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.
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.
So, now we see the Sabbath doing what?
It points to the past - the Creation.
It points to the present - redemption and sanctification.
It points to the future - the Kingdom of God.
These three areas are the perimeters within which Sabbath use and obedience fall. For there remains yet a keeping of the Sabbath. We won't go into this, but it is really beautiful. That is, what it shows in the Greek here - which, incidentally, is probably the most beautiful Greek in the whole Bible. It is really beautifully written. It shows that Sabbath rest has already begun IF we are striving to use it right. We have already begun to enter into it.
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.
That is it! They are not getting in. The Promised Land is verboten to them. Now Paul comes back with:
That is where we get this unwillingness to believe. It is the deceitfulness of sin that makes our heart hard and unyielding to God, because sin tries to get us to give in so that we can pamper our flesh in one way or another, or as John says, our mind. The lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, or the pride of our lives. One way or another sin tries to finagle its way past our defenses to get us not to believe, to give in to evil, and it is deceitful. We sometimes allow it to trick us.
We have been seeing this time and time again; that we are to steadfastly hold on to what we believe all the way to the end. It is an endurance race, a marathon, and we have got to be tough to keep believing what God has said.
That is right. God said they were not going to enter His rest. They sinned. They rebelled. They showed their hard hearts, and they died in the wilderness. They did not make it.
See, he is making you think: What do we have to do to make it into God's rest? The answer is in verse 19.
What does that mean to us if we are to enter in? We have got to believe! What did I say before? I said that belief is not only believing as we think of it in our mind. What did Paul say? He said, I believed, and thus I spoke, or I believed, and thus I did. I obeyed. These Israelites did not enter God's rest because they did not believe, and thus they did not obey. Paul is saying that if we want to enter God's rest we have to believe and obey. God's rest is so much greater, because it is not just the physical Promised Land, for us it is the Kingdom of God. We have to believe and obey to enter God's rest.
We should have a good bit of healthy fear of not making it, because that will give us motivation to make it, to believe and obey.
Moses and Aaron preached until they were blue in the face, and because the people did not believe, it was like falling on deaf ears. They might as well have had no ears for the good it did. Only two out of that entire couple million people made it the whole forty years. It is just incredible. Only two believed.
How many believed Christ? One hundred twenty names, as it says there in Acts. That shows a great deal of hardness of heart, that only 120 would believe. Yes, the church is small, because the same type of percentages work today just as they did back then. To make it into the Kingdom is no easy task. There are hurdles in front of us, and we are currently going through the paces now. If we believe and endure to the end, then we will be saved and make it into His rest, but it is a long journey.
Remember that I told you before that in Hebrews 4:3, this verse is telling us that the plan of God was completed before God even started the creation. But there is something else that is also mentioned here. It is a little bit difficult in the King James Bible, because it is not translated correctly. It says:
The author is making a contrast. True believers do enter into God's rest, even though it has not yet occurred. The unbelieving Israelites in the wilderness did not enter into the promised rest, even though God's purpose was formulated from before Adam and Eve. This is what it means when it says that His works were finished from the foundation of the world. (Of course, that is reinforced by Ephesians 1:4 and II Timothy 2.)
So what is the author saying here in verse 3? He is saying that God had parallel programs operating, going on, at one and the same time. While God was dealing with Israel, working things out physically, He also had a parallel spiritual purpose going on. Thus, God had two major parts of one purpose that He intended from the very beginning.
Now, there is significant overlapping between the two. While He was dealing with Moses, and Joshua, and David (for example), He was also dealing with the other Israelites - only physically. At some time in the future, the two parts are going to be drawn together into one grand-smash finale when both become one.
From your understanding already, you ought to be able to see that is still a long way off. It will not occur until after the Millennium. It will not occur until after the Last Great Day. That is how far ahead God was thinking. Thousands of years in advance, He had everything envisioned in His mind as to how He was going to work these things out. He said, I am going to have two things going on at once. One is setting an example that you should or should not follow.
