Sermon: Wittenberg Academy – Tuesday of Holy Week

12 April 2022

Text: Heb 3:1-19

In the name of + Jesus.  Amen.

The writer to the Hebrews demonstrates Jesus as the New and Greater Moses, the fulfillment of the Law of Moses.  For “Moses was faithful in all God’s house as a servant… but Christ is faithful over God’s house as a Son.”  And “we are His house if indeed we hold fast our confidence and our boasting in our hope.”

In other words, Moses gives us the Word of God that points us to Jesus; Jesus is the Word of God incarnate who fulfills the Law of Moses.  And reflecting on Moses and our need today as Christians to “hold fast” to Christ as our hope, the writer of Hebrews uses the Israelites from the Book of Exodus as an illustration, quoting Psalm 95: “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness, when your fathers put me to the test and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work.  For forty years I loathed that generation and said, ‘They are a people who go astray in their heart, and they have not known my ways.’  Therefore I swore in my wrath, ‘They shall not enter my rest.’”

Because of their falling away, the Lord made that rebellious generation to wander forty years, until all of them died, never reaching the Promised Land.  “Take care,” he says, lest our unbelieving hearts lead us to “fall away from the living God.”

This is a stern dose of the Law, dear friends.  It is a cautionary tale.  So how do we avoid the fate of the wandering Israelites?  “Consider Jesus,” he says, “the apostle and high priest of our confession.”  Our steadfastness is not in ourselves, our knowledge of Moses, our intimacy with the Law.  Rather, we are to be steadfast in Christ, the one who fulfills the Law.  We are to “hear His voice,” and by doing so, we will not be hardening our hearts like the rebellious Israelites. Our salvation, our life in the eternal Promised Land, is found in Christ, for “we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end.”

In other words, dear friends, we are to be steadfast in faith – faith not in ourselves, not even in Moses’s Law, but rather in Christ, who died for us, and who is leading us faithfully on to eternity.  It is rather much like the hymn attributed to St. Patrick that says: “Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ on my right, Christ on my left, Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down, Christ when I arise, Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me, Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me, Christ in every eye that sees me, Christ in every ear that hears me.”

Indeed, it is Christ who is our “confidence and our boasting in His hope!” 

Amen.

In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.