Above Thy Fellows

Two Sermons and Neither Reads the Verse

Two sermons are preached in Nigerian churches, and a good many believers have sat under both without noticing that they contradict each other.

The first says that wanting to be good at anything is dangerously close to pride. Stay small, stay quiet, pay your tithe, and whatever happens, happens. The people who hold this view are sincere, and they are not lazy. They have simply learned that ambition is worldly and that average is where the humble live, and so they let their expectations of themselves shrink to fit.

The second sermon says you were born to be above your fellows. It has a verse for this, and the verse is Hebrews 1:9. It comes with declarations, and sometimes with a small bottle of oil offered at a price, and a promise that your destiny will wake up by next week. Anyone who has scrolled through church adverts on a phone for ten minutes knows the style.

Both sermons get the verse wrong, and I think the first does more quiet damage, because nobody argues with it. A believer who has spiritualised being ordinary will sit through a whole career doing the minimum and call it trust in God. The second does its damage out loud. So the verse is worth reading slowly, from the beginning, before anyone is told what it promises.

“Thou hast loved righteousness, and hated iniquity; therefore God, even thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows.”

— Hebrews 1:9 (KJV)

Whose Fellows Are These

The writer of Hebrews is quoting. These words come from Psalm 45, which a translators’ note describes as a wedding song for a royal bridegroom (SIL International, n.d.). The Hebrew word the King James Version renders “fellows” means associates or companions, and the ESV prefers “companions” (Bible Hub, n.d.). In the psalm, then, the oil of gladness sets the king above the other royals gathered around him at his wedding. Nobody in that room is being told to compare their salary with their cousin’s.

Hebrews 1:8 and 9 quote Psalm 45:6 and 7 (Ellingworth & Nida, 1983), and the writer applies the words to God’s Son (SIL International, n.d.). It does so in a chapter whose whole business is the Son’s rank above the angels. The verse is a statement about who Jesus is. Its first meaning is that God has set him over every created thing.

That has a plain consequence for anyone who wants to turn the verse into a personal promise. If the fellows are the other kings in the psalm, and the angels in the letter, then “above thy fellows” is not a guarantee that you will outrank your colleagues at the ministry, or your classmates, or the man who got the promotion. Reading it that way takes the one verse in the chapter that is about Christ’s unique place and makes it a promise about yours.

I’d rather say that plainly than build a whole essay on a misreading and hope nobody checks.

The Anointing Came by the Road of Obedience

The verse has a shape that is easy to miss. Before the oil comes the cause. He loved righteousness and hated iniquity, and therefore God anointed him. The “therefore” is the hinge, and it says that the lifting follows the life.

Hebrews does not leave the Son’s exaltation floating in the air either. A chapter later the writer says that we see Jesus, who for a little while was made lower than the angels,

“crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.”

— Hebrews 2:9 (ESV)

Glory because of suffering. That is the order of events in the one life the verse is actually about. The oil of gladness was poured on a man who went to a cross.

So here is the first thing the prosperity talk leaves out. If the believer is to share in this anointing at all, and I think in a real sense the believer does, because the title Christ means the anointed one, and we are in him, then the sharing comes by union with a person whose road went through suffering. It does not come by claiming a position over other people.

And the second thing is that the condition, loving righteousness and hating iniquity, cannot be a performance requirement, or none of us would qualify. Paul gives the answer to Corinth.

“For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

— 2 Corinthians 5:21 (ESV)

The righteousness that the verse names as the condition has been handed to the believer in Christ. You are not trying to earn the anointing by being good enough. You are asked to live as someone who has already been given the standing, and to let the love of righteousness grow into a habit.

The Strongest Case for Claiming the Oil

Let me put the best objection in words its holders would accept. It runs like this. The Bible shows God lifting people. Daniel was preferred above the other officials, and the king thought to set him over the whole realm. The Son was anointed, and we are told to follow him. A church that has spent generations telling its young people to expect little has produced a lot of talent buried in the ground. If the “claim it” teachers are guilty of excess, they are at least trying to correct a real sickness, and the other side has only offered silence.

I think that is half right, and the half that is right matters. The sickness is real. Many believers do treat mediocrity as modesty, and it does hurt them, their families and the witness of the church. Nothing in Scripture tells us to be bad at our work, and plenty tells us otherwise.

But the cure the objection offers is aimed at the wrong thing. It takes God’s lifting, which Scripture shows as his own act and often in his own time, and turns it into an entitlement that can be claimed on demand. It also quietly changes the question from “what am I for?” to “where do I rank?”. And once ranking is the question, you have made the Son’s unique position into a ladder, and you have put yourself on it.