Then there is the other one. This is the one that really counts, brethren. And it included Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, David, the prophets, and on and on. How many there were, I do not know. But Revelation 7 and 14 seem to indicate that, when this portion of the plan [is done], those who truly do enter into the rest will only number 144,000 out of the 40 or 50 billion that have lived.
You can see that God's purpose is being worked out in small increments. They may seem big to us, but they are small increments. Those of us who are converted, we have weighty responsibilities. And we need to consider: Is it worth it to really devote ourselves to God? To receive the inheritance?
Well, we just saw that Paul said God wants to see people who are approved. That part of the plan of God falls on our shoulders. Will we repeat the same misbehavior as the Israelites of old? This is why the example is given. God is saying, Do not do this. It is the easy thing to do. Instead, control yourself. Discipline yourself. Believe what I tell you, and throw yourself into it.Is it worth it?
This takes the neglect one step further. This is a warning against doubt, because at the base of their neglect is going to be a waning of faith. Comprehending this revolves around the word hear in verse 7. This is a very widely used word in the New Testament, as well as the Septuagint Old Testament. It is applied in seven different ways throughout the Bible that begins with a simple awareness of hearing a sound. It is even applied in the sense of obey.
This can actually rightfully be translated: Today if you will obey My voice. Is that not what is implied sometimes when you say to your children, Did you hear me? You are really asking, Why didn't you obey me? Did you hear me? It also is applied in the sense of giving some degree of attention to. For example: Today, if you will give attention to My voice. That is a low level usage of the word, but it could be used in that way.
The most common usage is synonymous with the English word understand. That is how it is applied here in Hebrews 3:7. Today, if you will understand My voice. The author is aiming for understanding as his goal for those to whom he is writing. Now why? Because he did not want them to doubt. In order to have the faith, understanding of the word is necessary. A lack of faith leads to a lax, neglectful, careless lifestyle, which was what their problem was. They were growing evermore careless in the way that they were living. By the time we get to chapter 10, we are going to see that faith is the main focus of the author's writing, but here we will see this buildup toward chapter 11 is just beginning.
Here they were, in short, being accused of not really thinking things through. This has to do with giving weight to what you hear, which of course then has to do with the value that we put upon it. If we do not understand how valuable it is, then we can't really give it the weight in our lives that it needs to have. He is then telling them, Do you understand? Today, I want you to understand. He is urging them to really think things through, and especially maybe at this time at this stage in the letter, to think through the direction that they are headed, because it can only end in the Lake of Fire.
He is aiming right at this point that the neglect that they had was being caused by a misunderstanding. So this warning dovetails perfectly with the first warning that was directly tied to their greatly undervaluing the gospel of Jesus Christ. He is asking then, How can one have faith in something he has little understanding of, or pays little attention to?
Let us go to Romans 10:14 where Paul nails this. Listen to these questions.
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?)
Already we see the very clear difference between the two groups. He is talking here about the ones that came out of Egypt, and these ones do not know His ways. And if they do not know His ways, they are certainly not following them.
The truth of the matter is that the generation of the exodus failed abysmally. They never really came out of their slavery. They were brought out, but they had, I guess you would call it, a slave mentality to the end. They never became free, if you will, inside. They never grasped on to what God was trying to teach them. And so the result of that was continual rebellion against God.
They wanted to go their own way and do their own thing. And so God said, Okay, I've had enough of you guys; you're all going to die in the wilderness. I mean, we'll have burial parties every day as we bury everybody in that generation. You could probably follow a trail of graves from the Red Sea. There are graves from that point on all the way to the Jordan River. I cannot remember the math, but it was like a couple hundred a day had to die for all of that to happen. OK, you're on burial crew today. We've got these two hundred bodies; go to it.
That is kind of grim, right, that there were so many that died in the wilderness. But it was all because of sin. The wages of sin is death. God made His judgment, and that whole generation but Joshua and Caleb, died in the wilderness.
Now, it says here that God was angry with them for forty years. That is a long time to hold anger, and God does not hold His anger like that. But can you imagine all the rebellion that was continually going on and stoking God's anger, His wrath against sin? Contrast that to what Jesus says about the faithful servant, to whom God says, Well done, and calls him good and faithful.
