Like his teacher Paul, the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews regards the history of God's relationship with His people as a single spiritual process unfolding within a common spiritual and historical space. Hence the comparison of Moses with Christ: Moses, through whom God gives His people...
Like his teacher Paul, the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews regards the history of God's relationship with His people as a single spiritual process unfolding within a common spiritual and historical space. Hence the comparison of Moses with Christ: Moses, through whom God gives His people the Torah, stands at the origins of this process (though not at its very beginning, where Abraham still stands), while Christ, who revealed to the world the first and only example of the living Torah, stands at its conclusion. The Messiah completes what Moses began.
Thus the author of the epistle returns once again to the question of the spiritual dynamism proper to the human world and absent from the angelic world—a dynamism that proves to be connected with the Torah. This connection is, of course, no accident. The Torah was given by God precisely and only to human beings; angels manage without it in their spiritual life and have no need of it. For a human being, however, the Torah does not merely define all his relations with God: in a certain sense it makes the human person human, a being who has set out on the path of spiritual formation in God.
The Torah regarded solely as a moral or legal code is, of course, far removed from this. But the inner Torah—as the spiritual axis on which a person's life rests and as the spiritual and moral imperative that determines it from within—does indeed presuppose such a path. That path reaches its completion when the person is transformed into a living Torah, when his life is no longer determined by anything except the Torah itself. For this, of course, the person must be entirely free from sin; that is why the Bible contains no other example of the living Torah besides Christ Himself. But with Christ's coming begins the process by which the Church becomes the Body of Christ and each individual Christian in Christ becomes precisely a living Torah. It will be completed by the Savior's return in glory and the full transformation both of the human person and of the whole creation.
This is the process the author of the epistle has in mind when he says that it belongs to the human world and not to the angelic world. Salvation from the power of evil and sin consists in joining this process and travelling to the end of the entire path it entails. Only a Man can help a human being in this—indeed, Man with a capital letter, who has contained God's fullness within Himself and is free from sin. Even the mightiest angel cannot help here, for no angel is included in the process that brings salvation to humankind.
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3:1 The heavenly calling - God calls from heaven, and to heaven, by the gospel. Consider the Apostle - The messenger of God, who pleads the cause of God with us. And High Priest - Who pleads our cause with God. Both are contained in the one word Mediator. He compares Christ, as an Apostle, with Moses; as a Priest, with Aaron. Both these offices, which Moses and Aaron severally bore, he bears together, and far more eminently. Of our profession - The religion we profess.
3:2 His house - The church of Israel, then the peculiar family of God. Num 12:7.
3:3 He that hath builded it hath more glory than the house - Than the family itself, or any member of it.
3:4 Now Christ, he that built not only this house, but all things, is God - And so infinitely greater than Moses or any creature.
3:5 And Moses verily - Another proof of the pre - eminence of Christ above Moses. Was faithful in all his house, as a servant, for a testimony of the things which were afterwards to be spoken - That is, which was a full confirmation of the things which he afterward spake concerning Christ.
3:6 But Christ was faithful as a Son; whose house we are, while we hold fast, and shall be unto the end, if we hold fast our confidence in God, and glorying in his promises; our faith and hope.