Ambition That Points at Other People

Jesus was not shy about ambition. When James and John asked for the best seats in his kingdom (Mark 10:35 to 41), he did not tell them to want nothing. He redirected what they wanted. The other disciples were indignant, and he called them all together.

“But it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all.”

— Mark 10:43 to 44 (ESV)

Greatness is allowed. What changes is the direction. Great means useful to somebody.

Paul does the same thing in an unexpected place. He tells the Thessalonians to

“aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands”

— 1 Thessalonians 4:11 (ESV)

The word is aspire. Even the quiet life is something he wants them to reach for with effort. He isn’t forbidding a drive. He’s pointing it at ordinary faithfulness, a daily job done properly, and a household that does not depend on anyone’s charity.

The Paul who writes that also says, in a verse that holds ambition and humility in one hand, that he worked harder than any of the other apostles, “though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me” (1 Corinthians 15:10, ESV). He doesn’t pretend that he was lazy, and he doesn’t pretend the work was his own achievement. If you want a model of how to be excellent without being proud, there it is. You work as hard as you can, and then you tell the truth about where the strength came from.

There are two tests I’d put to my own ambitions, and you can borrow them. Who gains if I succeed, besides me? And what will I do if I’m passed over and the person who gets the post is less able than I am? An ambition that has no answer to the first question is hunger, and one that falls apart at the second has been resting on the ranking all along.

So humility was never the opposite of excellence. It is what excellence sounds like when it knows who paid for it.

When Excellence Gets You Into Trouble

Now the part that the oil sermons skip, because it is bad for sales.

Daniel is the standard example of excellence in the Bible, and he deserves it. The king found him ten times better than his rivals (Daniel 1:20), and long afterwards, under another empire,

“this Daniel was preferred above the presidents and princes, because an excellent spirit was in him; and the king thought to set him over the whole realm.”

— Daniel 6:3 (KJV)

Read the next verse before you celebrate. The other officials looked for a ground for complaint against him, and found none, “because he was faithful, and no error or fault was found in him” (Daniel 6:4, ESV). Their answer to a man they could not fault was to make a law against his prayers. The excellence that made him preferred was the reason he ended up in a den of lions. God shut the lions’ mouths, and that is the good news of the chapter, but it was not a reward for being good at his job. Daniel could not have known in advance that it would end that way.

I’m not saying this to scare anyone. I’m saying it because most Nigerians already know it from the office. Do your work well in a place where others cut corners and see what happens to your standing with them. Refuse to inflate a figure and watch who stops inviting you. Excellence is admired in the abstract and resented in the building. If your picture of the anointing leaves out the resentment, you will be shocked the first time it arrives, and you may decide you misheard God.

History gives the same warning in two African lives.

Samuel Ajayi Crowther was taken from his home in March 1821, at about twelve years old, by slave raiders, and sold to Portuguese traders. A Royal Navy ship freed the captives and landed them at Freetown. He became the first student admitted to Fourah Bay College, was consecrated at Canterbury in 1864 as the first African Anglican bishop, and supervised the Yoruba Bible that was completed in the mid 1880s (Wikipedia contributors, n.d.b). By any measure that is a life above his fellows. Then, in 1890, two European missionaries accused several African pastors of fraud, ignorance and immorality and held Crowther responsible, and he was pressured out of the Niger mission, with the work placed under European secretaries (Oke, n.d.). A later writer notes that the accusations were almost unanimously refuted by the time anyone checked, and that by then the damage was done (Guthrie, 2017). He died in Lagos on 31 December 1891 (Wikipedia contributors, n.d.b). I haven’t found anything that tells us what he said in his last year, and I won’t guess. What the record shows is that excellence in the church could be rewarded and punished in the same life.

Ameyo Adadevoh, the lead consultant physician at First Consultant Medical Centre in Lagos, was the doctor who suspected in July 2014 that Patrick Sawyer, a Liberian traveller who said he had malaria and wanted to go to a conference, had Ebola. She kept him in the hospital against the request of his country’s ambassador, saying that for the greater public good she would not release him. She died of the disease on 19 August 2014, aged 57 (Wikipedia contributors, n.d.a). The sources I read are silent on her religious faith, and I’m not going to claim her for any camp. What they do show is skill and firmness under pressure, and her son has said that the Liberian government pressed her to let Sawyer go (NPR, 2014). She did not live to see any recognition. The national honour, Officer of the Order of the Niger, came in October 2022, eight years after her death (Wikipedia contributors, n.d.a).

Neither life fits the promise that you will be elevated over your fellows. Both fit the verse, if the verse is about a path through cost to a gladness that arrives, when it arrives, on God’s schedule and not ours.

Excellence on an Ordinary Tuesday

So what do we do with all this on a Tuesday morning in an ordinary office, or a lecture hall, or a classroom full of children who need someone to mark their books?

