Articles, Bible studies, and sermons that contain Hebrews 3:7:
Hebrews 3:7-11
Let's stop there and collect things a little bit. What does the word Sabbath mean? It means rest. What we are going to see begin to develop here is a third reason why God created the Sabbath. Something is being introduced so that WE will use the Sabbath in the right way - as a springboard to greater things. The Sabbath was made for man!
Let's go back to Psalm 95:7, to the scripture that Paul just quoted. First, look at the very beginning - so that you can see the context in which this appears.
This is one of those Psalms that the commentators call A Sabbath Psalm. It is indicating an activity that is taking place on the Sabbath. That's when people gather before God, and shout joyfully, and come before His presence with thanksgiving. Of course, anybody can do that in prayer as well, but this is a Sabbath Psalm. That is its broad application.
You can see that it is a direct quote of this there in Hebrews 3.
Then, in verse 13, Paul uses Today, - from Psalm 95:7 - in its broad sense. That is, the time that we are called.
That's important. To the end. What was happening to these people? They were neglecting things. They weren't holding steadfast to the end. Things were drifting away. They were drifting away.
He begins, then, to show that the quotation from Psalm 95:7 has never been fulfilled. So, who would be the first ones to fulfill it? The first ones, you would think, would be the ones God called out of Egypt. That would be a right answer. They would be the first ones that could fulfill it, but we find in chapter 4:
They didn't fulfill it. It's still open. I won't go into every detail. Paul then goes on into Joshua and the people who entered the Land - which should have been the fulfillment. But it was NOT the fulfillment. You know what happened after Joshua died. Boy, the whole nation went down spiritually, like a rock in water - until everybody (as it says in the last verse of Judges) was doing what was right in his own eyes. There was no king. There was no central authority. There was nobody to point these people in the right direction. They didn't enter into the rest.
Now, let's jump all the way up to the time that Psalm 95 was written. It is generally conceded to be a psalm of David or of Asaph - someone of that period of time. And they were looking back. David lived how long after Joshua? Roughly 300 years after Joshua, and it hadn't been fulfilled in David's time either. Was it fulfilled in any other time? No, it wasn't. That's why the apostle is writing this. It still remains! God's promise has NOT been fulfilled.
Who's it going to be fulfilled by? Paul's hoping that it's going to be fulfilled by these people who were drifting away. That is, be fulfilled by the church. The promise of entering into that Sabbath rest has not yet been fulfilled.
What did he just say there? Have we entered into that rest? We have NOT entered into it yet. It hasn't occurred. So, what rest is God talking about here? He's talking about the Kingdom of God, which still lies before us. Now, look at the instruction.
We've seen the Sabbath, now, in several different lights. First of all, it commemorates the completion of the Creation Week. God is Creator. Then, in Deuteronomy, we see that it commemorates redemption. We find in the things that we see of Jesus in the Gospels - Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John - we see Him acting upon, not the Creation motif, but acting upon the redemption motif.
God has gotten us out of Egypt; now, how do we use the Sabbath? So He magnifies it, by showing that we should use the Sabbath in terms of a redemption motif. We might almost say that the first thing we need to make sure is that we are free and that we stay free. Therefore, we have to strive to do what? Keep the Sabbath! And the third lesson, then, is that it prefigures a time yet future when the people of God enjoy the rest.
It is important that the New Testament describes Jesus as faithful. He is called a merciful and faithful High Priest. He fulfills that role, finally and ultimately, in the service of God to make expiation for the sins of the people, as Hebrews 2:17 tells us. Jesus Christ is faithful in Moses' role. He surpasses and fulfills the faithfulness and loyalty of Moses in building and ruling the house of God - the household of God, the church of God.
The children of Israel continually tested God's faithfulness and loyalty, and always God was faithful to His covenant; and He was loyal to those who were loyal to Him. But they suffered from a human trait that comes out of rebellion, and that human trait is unbelief. Unbelief is faithlessness, and part of faith is loyalty. Therefore, disloyalty equates to unbelief.
