Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Hebrews · About this commentary
A Son over the House
Hebrews 3:1-6
1 Therefore, holy brothers, partakers of a heavenly calling, consider the Apostle and High Priest of our confession: Jesus, · WEB
Moses is granted full faithfulness, and the comparison that follows is about position rather than performance.
Therefore, holy brothers, partakers of a heavenly calling, consider the Apostle and High Priest of our confession: Jesus.
Two titles are joined that belong to opposite directions of travel. An apostle is one sent out from God; a high priest goes in toward God on behalf of others. The same person is both ends of the transaction, and the name arrives last in the sentence, after the offices.
What follows is the book's third comparison, and the striking thing is how much it concedes. Who was faithful to him who appointed him, as also Moses was in all his house.
Moses is faithful — the word is applied to him without qualification, and in all his house leaves no part of the record out. Nothing in this paragraph criticizes him, and the comparison would collapse if it did.
The distinction drawn is architectural: he who built the house has more honor than the house. Both belong to the same structure; one of them made it. And verse 4 closes off the obvious question — every house is built by someone; but he who built all things is God — which quietly places the builder of this house in the only category available.
Then the two roles, in the cleanest sentence of the chapter. Moses indeed was faithful in all his house as a servant... but Christ is faithful as a Son over his house.
A servant in it, a Son over it. The prepositions carry the whole argument, and neither man is charged with any failure. What separates them is standing, and standing was never something Moses claimed.
One clause about Moses' service is easy to pass: he was faithful for a testimony of those things which were afterward to be spoken. His work pointed at something not yet said — which is the same relation chapter 8 will describe between the copy and the original Hebrews 8:5.
And the paragraph ends by putting the readers inside the building: we are his house, if we hold fast our confidence and the glorying of our hope firm to the end.
The conditional is not decoration. It is the first of three in three chapters Hebrews 3:14 Hebrews 4:14, and it turns an argument about rank into a question about persistence.
settled What this mark means