Our Apostle and High Priest
1 Therefore, holy brothers and sisters, who share in a heavenly calling, consider Jesus, the apostle and high priest of our confession. o 2 He was faithful to the one who appointed him, just as Moses was in all God’s household. 3 For Jesus is considered worthy of more glory than Moses, just as the builder has more honor than the house. 4 Now every house is built by someone, but the one who built everything is God. p 5 Moses was faithful as a servant q in all God’s household, as a testimony to what would be said in the future. 6 But Christ was faithful as a Son over his household. And we are that household if we hold on to our confidence and the hope in which we boast. ,r
Warning against Unbelief
7 Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says:
Today, if you hear his voice,
8 do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion,
on the day of testing in the wilderness,
9 where your fathers tested me, tried me,
and saw my works 10 for forty years.
Therefore I was provoked to anger with that generation
and said, “They always go astray in their hearts,
and they have not known my ways.”
11 So I swore in my anger,
“They will not enter my rest.” ,s
12 Watch out, brothers and sisters, so that there won’t be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart that turns away t from the living God. 13 But encourage each other daily, u while it is still called today, so that none of you is hardened v by sin’s deception. w 14 For we have become participants in Christ if we hold firmly until the end the reality that we had at the start. x 15 As it is said:
Today, if you hear his voice,
do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion. ,y
16 For who heard and rebelled? Wasn’t it all who came out of Egypt under Moses? z 17 With whom was God angry for forty years? Wasn’t it with those who sinned, whose bodies fell in the wilderness? a 18 And to whom did he swear that they would not enter his rest, if not to those who disobeyed? 19 So we see that they were unable to enter because of unbelief.
C. Jesus Christ superior to Moses (3:1–4:13). 3:1. The author draws together the previous themes in a striking exhortation that concludes the previous section and introduces the next. The readers’ failure to give Christ the place in their minds and hearts that his divine supremacy, mediatorial work, and human sympathy deserve has led to their crisis of faith. Only in Hebrews is Jesus called an apostle, though the fact that Jesus was sent by God to act on his behalf is commonplace in the NT (cf. Jn 5:36).
3:2–6. The author now compares Jesus with Moses (3:2–3), again perhaps to counter an unhealthy veneration of Moses at the expense of Christ. There is but one house of God in which Moses served but which Christ built, and that house includes us. The Son is the builder (3:4) only as the executor of the Father’s will (1:2), unless the author intends here to call Jesus God. Moses was never anything more than a member of the house that Christ was building and a servant in that house over which Christ rules as God’s Son (3:5–6). Further, as a prophet, Moses pointed away from himself to Christ; his message was of salvation in Christ (cf. Jn 5:46; Rm 10:6–10). Believers today belong to that house, as did Moses and the faithful before and after him (Heb 11:1–40), if they hold fast to Christ and to no one and nothing else for salvation.
3:7–11. The warning of 3:6 that membership in God’s household is suspended on a living and persevering faith introduces a long exhortatory section (3:7–4:13) in which the danger of apostasy and the necessity of an enduring faith are illustrated from the history of Israel. Here the author cites the warning of Ps 95:7–11 as the living and active word of God (Heb 4:12) demanding to be heard and obeyed now as then. It is introduced as the word of the Holy Spirit (3:7), though later it is ascribed to David (4:7), an example of the consistent assumption of the writers of the NT that what Scripture says, God says (cf. Rm 9:15, 17; Gl 3:8; Heb 9:8; 10:15).
3:12–14. The point of the citation in 3:7–11 is driven home as the author reminds the readers that in this fundamental respect nothing has changed since the wilderness: it is still possible for those numbered outwardly among the people of God to forfeit the eternal country; it still requires nothing more than spiritual neglect to harden a heart to the point that it will turn away from God (3:12); and it is still as vitally necessary to stand fast in faith all of one’s life (3:13) and to help one another stand (10:23–25). As throughout the letter, the subject is not unbelief per se but apostasy, the rejection of Christ and the faith by one who professed to believe and was considered to belong to the church of God (3:12).
3:15–19. For a readership that was inclined to consider the life of Israel in the wilderness as a paradigm for their own, it was particularly necessary to emphasize that it was precisely that generation, the generation lifted out of Egypt on eagles’ wings, that was rejected by God for unbelief (3:16–18). The exhortation of 3:12–14 is thus reinforced by this explicit recollection of Israel’s forfeiture of the rest of God.