Call to Commitment

 An expository study of the book of Hebrews

                             Chapter 3

 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.

 An attempt to compare the incomparable

 Knowing their Jewish history, the believing Jews struggled in leaving it behind. God’s hand was powerfully and notably in all that they had learned since childhood. It was the task of the writer to show them that what God had done through the gospel was so much greater than their past. He addresses them as holy brethren, whose present calling was from heaven. God had separated them from the world around them and their Jewish nation hated them for it. They needed to see this as a high privilege.

   An expository study of the book of Hebrews

Chapter 2

 1. Therefore we must give the more earnest heed to the things we have heard, lest we drift away.

2. For if the word spoken through angels proved steadfast, and every transgression and disobedience received a just reward,

3. how shall we escape if we neglect so great a salvation, which at the first began to be spoken by the Lord, and was confirmed to us by those who heard Him,

4. God also bearing witness both with signs and wonders, with various miracles, and gifts of the Holy Spirit, according to His own will?

 

 An expository study of the book of Hebrews

 

1. God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets,

2. has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the worlds;

3. who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had by Himself purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high,

 Jesus Christ is greater than the prophets. Who is He?

 We enter this chapter and this book with great anticipation. We want to see Jesus and we open our hearts for the illumination that comes only from the Holy Spirit. Before the writer gives the first piece of advice, he extols Christ and thereby our hearts are warmed and encouraged to be faithful to Him at all costs. It is for our eternal benefit that God, Who created and rules over heaven and earth, desires to communicate with us. As we begin to ponder this book, verse by verse, that is our first consideration. In the past and in the present, God has spoken from heaven and we have a Bible that contains 66 books, by which we look into things from His perspective (v.1).

  We marvel at the insight of the prophets and their wonderful relationship with God, but God sends One, Who is superior to the prophets. In His great love for His people, the Father searches heaven, looking for a more perfect way to share His thoughts and heart with us. He sent His Word personified… In these last days, He sent us God the Son incarnate, in order to communicate from human lips to human ears, the infinitely superior purposes, existing in His throne room (v.2). There is something in the nature of God that pleases Him to save the best for last.

 We live in the very last moments of the last days. Peter quoted the prophet Joel, who prophesied of them: “It shall come to pass in the last days, says God, that I will pour out of my Spirit on all flesh” (Ac.2:17). We know, then, that the last days had already begun, when God poured His Spirit upon 120 disciples. Peter wrote in his second epistle that we should be patient, as we wait for the second coming of the Lord because, “with the Lord one day is as a thousand years…” (2 P.3:8). As the Lord sees things, a little less than two days have goneby since the time of the apostles.