is not named as the writer, but it would probably be better to refer to him as the pastor.

He's very much a pastor, writing to um Jewish followers of Jesus that are considering the cost of following Jesus.

And what we've seen through the first two chapters is Jesus is better than the angels.

He quotes from the Psalms where it says, You are my son, today I've begotten you.

Jesus is better than the angels because the angels never get told, you are my son.

And then Jesus is better than the angels because he took on flesh and blood, but in that humanity, he's crowned with glory and honor because of the work that he did.

We talked through the four implications of Jesus' incarnation.

When we were going through uh December, we looked at those four implications.

And then the last time we were in Hebrews, I introduced chapter 2, 17, and 18 as a bridge that took us from the section about angels into a new section.

The new section is about Jesus as our merciful and faithful high priest.

Jesus is a faithful, he's a merciful and a faithful high priest.

The next section after this is about how Jesus is a high priest after the order of Melchizedek.

So I would just say, as we talk about this book in as a means of our discipleship, that we get really comfortable with the idea of Jesus the high priest.

The Bible Project did a great six-part series on the idea of the high priest going from Genesis to Revelation.

And I would highly commend that to you.

Each video is about five to seven minutes long, and it's a six-part series, and it'll just give you the full biblical theology on this idea of a high priest.

But that's what we looked at last time and connected the previous thought to the new thought.

So let's pray.

Let's ask the Lord to take this text, Hebrews 3, 1 through 6, and apply it to our lives.

Lord, we give you the remainder of our time this morning.

We ask that you would speak to us through this book.

And I just confess, just my ears are not attuned to the way that this writer, this preacher is discipling.

The concepts are similar, but they're packaged differently.

And I want to be cross-trained in my discipleship to you, Jesus.

I want you to wrestle with my spirit and win.

And I pray that for my brothers and sisters, that they also would encounter you as we go through these texts every Sunday over the coming months.

Be our teacher, we pray in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Amen.

So I'm going to put up here on the screen Hebrews chapter 3, verses 1 through 6.

Hebrews 3:1–6

It says this.

Therefore, holy brothers and sisters who share in a heavenly calling, consider Jesus the apostle and high priest of our confession.

He was faithful to the one who appointed him, just as Moses was in all God's household.

For Jesus is considered worthy of more glory than Moses, just as the builder has more honor than the house.

Now every house is built by someone, but the one who built everything is God.

Moses was faithful as a servant in all God's household, as a testimony to what would be said in the future.

But Christ was faithful as a son over his household, and we are that household if we hold our confidence and our hope in which we boast.

But the first thing that I want to draw your attention to before we look at this comparison and contrast between Jesus and Moses, the first thing is verse one where it says we're called to take action.

He says, Therefore, holy brothers and sisters who share in a heavenly calling, consider Jesus the apostle and high priest of our confession.

The idea is this notice, observe, contemplate, focus in, look into.

That's what this word consider is.

It's to spend a moment, not just a fleeting moment, to actually, for a second, consider Jesus.

To consider Jesus.

When we look at the story of Moses, when we look at the story of Moses, he was out on a normal day looking after his sheep on the backside of the wilderness.

And all of a sudden, he sees a bush on fire.

And in the book of Acts, when it recounts this story of Moses, it says that he turned and he approached the bush to consider it.

To consider it.

Now that means that there was literally a break from shepherding.

Those sheep would be fine over there.

And we're going to turn our attention to this anomaly of a bush that's on fire, and it wasn't consumed.

That was kind of what caused so much curiosity.

It didn't just get hit with lightning and then puff, it's gone.

But it literally, it's burning and it's not consumed.

That's that word, consider.

In Moses' life, he stopped, approached the book to consider it.

When Jesus is teaching the Sermon on the Mount, and it's retold in Luke, not Matthew, Jesus instructs his disciples to consider the ravens.

Now that's not the football team.

Although you can use it in that way as well.

Consider the ravens, consider the lilies of the field.

What Jesus is doing as a teacher is he's asking for the audience to take a minute and think, how does that bird get its food?

And be amazed by it.

Say for a second, wow, that's incredible.

That bird doesn't hold a job.

It doesn't have a W-2.

It's not worrying about paying taxes now at the beginning of the year.

Like that bird is good to go.

God's taking care of that bird, right?

