Hebrews 3
Mike Barnett,
Hebrews 3:1-18 (pg, 847) says:
1Therefore, holy brothers, who share in the heavenly
calling, fix your thoughts on Jesus, the apostle and high priest whom we
confess. 2He was faithful to the one who appointed him,
just as Moses was faithful in all God's house. 3Jesus
has been found worthy of greater honor than Moses, just as the builder of a
house has greater honor than the house itself. 4For
every house is built by someone, but God is the builder of everything. 5Moses was faithful as a servant in all God's house,
testifying to what would be said in the future. 6But
Christ is faithful as a son over God's house. And we are his house, if we hold
on to our courage and the hope of which we boast.
7So,
as the Holy Spirit says:
"Today, if you hear his voice,
8do not harden your hearts
as you did in the rebellion,
during the time of testing in the desert,
9where your fathers tested and tried me
and for forty years saw what I did.
10That is why I was angry with that generation,
and I said, 'Their hearts are always going
astray,
and they have not known my ways.'
11So I declared on oath in my anger,
'They shall never enter my rest.' "[a]
12See to it,
brothers, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from
the living God. 13But encourage one another daily, as
long as it is called Today, so that none of you may be hardened by sin's
deceitfulness. 14We have come to share in Christ if we
hold firmly till the end the confidence we had at first. 15As
has just been said:
"Today, if you hear his voice,
do not harden your hearts
as you did in the rebellion."[b]
16Who were
they who heard and rebelled? Were they not all those Moses led out of
Lessons learned from
Hebrews 3:
1. A Christian is __________________ (declared)
to be ________________(Holy) because of who Christ is in them – they are
declared to ____________________(brothers) because of the Heavenly family they
have been _______________(adopted) into. V. 1
2. To walk in this God
Given righteousness on a daily basis, a Christian must continually __________(fix)
their ___________________(thoughts) on ___________________(Jesus) – this a good
method for “praying without ceasing”. V.
1
·
We have
allowed the thought patterns of this fallen world we live in to spill over onto
us.
·
Our minds/conscious
have been severed and scared by the selfish and sinful thoughts of the world we
live in.
·
To fix means:
a:To make firm, stable, or fast b: to
give a permanent or final form to. To make the image of. 2: To hold or direct
steadily. 3. To set or place definitely 4: To set in order: adjust 5: to get
ready: PREPARE 6a: REPAIR, MEND b: RESTORE, CURE. Webster’s Dictionary
·
Fix by
definition means to repair and make firm.
·
We need to
repair our thoughts and make them firm by thinking about Jesus and what he has
done for us.
·
Otherwise we
will be the “double-minded man that is unstable in all his ways” that James
speaks of.
·
Sharing in
verse two and following, the writer compares the faithfulness of Moses to the
greatest Old Testament leader of God’s people.
3) We are included God’s __________________(household)
- As Christians we are not only brothers and sisters of one another in Christ,
we are brothers and sisters of ______________(Christ). Vs. 2-6
·
To be Jesus’
brother or sister means that we are holy _______________________(positionally)
and we are exhorted to be Holy ______________________(experientially). Vs. 1-3
·
To be holy, the
writer urges Christians to “________________(FIX) THEIR _________________(THOUGHTS)
ON JESUS. Hebrews 3:1
·
Jesus was
faithful and was therefore appointed to be our _______________
_______________(high priest) because he lived as the faithful One here on
earth, in the same circumstances in which we live, not in the ideal conditions
of heaven. THEREFORE JESUS HAS BEEN FOUND WORTHY OF GREATER ____________________(HONOR)
THAN MOSES! V. 3
·
Moses let his
temper get the best of him and fell short of God’s perfect standard, yet He was
still worthy of honor because he was ordained by God.
·
·
In Numbers
12:6-8, God rebukes Aaron and Miriam for not honoring Moses as the through whom
God has uniquely revealed himself.
·
They should
have deferred to Moses because he had seen the glory of The Lord.
Numbers 12:6-8 says:
6 he said, "Listen to my words:
"When a prophet of the LORD is among
you,
I reveal myself to him in visions,
I speak to him in dreams.
7 But this
is not true of my servant Moses;
he is faithful in all my house.
8 With him I
speak face to face,
clearly and not in riddles;
he sees the form of the LORD.
Why then were you not afraid
to speak against my servant Moses?"
·
Jesus is the
actual ___________________(builder) of the house, whereas Moses was simply a ________________(part)
of it. Vs. 3-6
John
14The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.
We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only,[a] who came from the Father, full of grace and
truth.
·
Moses fell
short and let his anger get the best of him, but Jesus never did.
·
Therefore,
The Son of God is “worthy of greater honor than Moses. V. 6
·
The preacher
points out this God revealed himself finally and completely in His Son.
