Jesus: The Faithful Builder (Hebrews 3:2-4)

Hebrews 3:2-4 and the Call to Consider Jesus

Turn to Hebrews chapter two, sorry, three. Don't want to depress you by making you think we're still back in chapter two. Hebrews chapter three. Read together the first six verses, Hebrews three. Therefore, holy brethren, partakers of a heavenly calling, consider Jesus the apostle and high priest of our confession.

He was faithful to him who appointed him as Moses was also in all his house. For he has been counted worthy of more glory than Moses by just so much as the builder of the house has more honor than the house.

For every house is built by someone, but the builder of all things is God. Now Moses was faithful in all his house as a servant for a testimony of those things which were to be spoken later. But Christ was faithful as a son over his house, whose house we are if we hold fast our confidence and the boast of our hope firm until the end.

Let's pray together. Our father, we ask your blessing upon our time of study in your word. We ask you to do for us what we cannot do and that is to help us to understand your word, to see it in all of its fullness and its glory, help us to appreciate the glory of Christ and what he has done and who he is and how superior he is to all other things.

And may we walk away from our time here in your word, sanctified, made more holy, conformed to the image of Christ with hearts that are inclined by your grace and by your spirit to obedience to your word and to the Lord Jesus Christ.

That you our great triune God may be honored and glorified in all things and in your people. And in our time here, that is our prayer. We ask it in Christ's name, amen. Well, we've just started this long section that contrasts Moses with Jesus in Hebrews chapter three.

Faithfulness as the Mark of Christ and His Servants

And the emphasis of these opening verses in these first six verses of Hebrews three is on the faithfulness of the Lord Jesus Christ. The word faithfulness is a beautiful word. It is beautiful when it is attached to almost any noun.

When we see faithfulness in somebody, it is something that we admire and rightly so. And we speak of having a faithful employee or a faithful servant or a faithful church member or a faithful spouse, a faithful child, a faithful employer.

And you attach that word faithful to something,.

It says something.

It is a beautiful word and it conjures up in our minds these images of fidelity and obedience and trustworthiness and integrity and solidness of character and one's commitment to a task. To get an idea of just how beautiful it is, try contrasting it with its opposite.

When you hear the word unfaithful, what do you think of? That's just an ugly word, isn't it?

Unfaithful.

And we think of unfaithful, unfaithful conjures up into our minds disobedience and lack of fidelity and untrustworthy. And then when you attach it to any of those other nouns that we just attached faithful to it, and you get unfaithful spouses, unfaithful pastors, unfaithful church members, unfaithful employers, unfaithful employee.

How many of you want to employ an unfaithful employee? It's just the imagery of unfaithfulness is just a horrible imagery. And yet in our day, sadly enough, it seems as if in increasing numbers, unfaithfulness has come to characterize more and more servants of God and more and more churches.

And I think that since we are living in an age marked by apostasy, we're going to start seeing that more and more. We see in the headlines more and more pastors who are unfaithful to their spouses and pastors who are unfaithful to their churches and people who are unfaithful to the truth and unfaithful to the gospel and unfaithful to their calling.

And so consequently, then they're unfaithful to their Lord. That's ultimately what unfaithfulness is. It is a lack of fidelity or trustworthiness to do what God has called us to do. And so in these opening verses, it is this faithfulness that is being marked out.

And faithfulness is something that you and I should strive to. It's something that we should seek to model and emulate in our own lives. We look at Jesus. We are called in this passage to consider Jesus and he is faithful and he has described as faithful a number of times in this passage.

And so faithfulness is something that we ought to aspire to in all things. Paul says when describing his own ministry in 1 Corinthians 4, verse two, he said, as it was required of stewards, that is ministers or servants of Christ, that they be found faithful.

What is required of us is not that we have great intellectual capacity. We may or may not have the ability to have that. Not that we have great creativity or that we have great strengths or that we have great charisma or that we have great spiritual giftedness, but what is required of stewards?

That we be found what?

Faithful.

Now you can be faithful and not be a giant intellect. I do not have the intellectual capacity of R .C. Sproul. So I can't be an R .C. Sproul, but I can be faithful. I can be a completely unlearned and illiterate Christian and still be faithful.