Now, think about it.

When God created the heavens and the earth, he set up humanity.

He could have set up humanity where it was just like we had like, you know, like God had it on an auto, you know, dog feeder or something like that.

So humans like just got their food that way.

But instead, like as humans, we participate in this whole thing called work, where we have to work and get our food.

But when it comes to the birds, they don't sow, they don't have to reap.

They just have food that God's just built in.

This is how it works.

And what Jesus is telling these disciples is look, I want you to take a second.

I want you to consider these two things.

And the writer of Hebrews is using this same word.

Last week, so here's Moses.

Moses is considering the bush.

But last week we went to the aquarium.

And um we, when you go through the aquarium, I uh just found our um behavior in the aquarium unique.

Even some of our younger kids were um spending more time observing some of these tanks than I expected.

That these fish and these eels and octopuses and whatever they were were holding the attention of these kids and me.

And what do you do?

You go up to the tank there and you're looking at it, you're considering.

That is a very different existence than my existence, right?

It's just so bizarre.

He doesn't have legs, arms, you know, he's just swimming around in the water.

How does that work?

You're just considering it for a second.

That is what the writer, the pastor here of Hebrews wants for his audience.

He wants for them to consider Jesus.

Okay.

This is really different.

I I don't know about you and kind of how you use your phone, but over the last like couple years, year and a half for me, the one of the new things that I like to consume on my phone is like these short videos.

I think it started with TikTok before TikTok was even called TikTok.

And then Instagram and YouTube ripped it off.

You have reels and you have shorts, right?

And you just can swipe up, and it's a video that lasts really short.

You know, it's a really fast video.

And then you go to the next video, and then you go to the next video, right?

And that's the opposite of what the pastor here is writing about, right?

The the thing about that TikTok or YouTube Shorts or whatever it is, is it asks nothing of me.

It's pure entertainment, right?

It's fun.

Like if I need to waste 20 minutes, that's one of my favorite ways to waste 20 minutes.

But it really does nothing for for me other than entertain me.

I don't have to solve problems, I don't have to really engage what's there.

It's just either funny or not funny, interesting, not interesting, but whoop, swoop, swoop to the next one, and it's on to the next video.

The pastor of Hebrews is like, yeah, put that down for a second.

Put that on pause.

I want you to do this with Jesus.

I want you to pause in front of the scene, and I want you to take it in.

I want you to consider Jesus.

Now we happen to be pretty busy and we have a lot of noise around us.

And so this is needs to be put into a category that maybe a previous generation wouldn't have put it into a category.

We would call this the spiritual discipline of considering Jesus, right?

In other words, a spiritual discipline is something that we intentionally do to grow spiritually.

Now, there's a lot of stuff that we um that previous generations just didn't have to build in as a spiritual discipline because it just came part in parcel with culture.

Going to church on Sunday mornings used to be much more culturally, everybody does it, right?

Um building close relationships where we speak into each other's lives, having friendships.

Those things kind of um were more maybe organic or natural.

The idea of fellowship or eating meals together, all of those things maybe are part of other cultures as they are, but for us, we've become who we are in the West, and we've got to recognize and hear instructions like this.

And just because we're busy doesn't mean we're exempt.

We all that much more.

In order to obey the instruction that's given to us here, we've got to be intentional to consider Jesus.

This means scheduling it, building it into our routine.

That I'm gonna take a minute and I'm going to consider and reflect upon who Jesus is.

Here he's giving us two directions to run that he's the apostle.

That means that he's literally the one sent by God as the founder of our faith, and he's the high priest of our confession.

He mediates, he has taken it upon himself to personally mediate our friendship with God, to make sure that you and I can be a friend of God, that you today can have a sense of God's nearness.

Jesus is deeply invested in that as our high priest.

If you feel guilty or Satan's beating you up over the head over your failures, Jesus, as your high priest, as my high priest, is invested and adequate for drawing us near to God.

That's his role, that's his work that he has been appointed to and happily takes up for our cause.

And so the pastor here is asking us to consider Jesus.

And you know yourself, does this, you know, are you in a season where you do life slow enough and there are natural breaks within your routine where you can do and obey this instruction?

Or do you, coming out of this morning and hearing this text, do you need to take some intentional steps to be able to obey what the writer is doing here?

