Sermon: Wittenberg Academy - Tuesday of Holy Week, 2024

26 Mar 2024

Text: Heb 3:1-19

In the name of + Jesus.  Amen.

Jesus is the New and Greater Moses.  Whereas Moses was a faithful “servant,” our Lord is the faithful “Son.”  If we consider the people of God as a “house,” Moses is a structurally important part of that house.  But Jesus is the “builder” of the house, worthy of glory and honor denied even to one as great as Moses.  And because of our “confidence” and “hope” in our Lord Jesus Christ, “we are His house.”

The author of Hebrews cites Psalm 95 – which was customarily the first Psalm sung in the ancient prayer order of Matins – to remind us how important “today” is: “Today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.” 

“Today” means now, the present, this very moment.  We cannot change the past (though we can learn from it).  We cannot control the future (though what we do now can change its trajectory).  But in the present time, “every day, as long as it is called ‘today,’” both the Psalmist and the author of Hebrews remind us to “exhort one another every day.”  We are in this house together, and as people of the same household, we live and work and grow up and grow old together, striving to keep one another from hardening our hearts “as in the rebellion,” when the followers of Moses spurned his leadership and rejected the Word that God delivered to them.  Their falling away from faith, their provocation of the God who saved them, their rebellion against the man God sent to rescue them made God Himself “swear that they would not enter His rest.”  For “their bodies fell in the wilderness,” and they did not enter the Promised Land “because of unbelief.”  For in their unbelief, they were unfaithful.

Dear friends, let us not only read the Word of God, but let us “hear His voice” and take heed.  Let us not be “hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.”  Let us learn from the past, and let us have a future of “hope” – “hold[ing] fast our confidence” in the New and Greater Moses, who leads us out of the slavery of sin and death, a captivity to one older and worse than Pharaoh.  Let us not rebel against Jesus, or fall away, but let us remain faithfully in the house and in the household, walking behind Him into the Promised Land.

For we do indeed live in a day called “today.”  And the author of Hebrews makes the same urgent plea as St. Paul that we live and repent and believe now, in the present, today.  As the apostle wrote to the Christians in Corinth, citing Isaiah: “In a favorable time I listened to you, and in a day of salvation I have helped you,” and then adding this truth: “Behold, now is the favorable time; behold, now is the day of salvation” (2 Cor 6:2).

Behold, dear friends.  Behold the present.  Behold today.  Behold the good news that one greater than Moses brings: the builder of the house, the Savior of the world, the propitiation of our sins, our only hope (who is our certain hope) for eternal life.  Behold the Promised Land!  Behold the rest of the eternal Sabbath!  Behold victory over sin, death, and the devil!  Behold, Jesus Christ our Savior! 

Amen.

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