Please turn with me to Hebrews 3. And as you are turning, let us recall Brother Clyde's reminder just a few weeks back. It is Satan's deception that causes us to continue to live in sin and think that we are receiving God's favor at the same time. Hebrews 3, we will pick up a couple of scriptures here.
We must overcome our evil, selfish heart, brethren, and avoid all sin that separates us from God. We have a daily responsibility to ourselves and to each other to exhort and encourage one another in our daily battle of overcoming the hardness of our hearts and overcoming Satan's deceitfulness of sin. Too often we allow sin to just be in our lives, either because we cannot see it or because we do not see it as really being that bad. Satan deceives us into actually comparing ourselves to others because by doing so, our problem seems okay compared to theirs. But it is all sin, and sin separates us from God.
This deception allows us to become just like that publican in Luke 18 with the Laodicean attitude. It is what allows us to become the unwise virgins in Matthew 25 who carelessly waste away their time to prepare.
Now if we could create a list of the things that we need to overcome, things that we struggle with, we can pray and meditate on those things, and we can actually build a plan, a mitigation plan with controls to try to help us detect and prevent that behavior. (More on that next time, God-willing.) But the battle to overcome occurs predominantly in our minds. For many of us, the sins we struggle with the most are not easily identifiable against the Ten Commandments. Examples might include daily sins of neglect, where we just do not put enough time or effort in to study, to pray, to reflect, which is really how we purify our minds through Jesus Christ's words. His words are spirit.
Maybe it might be daily sins of idolatry, where we allow something in this world to take a more prominent place in our minds over God. We may struggle with daily sins where we do not properly care for our physical bodies to eat right and to exercise. We may struggle with daily sins where we do not put in near enough time for the proper care and edification of the Body of Christ, our spiritual Family.
The point is, every choice is an opportunity to overcome our selfish nature. We must carefully evaluate our choices to really think and understand what does God want, not what we want. What would bring the most glory to Him? What requires the greatest self-sacrifice from us? What would bring the greatest benefit to our relationship with God? What would bring the greatest benefit to the Body of Christ?
It is really easy to justify our selfish decisions and allow Satan to deceive us into thinking it is okay. We all have a critical role in the Body of Christ. Are we using all the God-given gifts and resources we have to serve and care for the Body of Christ?
Now, the question is, how do we accomplish mission impossible, the seemingly impossible task of overcoming our carnal nature? Turn with me to I John 5. And as you turn, we should recall Paul states in Philippians 4, we can indeed do all things through Christ who strengthens [us]. And we could tie that to John's warning in John 15:5, without Him, without Jesus Christ, we can do nothing.
As we reviewed earlier, the Greek word translated overcome is Strong's 3528, nikaó, which means to prevail, conquer, get the victory, or overcome. But did you know that these references, roughly, I think, 25 of them in the New King James, all have an underlying Greek primary word? And that word is only used once in the entire Bible. It is Strong's 3529, niké. It means conquest or victory, but most importantly, it is used to represent the means of that success. That means, the very source of our overcoming is clear to us. It is niké.
All of us need to guard against unbelief - as if it were an enemy that we are going to grapple, wrestling with, battle against. I mentioned in the sermon last week that this is not a heart in which unbelief is merely present - because that occurs to everybody. Doubts will creep into our minds regarding some areas. And God expects that. He knows that is going to occur. That is not what Paul is talking about here. Rather, he is talking about a heart that is controlled by unbelief. It is that kind of heart which will drag a person down, just like Peter who was dragged down into Galilee's water. The peril of unbelief is that it breaks the trust on which our relationship with God is based.
Paul says here, an evil heart of unbelief in departing from the living God. Departing means walking away from. And unbelief leads to walking away from or falling away - which is the opposite of drawing near. Again, recall in the sermon last week that I said this is the major theme in the book of Hebrews - that we are to draw near to God. We are to make an effort to do that - to draw near to Him.
In fact, the book of Hebrews shows very clearly that Jesus Christ, as High Priest, has preceded us into the heavens for the very purpose of enabling us to draw near to God. So He is there to help us come close to God. But unbelief (as we see here) or lack of faith (if I put it that way) causes us to fall away - to depart from the living God.