·
Thus it
behooves us to give the Son greater honor than he deserves by an obedience more
faithful and diligent than any ever shown to Moses.
4. GOD IS THE _____________________(BUILDER)
OF ___________________________(EVERYTHING) INCLUDING OUR MARRIAGE, OUR FAMILY
AND OUR CHURCH FAMILY V. 4
·
Just as God
has created established His people through the Son, so he also created the
world through the son.
·
The Son is
more worthy of more honor than Moses to the degree that the Creator is worthy
of more honor than what he has created.
·
Whereas Moses
was faithful as a servant in all God’s house.
·
Christ is
faithful as a son over God’s house.
·
MOSES WAS
FAITHFUL, BUT CHRIST IS FAITHFUL! V. 5
·
The Preacher
is primarily concerned about Christ’s faithfulness as a human being when He was
on earth.
·
The one who
is faithful on earth is now faithful in Heaven to save us.
·
A servant, no
matter how high in responsibility, is merely part of the household. But the Son is over just as the father is.
5. WE ARE GOD’S ________________(HOUSE)
– HE LIVES IN THE _____________(LIVE’S) OF BELIEVERS. V. 6
·
You and every
believer in Christ is the _______________
(House) where God __________________(lives) through the power of the ________________
_______________(Holy Spirit).
1 Cor.
16Don't you know that you yourselves are God's temple
and that God's Spirit lives in you?
1 Cor.
19Do you not know that your body is a temple of the
Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your
own;
John 14:10-21 (pg. 764) says:
10Don't you believe that I am in the Father, and that
the Father is in me? The words I say to you are not just my own. Rather, it is
the Father, living in me, who is doing his work. 11Believe
me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least
believe on the evidence of the miracles themselves. 12I
tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing.
He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. 13And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Son
may bring glory to the Father. 14You may ask me for
anything in my name, and I will do it.
15"If
you love me, you will obey what I command. 16And I will
ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor to be with you forever— 17the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it
neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and
will be[a] in you. 18I will not
leave you as orphans; I will come to you. 19Before long,
the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Because I live, you
also will live. 20On that day you will realize that I am
in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. 21Whoever
has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me. He who loves me
will be loved by my Father, and I too will love him and show myself to
him."
6. Christians are encouraged
to hold on to their courage and hope – in other words to be
________________(gritty) and ___________________(persevere) to the
_______________(end). V.6
·
Keep on
keeping on…Do not give in…Do not give up!
QUESTION: If we are God’s
house and he lives in us, then why do we need to just hold on ? ……ANSWER:
Because our position into God’s household is not seen with the physical eyes –
it must be received by ___________________(faith) which is contingent up our
___________________(choice) to ___________________(believe) God’s
___________________(promises).
·
The preacher
is anxious that his hearers remain a part of the people of God, so he adds: If
we hold on to our courage and the hope of which we boast.
·
The preacher
is also concerned that they hold onto the assured hope of living in God’s
presence forever.
·
God’s people
are not ashamed of this future hope. On the contrary, they boast about it.
7. It is not a sin to
__________________(boast) about what God has done for in you in Christ Jesus.
V. 6
1 Corinthians
31Therefore, as it is written: "Let him who boasts
boast in the Lord."[a]
2 Corinthians
17But, "Let him who boasts boast in the
Lord."[a]
·
It is only a
sin to boast about our own achievements apart from the Lord.
·
In Hebrews
3:7, the writer, who has been thinking about the faithfulness of Moses in
Hebrews 3:1-6, now turns to the unfaithfulness of the people Moses lead.
·
The preacher of
Hebrews sees a close parallel in the lives of his hearers.
·
They, too
faced opposition if they were going to continue to be faithful to God.
·
The society
around them was pressuring them to turn away from God’s final revelation in His
son Jesus Christ.
·
Some of them
began to wonder if faith in Christ was really worth the struggle.
·
They were
tempted to become slack in their Christian commitment.
·
In 3:1-19,
the preacher urges them to not follow the example of that unfaithful wilderness
generation.
·
In 4:1-11, he
encourages them to enter God’s blessing which the wilderness generation
forfeited.
8. IF YOU CAN
_______________________(RECEIVE) THIS MESSGAE OF HOPE BY
_________________(FAITH), THEN DON’T _________________(HARDEN) YOUR
___________________(HEARTS) AS THE WILDERNESS GENERATION DID THROUGH
__________________(UNBELIEF)! Hebrews
3:7-19
·
If you want
to harden your heart, then become cynical of God’s promises and doubt that they
will ever appear in your life – but if you want God’s
____________________(blessings) in your life just ____________________(believe)
the ________________(promises) to be _________________(true) right
_____________(now), today and every day you have breath!
Psalm 95:1-12 (pg. 426) says:
1 Come, let us sing for joy to the LORD;
let us shout aloud to the Rock of our
salvation.