I know for me it has to be intentional because of so many other things that I'd easily allow to crowd out my schedule.

So let's move to the main idea here in this text, which is that Jesus is better than Moses.

Jesus is better than Moses.

Pastor Amy Peeler, she says this: the context for the comparison with Jesus to Moses is an allusion to Numbers twelve, seven, where God defends Moses against the complaints of Aaron and Miriam, that he has compromised his own standing as a prophet by marrying a Cushite woman.

God affirms the superiority of Moses with whom he speaks face to face and not through dreams and visions.

Here is that passage out of Numbers 12.

God, and you can read back on this in the context if you want from Numbers 12, but God says of Moses, it's not so with my servant Moses.

He is faithful in all of my household.

And so what we see here in our text is that in verse 2, Jesus was faithful like Moses.

He's compared to Moses' faithfulness, faithful in his household.

The word house is probably used like six, seven times in these verses.

And it's used both in terms of the physical structure and then the metaphor of a household.

So in my version, the CSB version, it's jumping from the word house, which is literally what the word is, and saying this is referring to the household of Moses, the children of Israel that he led.

And so the first point that the pastor here makes about Jesus is that you look at Moses and his faithfulness to the children of Israel, and Jesus is just that faithful.

He's just that consistent, he's just that loyal.

If you're impressed with Moses and how Moses stuck it out, like just think of all of the junk that Moses went through.

The complaint.

The enemies, the impossibility, the Pharaoh, like he put up with Pharaoh after ten plagues.

I mean, goodness sakes.

Just the incredible faithfulness of Moses all the years in the wilderness, of wandering around the wilderness for 40 years.

And the pastor here says, look, as you're considering Jesus, you just need to know that Jesus, as our merciful and faithful high priest, he is that faithful.

He's that faithful.

You and I aren't that faithful.

We're the epitome of unfaithful, right?

Like we aspire to faithfulness.

And yet Jesus is faithful.

And so there is a commendation of Moses, and there's like, hey, we're going to just fit Jesus right in there next to Moses.

Like if you love Moses and you're impressed with his faithfulness, then you need to be impressed with Jesus.

The second thing is that Jesus is worthy of more glory than Moses in the same way that a building uh that the uh that a building of a house, or the builder is what that should say, the builder of the house is worthy of more glory than the house itself.

So, in the same way that you would praise the builder, the architect, the general contractor, the guy building the house, who's responsible for it, has more glory than the house itself.

Jesus is worthy of more glory than Moses.

This is a fun idea, I just, if you want to go back and meditate on this idea, in the email I told you what this last week just caused you to pause and go, wow.

Like when you just let me just ask you for a second.

Like when you're impressed, what words come out of your mouth?

Wow, yes.

What else?

Awesome.

Awesome, yeah, yeah, totally.

Yeah.

Yeah.

When we have one of those moments, what we're doing is we're saying, this is worthy of being surprised, enamored, like, oh my gosh, that is awesome.

And Jesus is worthy of more glory than Moses.

So if you take a minute and you read through the life of Moses and you're like, this guy's amazing, the pastor here is saying, look, Jesus deserves even more wonder and glory.

This all comes with considering Jesus.

This is all a part of, like, hey, if you put time out and you just take a minute and you just think about Jesus, consider him, consider him in light of Moses, then you're gonna go, wow, he's worthy of more glory.

And the third thing is, Moses was faithful as a servant.

This is not the Greek word do loss.

We, you know, if you've been around the Bible a lot, you know that there's the word do loss for servant that Paul would use about himself, that he's a servant of Christ.

This is actually a more dignified term that doesn't emphasize servitude as much as it emphasizes being an assistant, like an aide to a person.

Maybe not as much as like a nurse, but but somebody who's um not just like a slave in a house.

So Moses is given this kind of affectionate term for a worker in God's house, but Jesus, man, Jesus is the faithful son.

Like he's the son in the house, not just the aid worker there.

So these three things, Jesus is faithful, he's worthy of more glory, and he's the faithful son.

Let's let's conclude by just looking at this last verse, verse six, because it's personalized.

But Christ was faithful as a son over his house, hold, and we are that household if we hold on to our confidence and the hope in which we boast.

The pastor here is including himself.

He's saying, that household where Jesus is faithful, he says, we are that household.

We are that household.

