Bible Commentaries
Hebrews 3

Verses 1-19

III 1—IV 13 Christ’s Superiority over Moses— Again, a transition is effected with admirable naturalness and skill, the comparison with Moses being grafted on the word ’faithful’, 2:17, and subsequent comparison with Aaron being distantly prepared by setting the two titles: ’Apostle’ (like Moses) and ’High Priest’ (like Aaron) side by side as belonging to Jesus. The superiority of Christ over Moses was a tremendous truth for a Hebrew circle and is here made the basis of a very long exhortation, 3:7-4:13.

III 1-6 Christ and Moses— 1. ’Holy brethren’ is singularly honorific and only very doubtfully paralleled in 1 Thessalonians 5:27. ’Brethren’ is really a title derived from the efficacious call given from the Father in heaven and leading to heaven. The Hebrews are asked to consider the ’Legate’ who called, and the ’High Priest’ who sanctified, namely, Jesus.

2. His fidelity. likens him to Moses as eulogised by God in Numbers 12:7; but the circumstances of that fidelity set him immeasurably above Moses.

3-5. As Man, Jesus was faithful to his Maker ’in the whole house’ or people of God. The points of Christ’s superiority are: (1) He himself ’made’ the house of Israel, since he is God; (2) Moses was faithful in that house as an honourable servant (Te??p??) to speak things as they were to be said in God’s name (t?+?? ?a?ðTðs?µ????), but Christ stands as SON (without the article) ’over’ (not ’in’) his own house. 6. This statement leads to the long exhortation; for Christ’s house we are, provided we keep to the end our ’bold confidence and the boast of our hope’—very Pauline expressions (the second exclusively Pauline) for the assurance of the theological virtue of hope. 935d

III 7-IV 13 Exhortation to Fidelity— Under Moses an unfaithful generation was fearfully punished by exclusion from the temporal rest of Chanaan; much more must Christians fear the apostasy which would exclude them from eternal rest. 7-9. This is the substance of the solemn commination extracted from the two Warning strophes of the invitatory Psalm, Ps 94. Its words are referred to the Holy Spirit, the Author of Scripture. It is cited, 94:8-11, from LXX, with its etymological renderings of the local names Meribah (quarrel) and Massah (temptation). The constantly recurring waywardness of Hebrew hearts in the desert consisted in doubting that the all-provident God was with them. They sulked when God seemed to leave them in the lurch, and they demanded tests of his fidelity and power.

10. Almost every day they forgot the miracles of yesterday. St Paul heightens the picture of Hebrew rebellion by making the forty years a constant repetition of Meribah and Massah, ’where your fathers tempted me, proved and saw my works forty years’. Here he inserts a ’for which cause’ to show that God was just in his anger and in his decree to exclude the rebellious generation from Chanaan. There is no falsification of the text and no departure from historical truth.

11. ’If they shall enter’ means: ’They shall not enter’—an elliptic form of oath: ’(May I cease to be God) if they shall enter’. The rest or repose of Chanaan is typal (cf. 3rd, otherwise 2nd, beatitude)— a figure of eternal rest. The application here presents close affinities with 1 Corinthians 10:1-13, but we must not commit the exaggeration of asserting that every, one of the generation of the Exodus was eternally lost!

12-15. The admonition of the Psalmist applies to later generations of Israelites and to Christians as well. It is a warning against badness of heart consisting in unbelief and reaching the point of departure from the living God. 12. The ’living God’ is powerful to fulfil both his promises and his threats, cf. 10:31. 13. Corporate self-encouragement or mutual social exhortation is needed as long as the ’To-day’ of each day of life lasts. ’Hardening by the deceit of sin’ is a striking expression on which Estius remarks: ’The heart softened by the pleasure of sin little by little grows hard towards the precepts of God’. Sin is seductive, cf.Romans 7:8-11.14. The participation in Christ which we have, though very intimate (like his participation in our humanity, 2:14), will not last, unless we keep ’the beginning of his substance’—that is, faith which is the beginning, root, and foundation of Christian life (Chrys., Theodoret)—firm to the end. ’Beginning of his substance’, however, may simply mean’ our first hope in him’, cf. 10:32.

16-19. No one is exempted from fear, as the rhetorical questions based on the Psalm show. The punishment of their provocation of God fell on all the privileged ones of the Exodus, on all whom sin condemned to leave their corpses in the desert, on all the unbelieving Hebrews excluded from the rest of the Promised Land. Note well that 16 should read: ’Who were they who heard and rebelled? Was as it not all those who came out of Egypt under Moses?’ Rebellion against God, death in the desert, exclusion from Palestine, all attach themselves to the sin of unbelief (?p?stía) against which the warning is being given.