Servants and Chosen

Some men in Scripture are called servants and some are called chosen, and the two are not the same thing. Moses is a servant. Aaron is chosen. Abraham is a friend. And the writer of Hebrews sets the whole arrangement under a fourth name that changes what the others mean. What follows is the sequence, and the thing at the end of it that most summaries of the sequence get wrong.

1. Moses: the servant, and it is a title of honour

When Miriam and Aaron speak against Moses, God's answer is not that Moses outranks them. It is what he is called:

Numbers 12:7-8

My servant Moses is not so, who is faithful in all mine house. With him will I speak mouth to mouth, even apparently, and not in dark speeches; and the similitude of the LORD shall he behold: wherefore then were ye not afraid to speak against my servant Moses?

My servant Moses. God says it twice in two verses, and it is plainly not a demotion. Servant is the name God uses when He is defending a man. The same title is given to Abraham, to Job, to David, to Isaiah, and to the prophets as a class. In the Old Testament "my servant" is close to the highest thing God calls anybody.

2. Aaron: chosen, and it is not the same as faithful

Aaron does not become a priest by being faithful. He is taken:

Exodus 28:1

And take thou unto thee Aaron thy brother, and his sons with him, from among the children of Israel, that he may minister unto me in the priest's office.

The priesthood runs by birth, and the whole line is named in advance, including Nadab and Abihu, who will shortly die offering strange fire. Chosen is not a verdict on character. Aaron made the golden calf and remained the high priest. The office was given, not earned, and Scripture is unembarrassed about the gap between the man and the office.

So the two words are already pulling apart. Moses is honoured for what he was: faithful. Aaron is placed where he was put. One is a description, the other is an appointment, and confusing them is where a good deal of trouble starts.

3. And then Isaiah puts both on one man

Here is the verse that stops the categories from hardening:

Isaiah 42:1

Behold my servant, whom I uphold; mine elect, in whom my soul delighteth; I have put my spirit upon him: he shall bring forth judgment to the Gentiles.

My servant and mine elect, in one sentence, about one person. Whatever distinction the first two sections drew, it does not survive contact with the servant of Isaiah, and the New Testament applies this verse to Christ. He is the faithful one and the appointed one at once, which is what the whole arrangement was pointing at.

4. Hebrews sets the servant under the Son

The letter to the Hebrews takes Moses at his highest and then does something with him:

Hebrews 3:5-6

And Moses verily was faithful in all his house, as a servant, for a testimony of those things which were to be spoken after; But Christ as a son over his own house; whose house are we, if we hold fast the confidence and the rejoicing of the hope firm unto the end.

Notice how careful it is. Moses is not demoted; he is faithful in all his house, quoting the commendation God gave him. The difference is not quality, it is standing. A servant is faithful in the house. A son is over it, because it is his. And the sentence ends by putting the reader inside: whose house are we, with a condition attached that this site does not soften.

5. Friend, which nobody earns either

Abraham gets a name that is rarer than servant. "Abraham believed God, and it was imputed unto him for righteousness: and he was called the Friend of God" (James 2:23). And in the upper room Christ hands the same word to men who are about to run:

John 15:15-16

Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you. Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit.

Read the reason he gives, because it is not sentiment. He calls them friends because he told them things. A servant is not briefed; a friend is. The promotion is disclosure. And in the very next breath the other word arrives: ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you. Friend and chosen land together, and neither is something they did.

6. And Paul, who had all of it, picks the first word

Paul has been made a son and an heir, and says so in the plainest terms: "thou art no more a servant, but a son; and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ" (Galatians 4:7). That verse is the strongest thing anyone can say against this page, and it is dealt with below rather than here.

And when he introduces himself, this is what he writes: "Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle" (Romans 1:1).

He does not use the highest title available to him. He uses the first one, the one Moses had, and he puts the appointment after it. James does the same, "a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ" (James 1:1); so does Peter, "a servant and an apostle of Jesus Christ" (2 Peter 1:1), putting the servant first there too; and Jude, "the servant of Jesus Christ" (Jude 1). The men who could have written "son of God and heir" write "servant," and they write it after the resurrection, after everything that supposedly replaced the word.

And it is not only in the greetings. When Paul describes what he and Apollos are, the words go lower, not higher: "ministers by whom ye believed" (1 Corinthians 3:5), diakonoi, waiters at table; "the ministers of Christ" (1 Corinthians 4:1), hypēretai, under-rowers, the men on the lowest bench of a galley; "ourselves your servants for Jesus' sake" (2 Corinthians 4:5), your slaves. And he says outright what he is not: "Not for that we have dominion over your faith, but are helpers of your joy" (2 Corinthians 1:24). The apostle to the Gentiles never once calls himself a leader (what that means for pastors and titles is taken up in Call No Man).