2 Let us
come before him with thanksgiving
and extol him with music and song.
3 For the
LORD is the great God,
the great King above all gods.
4 In his
hand are the depths of the earth,
and the mountain peaks belong to him.
5 The sea is
his, for he made it,
and his hands formed the dry land.
6 Come, let
us bow down in worship,
let us kneel before the LORD our Maker;
7 for he is
our God
and we are the people of his pasture,
the flock under his care.
Today, if you hear his voice,
8 do not
harden your hearts as you did at Meribah, [a]
as you did that day at Massah [b] in the desert,
9 where your
fathers tested and tried me,
though they had seen what I did.
10 For forty
years I was angry with that generation;
I said, "They are a people whose
hearts go astray,
and they have not known my ways."
11 So I
declared on oath in my anger,
"They shall never enter my
rest."
9. AFTER YOU RECEIVE
GOD’S ______________________ ______________________(PROMISED BLESSINGS) BY
FAITH, YOUR _________________(FAITH) WILL BE ____________________(TESTED) BY
___________________(SCEPTICS) AND BY ___________________(TRIALS). Vs. 7-11
·
Hebrews 3:8
quotes Psalm 95:8:
“Do not harden your hearts
as in the rebellion, as on the day of testing in the wilderness.
·
Exodus 17:1-7
– Moses gave the names “Meribah” and “Massah” to this place because meribah
means “quarrel,” “contention” or “rebellion” and massah means “test”.
·
The people
quarreled with Moses and tested God’s patience because they did not trust God
to give them water.
·
The preacher
adds the words “THAT IS WHY” at the beginning of Hebrews
·
These words
do not appear in the Hebrews or Greek test of Psalm 95:7-11
·
The author wants
to make it clear that the rebellion of God’s people was the reason why God was
angry with them and did not allow them to enter His rest.
10) GOD GET’S __________________(ANGRY)
WITH HIS CHILDREN WHEN THEY DO NOT _____________(TRUST) HIS PROMISES, AND IT
MAKES SENSE WHEN YOU REALIZE YOU TOO GET UPSET WHEN YOUR CHILDREN, SPOUSE,
FAMILY AND FRIENDS DO NOT __________________(BELIEVE) WHAT YOU ______________(SAY)
TO BE __________________(TRUE). V. 10
·
GOD WAS ANGRY
WITH THE ISRAELITES AND DID NOT ALLOW THEM TO ENTER HIS REST, THE PROMISED
LAND.
·
THE LORD
DISCIPLINED THEN AND THEY WONDERED AROUND IN THE DESERT FOR 40 YEARS.
·
The preachers
interpretation of Psalm 95:7-11 in Hebrews 3:12-14 focuses on the first two
lines of the quotation: “Today, if you hear his voice and do not harden your
hearts”.
·
Hebrews
3:12-12 clarifies what it means to have a hardened heart.
·
We can divide
what is said about a hardened heart into three parts:
1)
It is a sinful, unbelieving heart.
2)
It is a heart that turns away from the living God.
3)
It is a heart hardened by sins deceitfulness.
11.
_____________________(Unbelief) leads to
________________________(Unfaithfulness) -The person with an unbelieving heart _____________
______________(turns) away from the living God who gives life to the fullest.
V. 12
John
10The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I
have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.
·
THIS
________________(FULL) LIFE IN CHRIST MUST BE RECEIVED BY _____________(FAITH).
·
If we
persistently refuse to trust God with the kind of faith that leads to
obedience, we are in danger.
·
It is
possible to come to the place where we have turned away from Him!
QUESTION: To
___________________(whom) can a person _______________(turn) when he turns away
from the living God? They are on their own.
·
The
wilderness generation was afraid of the people who lived in the Promised Land.
·
Therefore
they failed to trust God and refused to obey his command to enter the land.
·
As a result
they turned away from him and lost the blessed rest which he had prepared for
them.
·
Likewise the
readers of Hebrews were facing opposition from other people.
·
Those outside
the church looked down on them and persecuted them for being loyal to Christ.
·
But God,
through his son gave them grace to endure.
·
If they
turned away from God’s revelation in His son, they turned away from the one and
only true and living God.
·
The
unbelieving heart is a heart hardened by sin’s ______________________(deceitfulness).
·
Sin deceived
by causing people to see only the things of this world and not the
possibilities made available through the power of God.
·
Sin would
convince us that the difficulties of this world are stronger than the power of
God, and that the pleasures of this world are more satisfying.
·
The spies saw
strong armies and fortified cities in the Promised Land.
·
Those cities
were more real to God’s people than was the power of God to overthrow those
cities.