Regarding Hebrews 3:6, the servant owns nothing, is heir to nothing, has no authority and no right to control anything; and he is himself wholly at the will of another. A son, however, is the heir of all, has a prospective right to all, and is looked up to by all with respect. The idea here is not merely that Christ is a Son. It is that, as a Son, He is placed over the whole arrangement of the household and is One to whom all is entrusted - as if it were His own.
We are part of God the Father and Jesus Christ's Family. That is where we belong. We belong to the Family over which Christ is placed, under God the Father. Jesus Christ is the consummation of God's determined loyalty to His gracious covenant-relationship with His people. Christ is faithful and loyal to the Father, and the Father to Him. We have the wonderful opportunity to be part of this faithful and loyal Family. The training grounds for it is here and now - in our own households, and in the household of God.
Loyalty means enduring commitment to a person over a long period of time - often with the implication of the commitment persisting in the face of obstacles. We certainly see the obstacles in members of God's church - in sickness, from principalities, from others, and from our own human nature. Loyalty means enduring commitment to a person over a long period of time - often with the implication of the commitment persisting in the face of obstacles that threaten the lasting commitment.
Let me ask you this question, and let it ring in your ears as I let it ring in mind: How loyal are you? (How loyal am I?)
Jesus Christ is the epitome of loyalty and faithfulness. It is important that the New Testament describes Jesus as faithful. He is called a merciful high priest and He fulfills the role finally and ultimately in the service of God to make expiation for the sins of the people, as Hebrews 2: 17 tells us. Jesus Christ is faithful in Moses role. He surpasses and fulfills the faithfulness and loyalty of Moses in building and ruling the Household of God and the Church of God. Here in Hebrews 3:1-13 we will read.
We are in danger of being depersonalized, of having our hearts hardened - that is what depersonalization is.
Unbelief is faithlessness, and part of faith is loyalty therefore disloyalty equates to unbelief, to faithlessness. Of course it is loyalty to God and Jesus Christ first, and then to our brethren, as long we are following God and doing what He says in His inspired holy written word.
The servant owns nothing, is heir to nothing, has no authority and no right to control anything and is Himself holy at the will of another. A son, however, is the heir of all, has a perspective right to all and is looked up to by all with respect - that is if he is a good son, or righteous son.
The idea is not merely that Christ is a son; it is that as a son, He is placed over the whole arrangements of the household and is one to whom all is entrusted as if it were His own. We are part of God the Father and Jesus Christ's family. It is where we belong. We belong to the family over which Christ has been placed as the Firstborn Son.
Jesus Christ is the consummation of God's determined loyalty to His gracious covenant relationship with His people, and Christ is faithful and loyal to the Father and the Father to Him, and we have the wonderful opportunity to be part of this faithful and loyal family. The training ground for it is here and now, in our own households, and in the household of God.
We, of course, cannot literally hear the sound of His voice, but we can hear what He says and does in quite a number of ways.
A beautiful example that I think that we can all relate to is one that David used in Psalm 19 where he said that the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows His handiwork. He goes on to say that each day and each night utters speech and knowledge of God, and its sound is heard throughout the world. This is a poetic way of saying that the creation voices the knowledge of God to us.
We sing the hymn, God Speaks to Us and, by His great power we're led. We hear His voice speaking to us in the written word, in the preaching of His truth by His ministers, in the events of His providence, and sometimes in our own conscience.
In each of these aspects, when His truth is involved, His word is personally speaking to us. And He expects His children to hear - to listen with understanding - and to apply it today, RIGHT NOW, in the present! Don't put it off until tomorrow! That's the kind of attitude that He wants in His children.
Now here in Hebrews 3, this context is written in much the same sense of Psalm 19 of the creation. And even as the creation continuously witnesses for God each day across the face of the whole earth, Christ's voice speaks to His church throughout the ages wherever they happen to be. He does not want His children to put off repentance until tomorrow! How do we even know that we will be around tomorrow? We will act with alacrity if we appreciate the power. And I don't mean cringing terror, but in reverence, in appreciation of the fact that God intended us to use it - His word, His voice - to enhance and give life.