What the word costs: two servants, and Christ tells both stories

If servant is an honour that is never taken back, it is fair to ask what it actually asks of a man. Christ answers with two servants, and they are usually read apart. Together they are the whole of it.

The first has done everything, and has no claim. A man comes in from a full day in the field, and instead of being seated he is told to make supper first:

Luke 17:7-10

But which of you, having a servant plowing or feeding cattle, will say unto him by and by, when he is come from the field, Go and sit down to meat? And will not rather say unto him, Make ready wherewith I may sup, and gird thyself, and serve me, till I have eaten and drunken; and afterward thou shalt eat and drink? Doth he thank that servant because he did the things that were commanded him? I trow not. So likewise ye, when ye shall have done all those things which are commanded you, say, We are unprofitable servants: we have done that which was our duty to do.

Notice how far that goes. Not a servant who fell short, which is all of us. A servant who has done all those things which are commanded is still told to say he is unprofitable. Complete obedience puts God under no obligation whatever. If anyone wants the plainest statement in Scripture that our working earns nothing, it is not Paul arguing with Judaizers. It is Christ, in a story about a tired man and a late supper.

Which is why the word can be an honour and a hard word at once. The servant is trusted with the house and has no lien on it.

The second servant did not do the thing, and that is not treated as a smaller matter. The same Lord who says the obedient servant has earned nothing does not say the disobedient one has lost nothing. A faithful servant is one his lord “when he cometh shall find so doing” (Matthew 24:46). The other one says in his heart, “My lord delayeth his coming” (24:48), and is cut asunder and given his portion with the hypocrites. The one who buried what he was given is cast out as “the unprofitable servant” (Matthew 25:30) — the same word, now meaning the opposite thing, because he never did the duty the first servant did and could not claim.

The Greek word is the same in both stories, achreios, and the New Testament uses it nowhere else (Luke 17:10, Matthew 25:30). In Luke the faithful say it of themselves, and are kept. In Matthew the master says it of the one who buried what he was given, and he is put out. The word does not change. Who says it does.

And Luke adds the measure that makes it worse rather than easier for those who know: “that servant, which knew his lord’s will, and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes… For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required” (Luke 12:47-48). Cyprian cites that verse beside “not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord,” and he is reading them the way this page does.

Hold the two together and the whole shape appears. The working earns nothing, and its absence is fatal. That is not a contradiction; it is what a servant is. Duty does not create a debt, and abandoning the duty is still abandoning the post. The first parable kills merit. The second kills the idea that nothing is asked. And neither of them touches the title, because both men are called servants at the end, exactly as they were at the beginning.

7. A fifth word, and this one does divide

Servant, chosen, friend and son accumulate. Called does not behave the same way, and Christ says so outright, twice, in the same formula:

For many are called, but few are chosen.

— Matthew 22:14, and again at Matthew 20:16

So here there is a measurable distinction and it is not a comfortable one. Called is the wider circle; chosen is inside it. Both times Christ says it, He has just told a parable in which someone in the room does not stay: the labourers who resent the wage, and the man at the wedding without a garment, who is bound and put out of a feast he was already sitting at. Called is an invitation genuinely given to more people than end up at the table.

The early church read it as a warning to itself rather than as a headcount of the elect. Barnabas, writing very early: “Take heed, lest resting at our ease, as those who are the called of God, we should fall asleep in our sins… Let us beware lest we be found fulfilling that saying, Many are called, but few are chosen.” That is the called speaking to the called, and it is the right use of the verse.

And Revelation puts three of the words in one line, in an order worth noticing: “they that are with him are called, and chosen, and faithful” (Revelation 17:14). Called, then chosen, then faithful. The third word is not a title at all. It is what Moses was commended for, and it is the one thing in the list that has to keep being true.

And this is not a new reading

Chrysostom noticed the same thing about the same greetings, and said so in the fourth century. Opening his homily on Philippians, where Paul again writes “servants” rather than “apostle”:

Here, as writing to those of equal honor, he does not set down his rank of Teacher, but another, and that a great one. And what is that? He calls himself a “servant,” and not an Apostle. For great truly is this rank too, and the sum of all good things, to be a servant of Christ, and not merely to be called so.