And ultimately what I want to hear is, and when I stepped into the kingdom, well done, good and creative?

No, faithful.

Well done, good and gifted servant? Well done, good and powerful servant? Well done, good and popular servant? None of that. All we wanna hear is well done, good and faithful servant. We can be faithful and not have the charisma or the giftedness or the intellectual abilities or even the social abilities of other men who are faithful in their stead, but we can be faithful even without any intellectual capacity or spiritual giftedness that we consider to be popular among the greats.

We can be faithful. Thankfully, it is required of stewards that we be found. What?

Faithful.

Just trustworthy. Just doing what God has called us to do. Moses was such a man and the Lord Jesus Christ, of course, was such a man. Ultimately, since we long to hear that, well done, good and faithful servant, if that is the prize, then we ought to emulate those who have gone before us who have been men and women of faithfulness to the calling that they've been given.

The last week we looked at what it means to consider Jesus. And the author of Hebrews sets before us at the beginning of chapter three, Christ. He says, we are holy brethren. We are partakers of a heavenly calling.

We are to consider, to set our minds and to focus our attention on Christ. And now he's going to describe for us who the Lord Jesus Christ is and what the Lord Jesus Christ has done, particularly his faithfulness.

But just the fact that the author encourages us to consider, to fix our minds on Christ, just that fact is evidence enough that Jesus is superior to Moses. You can read through the Old Testament and through the Old Covenant, and you will never once in any of the Old Testament ever see anybody say, look, look to Moses, consider Moses, fix your attention on Moses, set your mind on where Moses is.

I follow the example of Moses. That's not the imperative. That's not the command of the Old Testament. But in the New Testament, it is for us, Jesus. We are to fix our mind and our attention and our focus on Jesus.

So just that fact alone, that we are encouraged throughout scripture, throughout the New Testament, to fix our attention on Christ is an evidence that Jesus is superior to Moses. And that's the point that's being made here in these opening verses of chapter three.

We've gone from chapters one and two, Jesus is superior to the angels, to chapter three and four, Jesus is superior to Moses. Now to us, that seems, well, we take that for granted, right? We understand and we take for granted that Jesus is superior to Moses, but to a first century Jew living in the land of Israel, this is something that Jesus is superior to Moses.

This is something that they would have needed to be reminded of and have impressed upon them the superiority of the Lord Jesus Christ to Moses. Because they had grown up with all of the smells and bells and all of the sounds and scents of the Old Testament and the covenant and the sacrifices in the temple and the feasts and the festivals and all of the Jewishness that was part of their faith.

They had walked away from that. And now they're with just Jesus. And I say that tongue in cheek. All they have now is Jesus. Now they have a high priest that they see once a year. They have a high priest who sits in heaven, intercedes for them.

They can't go there and hear the high priest intercede for them. They don't offer sacrifices anymore. They're not involved in the festivals and the feasts and all of the activities of the old covenant.

And so then they were struggling with this longing, this desire, and it was quite an allurement to go back to what they were familiar with, especially while their friends and their family are back there enjoying those things.

And they're used to walking into the temple, into the tabernacle and smelling and seeing those things that reminded them of their childhood. And now they're off into the new covenant and the persecution has come.

And their inclination is, well, I could go back there. And so we find in the book of Hebrews that much of this letter is written to those who were on the fence and to those who were feeling the strong allurement to go back to their old practices, their old life in Judaism and to enjoy the smells and the bells.

Imagine what it is like. Have you ever walked into someplace and you smell something that just reminds you of your childhood? You smell something that reminds you of a whole era of your life? You think, man, that's familiar.

This takes me back to grandma's house. My great-grandmother had a porch that was attached to the side of her kitchen. And every once in a while, I can remember in my mind or I will smell something. I think, oh, that's great-grandma's porch.

It reminds me of walking in there and all that was attached to that and all of that. And it just, it's like I stepped back in time for a second. Imagine being a Jew and having grown where your entire religious faith surrounded and revolved around the burning of flesh and the blood and the sacrifice and burning of incense and all of that.