That is what He wants to see, but the Israelites of that generation, He could not do anything with them. So we want Him to be pleased, not angry. And what we get from the end of Joshua and the beginning of Judges was that He was actually pleased with the next generation because they knew the Lord and they did what the Lord said.
But the earlier generation, God refused them entry into the land, which is a symbol of His rest. And they did not make it. They failed. They died in their sins.
Let us move on here to chapter 4 of Hebrews. We will read the first eleven verses. The author here continues with the idea of God's rest.
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.
When we lose our Berean self-reflexiveness (thinking about our thinking) we tend to lose our teachability and we lose our pliability. Perhaps the most important aspect of self-reflexiveness is our willingness to be shaped and molded by Almighty God, and not become stiff-necked as our forebears did in the wilderness.
On May 26th of this year, Bill Onisick gave a sermonette titled Using Gray Matter to Solve Gray Matters, acknowledging that when we are newly called babes in Christ, we naturally prefer simple black and white choices, but as we mature, we are required and mandated by Almighty God to make decisions in gray matters, far more numerous than the simple black and white decisions we had to make when we were first called.
For example, it is easy to understand that we should keep the weekly and the annual Sabbaths holy. But how to keep the Sabbath holy is up to our own discretion and we will have to experiment - possibly making mistakes and false steps in the process. It is by God's design that we use these numerous, gray, uncharted areas to build spiritual maturity by applying the principles in God's Word, using common sense and emergent God-given discernment prompted by God's Holy Spirit.
Spiritual maturity develops within us only if we have regularly and faithfully exercised discernment concerning these multiple gray areas using the God ordained human reason which I am sorry to say that some evangelical fundamentalists have denigrated.
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.
This section says pretty much the same thing that Paul said in Hebrews 3 and 4. If you think you are doing okay, if you feel satisfied with your spiritual standing, if you feel like your relationship with God is okie dokie - watch out, because something is going to be coming. You have become self-satisfied. You have become like the Israelites who felt that their closeness with God (in the covenant) would take care of everything for them, and they could do pretty much as they pleased. So if we find ourselves falling into this sort of attitude, we will end up falling just as Israel fell. Their bad examples are inscribed in black and white in God's Word so that we can avoid repeating those things.
[We need to consider this because Paul is showing here where the problem lay. God says very clearly it was in the heart. Paul makes it much more specific in that it was a problem having to do with faith, unbelief. And so he exhorts us:
Now a connection is made, if we are following the context here, between the heart, disbelief and sin, almost as though he is showing a progression. Because the heart was not unshackled there was disbelief and the result in was sin, a going aside, a turning off the way.
They all fell in the wilderness, except for Joshua and Caleb and I would assume their families - an assumption - but God points them out as not having failed. We would have to consider here then that the whole slew of them unshackled from their bondage to Egypt. Yet their heart was never unshackled) did not have the kind of faith God would require for salvation. They all died because they sinned.
Do you see what connection is being made here? It is a direct connection, almost as if they are synonymous between unbelief and sin. It is almost as if He is saying, one equals the other.
I want to inject something right here, because that is somewhat mistranslated. I want us to look at Hebrews 3:11.
The reason I want to draw your attention here is because that is exactly the same phrase that appears in Hebrews 4:3. Why they ever translated it differently, I do not know, because it is the same dogmatic statement: They shall not enter into My rest.
Again, this is the same phrase that is in verse 3, and also in Hebrews 3:11. It is a direct statement. They shall not enter into My rest.
Hebrews 3 begins with a quotation of the end of Psalm 95 because Paul (or the author of Hebrews) is trying to get us to understand this particular concept.
Remember what the author of Psalm 95 was referring to? He was referring to three different things: First, the Sabbath and our day of salvation; second, the Millennium; and third, the time beyond that.
Are the Outcome-Based religions departing from the living God? Oh, yes! If anything stands in the way of their achieving their hope, they will cast that doctrine aside, and so a piece of the puzzle gets thrown out. I cannot figure where this fits. It does not fit what they think the picture is, and therefore they throw it out.