We do what Paul told the church in Colossae to do, which was to take the work in front of us seriously and leave the distinction to God.

“Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men,”

— Colossians 3:23 (ESV)

Notice who the audience is. It is not the supervisor, who might not notice. It is not the congregation, who might clap. The standard is set by the person you work for, and he sees the version of the job that nobody checks. The Nigerian student who has learned exactly how much to write to clear the pass mark has a skill, but it is a skill for an examiner. A student who studies to understand is working for someone else.

The same goes for the clerk who could pad a figure and doesn’t, the teacher who marks every script when half the pile would pass unread, and the young pastor who prepares as carefully for twelve people on a rainy Wednesday as he would for twelve hundred. Nobody gives out prizes for these. Most of them will never be noticed at all. That is exactly why they are the real test. A person who is excellent only when watched is acting, and the Lord, who is the one reading the work, has seen the acting before.

There is also a smaller honesty to be kept. False modesty is a kind of pride too. The person who says “I’m just a small person, who am I to do that” about work they could plainly do well is often protecting themselves from the risk of failing in public. God didn’t give the gift for that purpose. If you can do a thing well and the need is real, saying so, and then doing it, is not arrogance. It’s obedience.

And if lifting does come, as it came to Daniel, take it as a loan. The oil is for the room you’ve been put in, and it isn’t for display.

I will leave you with one small task and one question. Pick one piece of your work that you currently do at about seventy percent because no one will check it, a lesson note, a report, a small repair, a reply to a customer, and do it properly this week, as though the Lord were the one reading it. Then ask yourself honestly what you wanted from it. If the answer is applause, you have found out something worth knowing. If the answer is only that it should be right, then you are closer to the verse than you thought. And whatever you find, tell someone you trust, and let them ask you again in a month how it went.

References

Biblical References

Hebrews 1:9 (KJV). The epigraph and the anchor text; read as a statement first about the Son, whose anointing follows his love of righteousness.
Hebrews 1:4 to 14. Referred to by reference only: the chapter in which the Son is set above the angels.
Psalm 45:7. Referred to by reference; the wedding song for a royal bridegroom that Hebrews quotes, with “fellows” or “companions” as the groom’s peers.
Hebrews 2:9 (ESV). Jesus crowned with glory and honour because of suffering; shows that the exaltation the verse describes came by the road of the cross.
2 Corinthians 5:21 (ESV). The righteousness named as the condition is given in Christ, not manufactured.
Mark 10:35 to 41. Referred to by reference only: James and John ask for the best seats.
Mark 10:43 to 44 (ESV). Jesus redirects ambition toward service.
1 Thessalonians 4:11 (ESV). Paul tells believers to aspire to a quiet life of honest work.
1 Corinthians 15:10 (ESV). Paul works harder than the others and credits the grace of God.
Daniel 1:20. Referred to by reference only: the king finds Daniel and his companions ten times better than his advisers.
Daniel 6:5 to 9. Referred to by reference only: the officials’ law against Daniel’s prayers.
Daniel 6:3 (KJV). Daniel preferred because of an excellent spirit.
Daniel 6:4 (ESV). The officials find no fault in Daniel; his faithfulness becomes the occasion of the plot.
Colossians 3:23 (ESV). Work as for the Lord, the standard that governs the closing invitation.

Other Sources

Bible Hub. (n.d.). Psalm 45:7 [Parallel translations and lexicon]. https://biblehub.com/psalms/45-7.htm
Ellingworth, P., & Nida, E. A. (1983). A handbook on the letter to the Hebrews (UBS Handbook Series). United Bible Societies. Read through https://tips.translation.bible/tip_verse/heb-18/page/2/
Guthrie, H. (2017, February 22). The triumph and tragedy of Anglicanism’s first African bishop. 9Marks. https://www.9marks.org/article/the-triumph-and-tragedy-of-anglicanisms-first-african-bishop/
NPR. (2014, December 31). A son is lost without his mother, so is a country. NPR Goats and Soda. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2014/12/31/374024919/a-son-is-lost-without-his-mother-so-is-a-country
Oke, K. (n.d.). Samuel Ajayi Crowther, Black Victorians and the future of Africa. University of Oxford, Faculty of History. https://www.history.ox.ac.uk/node/2168791
SIL International. (n.d.). Translator’s notes on Hebrews 1:8. Read through https://tips.translation.bible/tip_verse/heb-18/page/2/
Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.a). Ameyo Adadevoh. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ameyo_Adadevoh
Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.b). Samuel Ajayi Crowther. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Ajayi_Crowther

Translation Notices

Scripture quotations marked ESV are from the ESV Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version), copyright 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the King James Version, which is in the public domain in most of the world.