That was the tactile evidence that you were in a right relationship with God. And now you've come into the new covenant where you walk in here, you smell any of that. And all of that is part of something else.

And then what would happen when you start smelling the burning of flesh? Or you smell blood, or you smell incense burning? You think, oh, that reminds me of my childhood. Boy, I'd love to go back to that.

And that's what the Hebrews were struggling with, going back to that. Should we go back to that? And so the warning passages in Hebrews are intended to keep them from going back to that, from reverting back to that.

So here we are, chapter three, verses one through six, seeing that Jesus is superior to Moses. Today, we're looking at verses two through four. We looked at verse one last week. Today, we're looking at verses two through four, seeing that Christ is worthy of more glory for three reasons.

First, because he was faithful. Second, because he is the builder of God's house. And third, because he is divine. So in this comparison between Jesus and Moses, we're gonna see that Jesus is worthy of more glory than Moses because Jesus is faithful, he is the builder of God's house, and he is divine.

So let's look at the first one, that he is faithful in verse two. He was faithful. Now this is speaking of Jesus because verse one, he says, we are to consider Jesus, the apostle and high priest of our confession.

He, that is Christ, was faithful to him who appointed him, as Moses also was in all his house. Now the author begins by saying something about Moses that is one of the most complimentary things that you could say about an Old Testament saint.

In fact, it is one, as I hope you saw from the introduction, it's one of the most complimentary things that anybody could say about you and I, that he is faithful. Would you rather be known for being faithful or for being smart?

I hope you would rather be known for being faithful. Would you rather be known for being faithful or being popular or being funny or charismatic? I hope it's faithfulness. So the author begins by affirming something of Moses that is one of the most complimentary things that he could have said of Moses.

And that is to say that he is faithful. And he says it down again in verse five. Now Moses was faithful in all his house as a servant. So he says in verse two, that Christ was faithful, just like Moses was faithful.

It says in verse five, Moses was faithful in all of his house. He was affirming the faithfulness of Moses. So he begins here with the similarities between Jesus and Moses. And it is smart for the author to do this, given that his audience was a bunch of Jews, right?

He didn't wanna come right out of the gate and say, look, I know we all revere Moses and think Moses is a great character, but let me tell you about all the horrible things Moses did and said and thought.

He doesn't do that.

Instead, he affirms the faithfulness of Moses, speaks very complimentary of Moses, so as not to alienate any of his audience. And then he compares by giving us, I think two significant similarities between Moses and Jesus.

First, that both of them were appointed or sent. Moses was appointed and Jesus was appointed. He says in verse two, Jesus was faithful, Christ was faithful to him who appointed him. Just as Moses was, and the parallel is, just as Moses was faithful to one who appointed him.

And we saw last week what the word apostle means. What does it mean? A sent one, one who was appointed or sent as a representative of someone else. So he's already affirmed in verse one that Jesus is the apostle and the high priest of our confession.

Jesus was appointed by the father. He uses the word, Jesus uses the word sent of himself 41 times in the gospel of John to describe the fact that the father sent him and that he came and that he came to do all of the father's will and he came to represent the father.

That was his goal, that was what he did. And Moses also was appointed. In fact, the word appointed is used of Moses when Samuel in talking to the people when they wanted a king, says in 1 Samuel 12 verse six, it is the Lord who appointed Moses and Aaron and who brought your fathers up out of the land of Egypt.

So there's an intentional reference here back to something that was true of Moses. Moses was commissioned and appointed by God to do a certain thing. He was faithful in it, he did it. Jesus likewise was appointed by God to do a certain thing, the father to do a certain thing and Jesus was faithful in it and he did it.

The second thing that both of them have in common is not just that they're faithful, but that they're sorry, not just they were appointed, but that they were faithful. And that's the main point of this passage.

Three times the word faithful is used of Jesus in this context. Look up at chapter two, verse 17. Chapter two, verse 17, we're reminded that he had to be made like his brethren in all things so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest.

So concerning his high priestness, his high priesthood, his office of being a high priest, the fact that he's a high priest, he's faithful in that. We see in verse two here that he was faithful as a builder of God's house, that's verses two and three.