— St John Chrysostom, Homily I on Philippians

And on Romans 1:1 he makes the Moses connection this page makes, without being prompted: all Israel were servants, he says, but Moses in a special way, “and since then, in all the forms of the marvellous servitude, Paul was a servant, this he puts in the room of the greatest title of dignity.” In the room of the greatest title of dignity. That is the whole argument of this page in one clause, four hundred years after Paul wrote it and eleven centuries before anyone here.

Ambrose puts it as a paradox rather than an argument, and it may be the better way to say it: “It is more glorious for us to be bound by Him, than to be set free and loosed from others.”

The strongest objection, and it is a good one

Galatians 4:7 says plainly, thou art no more a servant, but a son. If the words replace one another anywhere, they replace one another there, and this page has to answer it rather than walk past it.

An earlier version of this page answered it badly. It said the next verse tells us which servitude Paul means, “when ye knew not God, ye did service unto them which by nature are no gods” (Galatians 4:8), and concluded that the bondage in view is idolatry rather than the servant’s title. That reading does not survive the chapter, and the commentators say so. Calvin takes verse 8 to be a separate rebuke and not a definition at all:

This is not intended as an additional argument… His object is to make their fall appear more criminal, by comparing it with past events.

— John Calvin, on Galatians 4:8

And on verse 7 itself he reads the servitude as the old covenant, not idols: “In what respect the fathers under the law were slaves, we have already inquired; for their freedom was not yet revealed, but was hidden under the coverings and yoke of the law.” Gill agrees that the bondage is “particularly from the law, and that spirit of bondage which it brought upon them, which is chiefly designed.” Matthew Henry reads the whole chapter as written against teachers “who cried up the law of Moses in competition with the gospel of Christ, and endeavored to bring them under the bondage of it.” The chapter itself points the same way: bondage under the elements of the world (4:3), those under the law (4:5), days and months and times and years (4:10), Sinai which “gendereth to bondage” (4:24).

So the objection stands where it is aimed, and it does not reach this page. Galatians 4 is about a legal standing, whether a man comes to God as a minor under a guardian or as a grown son in his own house. It settles that question and it does not touch what a son then calls himself. We know it does not, because the man who wrote “no more a servant” also wrote “Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ” (Romans 1:1), and wrote it after Galatians. Whatever he meant in chapter 4, he did not mean that the word was now beneath him.

The same holds for Hebrews. A servant is faithful in the house; a son is over it (Hebrews 3:5-6) is a statement about standing, and Hebrews says it while quoting God’s own commendation of Moses back at him. It does not take the commendation away.

Where this lands

The sequence is real. Servant, chosen, friend, son, and Scripture moves through it deliberately, and Hebrews and Galatians both say plainly that the last is better than the first.

But it is not a ladder you climb off. The titles accumulate rather than replace. Isaiah's servant is also God's elect. The men called friends in the upper room are told in the same paragraph that they were chosen. And the apostles, who had every warrant to call themselves sons, chose the servant's word to open their letters.

Which suggests the point of the whole arrangement was never rank. Chosen answers the question of how you got here, and the answer is that you did not arrange it. Servant answers the question of what you are for, and the answer does not change when your standing does. Friend is what it becomes when He tells you what He is doing. Son is what you are, and it is the only one of the four that is about Him rather than about you, because it is His house and we are in it on His terms.

So a man who has understood that he is a son and stopped being a servant has taken the sequence in a direction the apostles did not take it, and they had better warrant than he does.

And the servant’s word says what the work is for. Paul gives the reason a Christian labours in one clause: "let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth" (Ephesians 4:28). He lived it. The apostle who had every title in this letter kept a trade, "for by their occupation they were tentmakers" (Acts 18:3), and told the Ephesian elders, "these hands have ministered unto my necessities, and to them that were with me... It is more blessed to give than to receive" (Acts 20:34-35). He told a whole church the same: "work with your own hands, as we commanded you; that ye may walk honestly toward them that are without" (1 Thessalonians 4:11-12). The servant is not a man who gave everything up and waits to be fed. He is a man who works so that he has something to give.

Related: Adoption, The Bored Ear, Free Will, Predestination, Lordship, The Vine. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub. The pattern this page argues is drawn from the texts themselves and the other places are cited so a reader can check. Chrysostom, Ambrose and Barnabas quoted verbatim from the public-domain Ante-Nicene and Nicene fathers in our library; Calvin, Gill and Matthew Henry likewise, and they are quoted where they read Galatians 4 against an earlier version of this page.