Comments on: NT for Lent 3: Hebrews 3

By: just_nigel

just_nigel — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 11:13:27 +0000

Jebus, I thought the promise here was that “if we hold on to our courage and the hope” we will be “God’s house” and “enter God’s rest”. Do you see that as translating to material supply?

I’m not sure why you are so down on doubting. I didn’t see anything here in Hebrews against having doubts. Those who were condemned where not those who had doubts but those who had such “sinful, unbelieving hearts” they ” turned away from the living God.” Sometimes it takes a lot of courage and hope to honestly doubt.

By: just_nigel

just_nigel — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 10:59:55 +0000

Having proved Jesus is greater than angels we are now establishing that Jesus is greater than Moses. (Again not an argument I need to be convinced of, but considering we call the book ‘Hebrews’ it may be relevant.)

Basically Moses was a faithful servant of God among God’s household of people but Jesus as Son of God shares in God’s creating and so is greater than any one member of that people becuase Jesus makes those people God’s house, just as we too will be if we hold on to our hope in Christ.

(It is not often that I call Jesus an apostle, but I guess he is the first witness to the resurrection!)

Psalm 95, which is quoted here, is the only psalm that is recited every day in the Divine Office from the Catholic tradition, which I have been spasmodically following. In their texts they give a NT verse for each pslam to give a christological focus to reflections on that psalm.

For this pslam it is Hebrews 3:13a:
“Every day, as long as this ‘today’ lasts, keep encouraging one another.”
What I never realised until today was that Hebrews was refering to this Psalm when it says that.

Yes let us encourage one another to remain faithful to our hope in Christ.

By: Jebus

Jebus — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 00:49:12 +0000

“’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.’”
“13But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called Today, so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness.”

When we are going through the deserts of life - we need to claim the Word of God as our reality, not the circumstantial evidence. He has promised to supply our EVERY need, if we look to the Source of our supply, and know that “HE IS FAITHFUL WHO HAS PROMISED”, and WILL manifest those promises IF we won’t doubt. It isn’t that we lack faith, the Word says that we have all been given a measure of faith, but we place that faith in the things we see, hear, taste, smell and touch, and not in God’s “unseen” realm that WILL manifest in the natural realm, like “manna” in the desert - if we will believe it.