And then down in verse six, we see the Christ is called faithful as a son over his house. So he's a faithful high priest, a faithful builder and a faithful son. Those are the three points of this passage.

And he is contrasting the Lord Jesus with Moses in order to show the faithfulness of Jesus. Moses also said to be faithful twice in this passage. As the conclusion is this, that both of them were faithful in that which God had commissioned them to do.

Both of them did it faithfully and obediently, and both of them did it well. Now here's what's interesting about Moses. The author could have compared Jesus with Moses to show that Jesus was more faithful than Moses was.

He could have done that, right? Because was Moses perfect in all that he did? He wasn't perfect, but he was faithful. Moses had his failings, Moses had his moments of disobedience, but the general pattern of Moses's life is that he was a faithful man, not perfect, but he was faithful.

That should be an encouragement to you. I don't have to be perfect, I just have to be faithful. Faithful to do what God has called me to do. Now the author could have compared Jesus with Moses to say Jesus was perfectly faithful and Moses was faithful as well, but less faithful.

He could have made that comparison, but it's not the comparison he makes. Instead, he makes a comparison as to the faithfulness of each of them and the nature of the task that they were given. Jesus being a son over the house of God, Moses being a servant in the house of God.

So it is not the degree of their faithfulness that is compared, it is the arena of their faithfulness that is compared. And the arena of Jesus' faithfulness and what he was faithful to do is greater than what Moses was given to do.

And therefore Jesus' faithfulness makes him greater than Moses, not because he was more faithful, but because he was faithful in a greater thing. Make sense? Now think of what is it that Moses did that might've marked him as being unfaithful.

Can you think of a few things? Do you remember at the beginning of his call to ministry, and this was before he killed the Egyptian in Egypt, but when he was out in Midian and God appeared to him in the burning bush, do you remember what that calling looked like when God spoke to him and said, look, I wanna send you back to Pharaoh, to the land of Egypt to deliver my people.

You're gonna go to Pharaoh and be my spokesman. What did Moses say? Speak and I shall do exactly what they asked to do, Lord. You say anything like that? Well, Moses said, no, I think you got the wrong guy.

I don't wanna do this, and somebody else, anybody else but me, does that sound like a faith? And a faith doesn't at all, does it? Wavering right at the moment of his call. And then God said, look, I'm gonna tell you to, I'm gonna put my words in your mouth and you're gonna speak to Pharaoh on my behalf.

And Moses said, what? Yeah, I'm articulate, I'm a great spokesman. I think you've got the right guy. No, Moses said, you got the wrong guy. Can't speak, I can't articulate. And God said, look, I made the tongue.

I can make you speak. If I want you to speak, fine, I'll make Aaron your spokesman. So there was a moment of unbelief there. You remember, there's this little incident in Exodus chapter four that I've always found fascinating.

When it says that Moses did not circumcise his sons. And so God sought to put Moses to death until Moses's wife took a flintstone and circumcised their son, and threw the bloody foreskin at Moses's feet and said, you are a bridegroom of blood to me, Exodus chapter four.

I wish I had a little bit more detail.

About what all of that was.

You can put that in the category of things you did not learn in Sunday school class when you were a kid. There's that brief lesson shows that Moses, as the leader of God's people, had been disobedient in something, and God set his face against Moses until that obedience was taken care of.

There's that little lack of faith, lack of obedience, small thing in Moses's life, but it was enough that God said, I've called you to be my leader to my people, and now I'm going to kill you because you will not obey me in this.

And of course, the big issue of Moses's disobedience was in the middle of the wilderness journeys when God told him to speak to the rock and he struck the rock instead. It was an act of disobedience, and Moses was brought all the way up to the edge of the promised land, and God said, you're not going in.

You disobeyed me, so I'm not going to give to you this blessing. And so God took his life, and Moses was, don't think that he was young and in his prime, he wasn't. He was older, but God allowed him to die, and then buried him somewhere by himself, and he was not allowed to go into the promised land.

So there are these incidences in Moses's life where we look at them, a lack of faith, a lack of obedience, a lack of trust, and a lack of faithfulness, but that's not what characterized Moses's life. From beginning to end, that's not how you would describe Moses.