Remember this. It is essential to us. I think that if our faith is going to grow, we have to understand that when Paul talks about falling away, that he is talking about falling away from a Personality. Not merely falling away from, let us say, a word, or a group of doctrines, or a doctrine; but we are walking away from - falling away from - a living, dynamic Personality. This is going to have very much to do with the theme of this sermon.
The supreme disaster of life, the ultimate defeat, is to fall away from this Personality. Why? Because it completely thwarts God's purpose. He wants us to be so near to Him that we are exactly like Him! And the way that we become like Him is to associate with Him - be around Him. I will use a verse that illustrates this, I think, very clearly in just a little bit.
This faith needs to be cultivated. It grows, as we find, by reading and hearing the Word of God - meditating upon God's Word. It grows in an atmosphere of trial because it is exercised by use. There is a saying that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. And, so, as we see results by using the faith that God makes possible for us, it then reinforces and tends to make us stronger as well. It also grows in an atmosphere of exhortation. And that is what this is about, in these three verses - verses 12, 13 and 14. Because he says,
Did you ever think that exhortation was a preventative of falling away? Did you ever think of exhortation as being something that would strengthen your faith? Yes, it is - very much so. And one of the greater trials that those of us who are part of the Church of the Great God is facing is that we are so scattered and fellowship is not as easily accessible as it used to be. So it is something that I feel God has brought about to try us.
I think one of the first things that He wants to establish is that our continued existence as a son of His depends upon the relationship, first of all, that we have with Him - the fellowship we have with Him - and then secondarily, the fellowship that we have with one another. And we can do that much more easily today than these people could in the book of Hebrews. Because we have telephones, we can at least communicate back and forth that way. We can communicate through letters. And all of us have at least a little bit of fellowship with one another - some of us more than others.
Understand this: Poor health habits (like sin) wear a cloak of deception (the deceitfulness of sin). Satan is the deceiver, is he not? He is! So let us pick up another thing from the book of Hebrews, chapter 11. This is in reference of Moses. It says of him . . .
He made a choice. He was confronted with one of the most awesome choices that any human being has ever had to face in the history of mankind. If we understand the history properly, what Moses had to choose between was whether (1) he was going to be pharaoh of the most powerful nation on the face of the earth at that time - and have all of the honors and dignities, all of that wealth and power that came with that office - or, (2) if he was going to give all that up and go out into a wilderness with a scraggly bunch of slaves.
If sin always immediately brought terrible results (horrible experiences), then nobody would do it. We would say, Oh, no. I don't want to do that! It is, in principle, exactly the same with an unhealthy diet. It always tastes good while it is going down, while it is in our mouth, while we are indulging our appetite. It tastes so good. It is enjoyable; but the end results may be, years later, bad! Are you getting the principle that is involved here?
In the spiritual realm, it is exactly the same. While sin is going down, while we are participating in it, there is enjoyment. There is pleasure. If it immediately gave pain, then we would withdraw from it in horror (if it shocked us, like an electrocution). One man said, If sin were without pleasure, only the mentally deranged would commit it. Sin contains death, and we would know that; and only the mentally deranged would do it.
I would like for you to reflect back on that sermon that I gave two weeks ago. Does it not say, in II Timothy 1:6-7, that the spirit that is in us - the gift - is the spirit of love, power, and a sound mind? When we permit ourselves to sin, according to this man's definition, we are somewhat mentally deranged. We know, at least intellectually, that sin produces death, and yet we involve ourselves in it.
In the parallel, the same is true with good physical health and good mental health. In both of them, we allow ourselves to think within parameters that are eventually going to produce depression, produce paranoia. Those mental illnesses are nothing more than the results of an extended period of self-centeredness in terms of negative thinking. They are caused by giving ourselves over to demonic thinking. Not that we are demon possessed, but that is the way demons think. They are weird! But we give ourselves over to it, and we end up mentally ill.
