Burn Your White Flags (Hebrews)Sýnishorn

So you finally make the trip you’ve been planning for years and you walk by the translucent pyramid which is oddly out of place. But you make it to the Musée du Louvre in Paris to see what millions of people travel the world to see: the Mona Lisa, an early 16th-century painting by the famed Italian artist Leonardo Da Vinci. 

And you wait and wait and wait … and with bated breath you lay your eyes on her and you think … “That’s it!?” 

Not to take anything away from Da Vinci’s genius, but you’re slightly underwhelmed by its size and scope. 

But the croissant on the way in was amazing!

Sometimes the value of a thing is based more on what or whom that thing is associated with rather than the thing itself. In our text today, we see the author of Hebrews explain that Jesus is far superior, not only to the angels (chapters 1 & 2), but is also superior to the Mosaic Law and Moses himself—the Hebrew prophet par excellence—because of the way He relates to the plan and purposes of God. 

Moses had an incredible calling on his life as God called him out of the upper echelons of society and called him to leave his life of complicity against his own people to actually become a liberator of his people from the oppressive regime of Egypt. 

Moses became the greatest prophet of the Old Testament and was faithful over God’s house as a servant. 

But even as faithful and true as Moses was, Jesus is far superior to Moses in the way in which He administers God’s plan of salvation to the world. 

Moses pointed towards salvation; Jesus is salvation.

Moses’s face shone when he came off the mountain; Jesus’s entire person shone like the noonday sun (Matthew 17). 

Moses lifted up the bronze serpent on the pole for the healing of the Jewish people (Numbers 21); Jesus himself is lifted up on a pole for the healing of the nations.

Moses is a servant to greater things; Jesus is the greater thing. 

And the most shocking development comes from the lips of Jesus: “No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you” (John 15:15). 

And so receive this truth: Jesus is far greater than Moses, and He calls you friend.