You would say he was a faithful man. Perfect, no, disobedient in a few things, but he was a faithful man. Can we say the same thing of Jesus? Perfect, no, disobedient in a few things, but by and large, faithful.

No.

See, the author could have said, yeah, Moses was faithful, but remember? Remember the incident of the calling? Remember the incident with the foreskin? Remember the incident of the disbelief and striking the rock?

Remember those things? Yeah, Jesus had none of those type of inconsistencies in his life. Jesus was perfect morally, perfect to do everything God gave him to do, the Father sent him to do. He was utterly perfect.

He could have compared the degree of faithfulness,.

But he doesn't do that.

Instead, he compares the arena of faithfulness. Jesus was faithful in a larger and greater arena. And this is where the analogy of the house comes up that you see in the passage there. Moses was also in God's house, faithful just as Jesus was, verse two.

And then you'll notice that this analogy of a house, the word house is mentioned at least once in every verse for the rest of the passage. So this idea of the house is central to the argument of this entire passage all the way through the end of verse six.

Look at verse three. He, that is Christ, has been counted worthy of more glory than Moses, just so much as the builder of the house has more honor than the house. For every house is built by someone, but the builder of all things is God.

Now, Moses was faithful in all his, that is God's house, as a servant for a testimony of those things which were to be spoken later. But Christ was faithful as a son over his house, whose house we are if we hold fast our confidence and the boast of our hope firm until the end.

So you can see how this analogy of a house is woven all the way through the passage. So it is central to understanding the argument of the author, to understand what is this house that he is speaking of.

This is where you're going to get into a distinction between people who believe in dispensational theology and covenant theology. I'm gonna flesh that out in just a second, and it's not gonna be too complex because I'm not gonna go into it in too great a detail.

So here is what the house is all the way through this passage. The house is the spiritual people of God, period, full stop. The spiritual people of God. This is the redeemed of God. So we're not talking about ethnic Israel.

We're not talking about ethnic Israel because though Moses was ethnically a Jew and involved in some way in serving the ethnic national Israel, that is not what he is describing here. Moses, he is describing here the spiritual people of God.

So it's not ethnic Israel because not everybody who was a Jew was saved. You had rebellious and disobedient Jews, many of whom perished in the wilderness. You had Jews who did not believe in Yahweh and did not exercise faith in Yahweh, and they perished and they were punished in hell.

They weren't saved just by virtue of the fact that they were Abraham's descendants. Not everybody who was of Abraham is a spiritual descendant of Abraham and saved. So he's not describing ethnic Israel, the nation of Israel, as the house.

He is describing the people of God, the spiritual people of God. In the Old Testament, that would have been largely Jews, though not exclusively, because you have Rahab and you have the citizens of Nineveh who repented.

You have other Gentiles who were sort of brought in, but in the Old Testament and the Old Covenant, it was largely a Jewish spiritual people who God had saved out of the Jewish nation and he had called Gentiles to himself.

And those Gentiles came and worshiped God according to the terms of the Old Covenant. And that meant becoming identified with the Jewish nation and undergoing circumcision and adopting the culture and forms and the worship and the sacrifices of the Jewish.

So they worshiped God according to the terms of the Old Covenant. They were a spiritual people. Under the New Covenant, we are saved by faith just as they are. Faith in the very thing. We believe what God has said and we have imputed to us righteousness just like Abraham.

So we are a spiritual people of God. Today, we are called the church, but our faith is exclusively and solely in the Lord Jesus Christ and what is revealed concerning him. We look to Christ. They looked to Yahweh of the Old Testament.

Turns out they're one in the same. They didn't realize that in the Old Testament, but they were believing Yahweh. We believe Jesus is Yahweh. And so we trust him. We believe him. And we worship God under the terms and according to the terms of the New Covenant, in spirit and in truth, not as Israel, not with the culture and the customs that are attached to the nation, but we worship God according to the terms of the New Covenant, which is faith in Jesus Christ as a redeemed people.

The house of God, we've incorporates all of those spiritual people, whether it is Rahab or the people who are part of this house. God is building a house composed of redeemed people, all of whom belong to God that is God's spiritual house.