That's our family that we're a part of.

We just went through the holidays, and some, you know, there's always this joke about family where you've got like the crazy uncle.

And um, hopefully you don't.

Hopefully you have great like family and in-laws and you love them.

But family can sometimes be weird, it can be dysfunctional.

Sometimes it's like uh you appreciate the fact that you don't have to associate with your family all that often.

But God's family is different, right?

When you have Jesus as the son, and he's our older brother, and in his role as our older brother, he is the faithful and merciful high priest, it's just such a beautiful thing.

It's such a beautiful family, a beautiful household to be a part of.

I do want you to know, as you study, as you study this book, one of the things that you're gonna see as a repeated theme, I don't I wish I could put it up on the screen here, my notes, but like one of the great themes of Hebrews is just the family of God.

So if the pastor of Hebrews is discipling us, one of the things that he really, really wants for you and I to grab a hold of is this idea of family.

That God is our father, that Jesus is our brother, that he, and that that just gives you privilege.

It gives you such rich privilege.

Meditating on that would be helpful as we go through this book.

It's it's a beautiful part.

It's like you can't divorce the idea of family from the spiritual value, the richness of what the writer is trying to get across.

Moses was a really good brother to Israel.

He was a really good brother.

Like if you if you like, you would be like, I'm so glad that we were given a.

If you were an Israelite, you would be like, I'm glad he's my kin.

He confronted Pharaoh.

He led Israel out of Egypt.

He spoke to God on their behalf.

He fed them, right?

He fed them in the wilderness.

He established a priesthood for them.

He interceded on their behalf when they got caught up into idolatry.

Think of that, like just the compassionate care of Moses when all of Israel screwed up, right, and they're worshiping this idol.

And Moses says, God, like take me, take me out on their behalf.

If someone's got to die, I'll die on their behalf.

I mean, Moses was a good brother, a good guy to have in your family, a good guy to have in your corner.

He gave order to the tribes.

He led them in victory over their enemies.

But at about 120 years old, he died.

And he couldn't be their functional brother any longer.

God raised up Joshua to lead into the promised land.

But the point is this: if you think through a Moses, and and Jesus is like, hey, I'm like Moses, but better.

It's like awesome.

Like, do you have an Egypt that you need to be delivered from?

Well, Jesus is better.

He's a better deliverer.

Do you have an idol in your life that you're ashamed of?

Like, Jesus is there interceding on your behalf.

Do you need order to be given to like your family?

Well, Moses did that, but Jesus is better.

Do you need a high priest?

Do you need someone to fight the battles for you?

Like, Jesus is a better Moses.

I can't liberate myself from an oppressive Pharaoh, but Jesus can.

I can't part the Red Sea in my life, but Jesus can.

I can't determine the path through the wilderness, but Jesus can.

I can't find water or food in the wilderness, but Jesus can.

I can't undo my moments of idolatry, but Jesus can.

I can't figure out the laws or the code of conduct, but Jesus can.

In the very first verse, it says, Therefore, holy brothers and sisters, who share a heavenly calling.

This is this idea, not that we're called to another place, but that we have been given a heavenly calling, which is just broader, it's broader perspective.

Rather than looking at your vocation here and setting goals for 2023, and it's like, you know, I want to lose weight and get more, make more money, or whatever your goals are, it's like we have this heavenly calling, which means that eternity bears implications upon the present physical world, where the people who are far from God and not followers of Jesus are only thinking in terms of if they're thinking at all about a vocation, they're thinking in a very physical, temporal way.

You and I have this heavenly calling that our brother Jesus, who is our merciful and faithful high priest, is leading us in.

It's a heavenly calling.

Our heavenly calling is a vocation with a heavenly exponent.

It is a life lived with a view broader than the physical.

And so I would commend to you this morning.

Let's be a people discipled by the pastor writing Hebrews and consider Jesus.

In line with the example of Moses, but so much better than Moses.

Lord, we thank you for your word.

We ask that you would uh go with us this week as we do this this um our jobs and our families and our um relationships with friends and neighbors.

Um Lord, we pray you would be um in our midst.

Take and apply this text to our lives, teach us, pastor us.

Um we pray and we want to hear your your voice uh this morning and this week as we go through we go through our regular routine.

We ask these things in Jesus' name.

Amen.