But there is still yet something else missing! Let's reread verses 12 and 13 in Hebrews 3:
The author of Hebrews here (Paul, in my estimation) does a masterful job in summarizing the wilderness experience of the children of Israel - all those who came out of Egypt. He has nothing positive to say about them. Not one word. His description of them - the whole generation - is about rebellion, testing and provoking God, going astray, doing evil, being unbelieving, having hard hearts, being deceitful, sinful, disobedient.
In what is essentially an epitaph on an entire generation of Israelites, Paul concludes that they were denied entrance into the Promised Land because they never believed God and that led to their disobedience. They simply did not take His Word as anything of value. So they did not believe it, did not put any stock into it, and did their own thing.
What we see, the end of it all was, as it says here in the New King James, their corpses fell in the wilderness. This is a particularly effective and picturesque illustration, that their corpses fell in the wilderness.
The King James makes it a little bit more macabre. It says it is their carcasses [that] fell in the wilderness. The Phillips version reads that they left their bones in the desert.
The Amplified Bible reads, whose dead bodies were scattered in the wilderness. The Good News Bible (we are getting a little bit more into paraphrases here) reads, who fell down dead in the desert. And, finally, the Message says that they ended up corpses in the wilderness.
The result of all their sin and their rebellion and their provoking God is that they left their rotting carcasses from one end of the wilderness to the other. Every single one of them died. Paul says, Indeed, was it not all who came out of Egypt, led by Moses? All! Every. Single. One.
Let us go back to the book of Hebrews. Remember Lot's wife - an instruction specifically given to the disciples of Christ that applies to the end time. Are we living in the end time brethren? Remember Lot's wife. There is a powerful lesson for you and me here.
We could go on and on. The appeal that Paul is making here to these people is that they not harden their hearts. Let's drop down a little further to verse 12.
That is what the world does. It creates a spiritual callous, so that our heart, our mind, becomes hardened.
I do not think that there is anything that so subtly deceives a person as familiarity. Lot's wife was familiar with Abraham. She was familiar with the lessons, with the teachings. She began and she indeed became comfortable with it.
The unbelieving heart here does not mean a heart in which there is no belief. All of us have weaknesses in that area, but it is rather a heart in which unbelief or doubt is allowed to control the person's conduct. Familiarity is the influence that all of us must deal with and again, perhaps, this is one of the particular or maybe greatest trials that a second generation Christian or a person accustomed to the kind of prosperity that you and I have lived within these Israelitish nations have to deal with. I do not believe that the familiarity which led her to ignore her wonderful privilege was Lot's wife's besetting sin, though. But rather, I believe that it helped to set her up for the worldliness that led to her premature death.
That is interesting in itself because He taught them His ways; but they never 'knew' them.
Paul's exhortation here is very urgent, very sobering. Beware, lest you be like them, he says, as in the day of rebellion - when they hardened their hearts against God.
The stakes are so much higher for us! It was not just a matter of physical life being lost, or physical destruction; but once we are talking about spiritual Israel (spiritual matters), we are talking about eternal life at stake. If we express the same attitudes and actions as they did - with the knowledge and the calling that we have - the effect is so much worse. Hebrews 4:1 says that we should be terrified of falling short of God's Kingdom! Let us therefore fear of not entering into that rest, because if we do not, that is it.
Let us go back to Hebrews 3. Here is an example of people that did not believe: the Israelites. The Israelites are the classic example of a people who had hardness of heart. They had hearts of stone rather than hearts of flesh. Paul is writing to the same Hebrews who were having this problem. He is approaching it from a different angle. Similar, but a little bit different.
That is amazing! For forty years these people saw miracles, plagues, signs, destruction, opening of the Red Sea, opening of the Jordan River. They saw the Cloud and the Pillar of fire every day. They saw manna come down forty years, and they hardened their hearts and would not believe the words God said. Now Verse 10 becomes understandable.