I do not believe that the point of the analogy is to distinguish between Israel and the church, nor is it to confuse Israel and the church. That's not the point of the analogy. He's just talking about the house.

Moses, amongst the people of God, those who belong to God, he was faithful. Jesus, for those who belong to him, he is also faithful to build that house. And so it is just the spiritual people of God.

In Old Testament,.

How the spiritual people of God is referred to as the house of God. Numbers chapter 12, verse seven through eight, it is, that's in the context of Miriam and Aaron's disobedience and rebellion against Moses and saying, it's God only spoken through you.

I mean, who are you to think that you should lead us? Numbers chapter 12, God reproves them. And he says this, it's not so with my servant Moses, he's faithful in all my household. With him, I speak mouth to mouth, even openly and not in dark sayings.

And he beholds the form of the Lord. Why then are you not against my servant, against Moses? So you see there the analogy or the statement there that God gives, that Yahweh gives concerning Moses, he is faithful in all my household.

We get illusions already in the Old Testament that God had a house of people. It's a spiritual analogy for the spiritual people of God. In the New Testament, under the new covenant, those who are in Christ, who are part of the church, we belong to the house of God.

Ephesians two, 19 to 20. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, your fellow citizens with the saints and are of God's household. Having been built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets, Christ Jesus himself, being the cornerstone in whom the whole building being fitted together is growing into a holy temple.

Listen to all this language of buildings and temple. In the Lord, in whom also you are being built together into a dwelling of God in the spirit. First Peter two says, and coming to him as the living stone, which has been rejected by men, but his choice and precious in the sight of God.

You also as living stones are being built up as a spiritual house for a holy priesthood to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. So the house is the redeemed. That's what it is, spiritual people.

Old Testament or New Testament, the purpose is not to distinguish or to confuse the nature of these peoples of God, whether national Israel saved Israel or the church. The purpose of the analogy is not to speak anything to that.

Both of us, Old Testament, New Testament saints are saved by grace, saved by faith, imputed the righteousness of Jesus Christ. They look forward to the righteousness of Christ. We look back to the righteousness of Christ.

They look forward to what God was going to do. We look back to what God has done, but we are all saved on the same basis of anticipating that atonement for our sin and believing that God would save us on the basis of a substitutionary atonement.

So the fact that the same analogy is used does not mean that there is no distinction between Israel and the church. This is the money statement. The fact that the same analogy is used is no proof that there is no distinction between Israel and the church.

I can speak of the spiritual people of God, generally speaking, and still at the same time, recognize that Israel, ethnic Israel or saved Israel is not the same people group as the church. Now, covenant theologians believe, and this is in the 30 seconds that I have left on this point, I'm not gonna be able to finally distinguish where you might be if you're a covenant theologian, okay?

So I understand that. Give me just a little bit of grace, but broadly, in the broadest possible way of speaking, covenant theologians believe that there's no distinction between Israel and the church, that Old Testament Israel was the church of the Old Testament, that the church today is the New Testament Israel, that these are all one people group, that there is no distinction between the two of them.

And they will use analogies like this. See, there's one house, there's one house, one household.

We're all part of it.

Old Testament saints, New Testament saints. Well, I believe that, but I don't believe that just because we're all part of God's spiritually redeemed people, that there's therefore no distinction in how God deals with or how God's treat or what God's plan is for different people groups amongst or inside of that household.

So I find, and I know that some of you are covenant theologians, so just calm down. Wait till I'm done before you drag me outside and stone me. I find that covenant theology makes far too much of analogies like this, when the point of the passage is not to speak to the nature of the church in Israel.

And then when you get to a passage of scripture, which clearly identifies the distinctives between Israel and the church, they're far too quick to turn it into metaphors and allegories and symbols, okay?

So the point of the analogy is not to speak to whether Israel and the church are one and the same.

They're not.

Christ as the Builder of God’s House

He's the builder of the house. That's point two. We'll jump off of that before some people get up and start walking out. He is the builder of the house, and this is verse three. So first of all, he is faithful.

He's faithful in God's household, just like Moses was faithful in God's household. And second, he is worthy of more honor than Moses because he is the builder of the house. So we've established that both Jesus and Moses were faithful.