Numbers 13:28-33 says:
28 But the people who live there are powerful, and the
cities are fortified and very large. We even saw descendants of Anak there. 29 The Amalekites live in the
30 Then
Caleb silenced the people before Moses and said, "We should go up and take
possession of the land, for we can certainly do it."
31 But the
men who had gone up with him said, "We can't attack those people; they are
stronger than we are." 32 And they spread among the
Israelites a bad report about the land they had explored. They said, "The
land we explored devours those living in it. All the people we saw there are of
great size. 33 We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants
of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes,
and we looked the same to them."
·
They
preferred “to go back to
·
IF we let sin
harden our hearts in this way, we will live for what we can see.
·
The modern
world to which we live, is ever intensifying its pressure to turn Christians
away from complete loyalty to Christ.
·
Unbelievers
do not mind if we call ourselves Christians, so long as we don not take a stand
for righteousness. The pleasures of the senses were never more available or
more intense.
·
The writer of
Hebrews calls us to live by the _________________(unseen) _________________(power)
of God by __________________(faith) in order to obtain the unending and fully
satisfying joys of eternity.
·
The writer is
anxious that his readers be concerned about their fellow Christians’ hearts.
·
After all
Christians are brothers and sisters in Christ.
·
We must all exercise
extreme care so that none of us allows an unbelieving heart to develop or ______________(harden)
by _____________(sin).
Hebrews 3:12-13 says:
12See to it, brothers, that none of you has a sinful,
unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. 13But
encourage one another daily, as long as it is called Today, so that none of you
may be hardened by sin's deceitfulness.
12. CHRISTIANS ARE TO ____________________________(ENCOURAGE)
EACH OTHER ________________(DAILY) BY ________________________(REMINDING) EACH
OTHER WHO ____________(WE) _______________(ARE) IN CHRIST! -
_______________(GOD’S ________________(HOUSEHOLD) Vs. 12-15
·
The preacher
is convinced that his hearers share in Christ and the salvation in Christ, that
they hold firmly till the end the confidence they had at first.
·
The verse
could be rephrased:
·
“If we hold
firmly to the reality that we experienced at the beginning of our Christian
lives until the end” or “If we hold firm till the end the determination with
which we began our Christian lives.”
·
In
·
The preacher
wants them to end the way they began!
13. Christians are urged
to end they way they begun the spiritual journey in Christ and
__________________(finish) __________________(strong) because it is easy to let our first _______________(zeal)
for God grow _____________(cold).
Revelation 2:4-5 says:
4Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken your
first love. 5Remember the height from which you have
fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first. If you do not repent, I will
come to you and remove your lampstand from its place.
·
WE ARE URGED TODAY,
IF YOU HEAR HIS VOICE, DO NOT HARDEN YOUR HEARTS, AS YOU DID IN REBELLION.
·
V. 16 - shows how serious the wilderness generations
sin was by describing the great privileges which they had received.
·
“Now who were
they who heard and yet were rebellious”?
·
They were the
privileged people who had heard God’s word on
·
Those who
rebelled were those who Moses led out of
·
They had no
excuse for their unbelief because they saw God show up in tangible ways.
·
They were
witnesses to God’s many miracles.
·
The saw the
miraculous ten plagues.
·
They saw the
·
God had fed
them manna from Heaven.
·
He led them
with a pillar of cloud by day and with a pillar of fore by night.
Numbers 14:22-23 says:
22 not one of the men who saw my glory and the
miraculous signs I performed in Egypt and in the desert but who disobeyed me
and tested me ten times- 23 not one of them will ever
see the land I promised on oath to their forefathers. No one who has treated me
with contempt will ever see it.
·
Their sin was
rebellion because they deliberately rejected God despite the many ways he had
blessed them.
·
God’s forty
year anger with the wilderness generation described in 3:17a is an allusion to
Psalm 95:9b-10a quoted above in Hebrews 3:9a-10a.
·
·
He wants to
show his hearers how this sins severity brought on the deadly punishment that
the wilderness generation sufferer.
·
The essence
of their punishment was – THEY WERE NOT ABLE TO ENTER.
·
THEIR
UNBELIEF BROUGHT PUNISHMENT!
·
THE PREACHER
URGES CHRISTIANS TO ENTER THE REST THAT THEIT FOREFATHERS FORFIETED.
·
IF YOU CHOOSE
NOT TO ENTER THAT REST IN CHRIST, THEN PERHAPS YOUR CHILDREN WILL NOT.
13) YOUR
________________________(DISOBEDIENCE) WILL HAVE _____________________(RESIDENTUAL)
_________________(EFFECTS) AND ___________________(CONCIQUINCES) THAT WILL
___________ (OUT) _____________(LIVE) YOU AND BE PAST DOWN TO YOUR CHILDREN AND
YOU CHILDREN’S CHILDREN AND FURTHER DOWN THE FAMILY TREE! Vs. 16-19