The same principle is true in regard to physical health as well. There are many things that we know about general rules of good health - diet, exercise, or whatever it is - and we know that the pattern of life that we are following is wrong; and yet we do it anyway. And eventually, we cut short our life; and we produce, very possibly, long periods of bad chronic physical health.
The change that really produces [good results] is when we change our thinking. That is what it takes. As we are within so are we. So the change has to be made there. We can make changes on the outside. The world is doing it all the time. But what I am talking about here is the right way that will produce the real results for the longest period of time. That is, the good results.
One final scripture before we close for today is back in Hebrews 3:12-14. This is just a cautionary note. God has implanted this (what I have called an energy) power enabling us to respond in faith to His Word, but it does need to be exercised. It does need to be nourished or nurtured.
If it is not, then like most other things in life it will begin to dissipate, degenerate, and eventually it will fade away. That is because this faith is dependent upon a relationship. You know that if you do not nurture a relationship with another person (you might have been at one time very fast friends with them, but if the relationship gradually becomes broken off) they become further and further away from you, and you think less and less of them until the time that you hardly even know them or would recognize them.
I am thinking here of the people we have gone through high school with. It is very difficult for me to think that I have been out of high school over forty years. When I graduated from High School it never entered my mind that some of these people I would never see again. Yet most of those people that I graduated with, I have never seen them again. A small number I saw five years later when I attended a high school reunion, but some of those people I have not seen for over forty years, others thirty-five years, and I know that we have become so distant that I could pass most of those people on the street and I would never even recognize them. The thing that bound us together is gone.
The same thing can happen with God. The thing that binds us to God is faith. It binds us into a relationship. That relationship has to be nurtured and if it is not nurtured we begin to drift apart and we become less and less alike, less and less attuned to one another. That is what the apostle is talking about here in Hebrews 3.
All of us need to guard against unbelief as we would against an enemy. Paul is not talking here about a heart in which unbelief is merely present, but rather a heart that is controlled by unbelief, the kind of heart that will drag a person down even as Peter was dragged down into Galilee's water. The peril of unbelief is that it breaks the trust on which our relationship with God is based. Unbelief leads to falling away which is just the opposite of drawing near. Drawing near is one of the major themes of this book.
Falling away is its antonym, its opposite, and falling away, brethren, is the supreme disaster of life, the ultimate defeat because it completely thwarts God's purpose for creation. It is essential to remember that when a person falls away he is not merely falling away from a doctrine or even a set of doctrines, but he is falling away from a living, dynamic Personality. Faith needs to be cultivated. It grows by reading, studying God's Word, meditating upon it. It grows in an atmosphere of trial because it is exercised through use.
It also grows, as we find here in these three verses, in an atmosphere of exhortation, exhortation that comes from others who are fellowshipping with us. Exhortation is a preventative of falling away and this is a major reason why fellowship is so needful. Without it, brethren, you may hold your own and maybe your faith will not slip very much, but a person who is not fellowshipping with others of like mind will rarely ever grow.
We need to keep asking God to increase our faith because it is capable of growing.
Look at what watching the sin and the prosperity of the wicked did to that godly man's faith. It nearly destroyed it, because watching that produced a sin in him, envy. Sin destroys faith. And it does not have to be your sin, another person's sin will in turn sow a sin in us. Now again, this is another play on that principle, if God is so powerful, why does He allow such unfairness to exist? Well, let us go to Hebrews the third chapter
There it is. He rejected those who sinned, He rejected those who did not believe. They are equated there as being one and the same, part of the same coin, or the same operation.
From this, brethren, we can pick up what it is that separates us from the world. And that is faith in God, called here belief. Adam and Eve did not believe and they laid the foundation for the world, and all of their descendants have continued in their way, by not believing and then carrying on a life on that basis. Now, because sin abounds people are deceived into thinking that it can be gotten away with and so they participate in it with others who are doing the same thing. Sin deceitfully promises joy and fulfillment, other elements of what people may consider to be the good life, but it cannot deliver on a sustained basis, and certainly cannot deliver a person eternally. Sin creates the illusion that one really can get away with it.
Ask yourself this question. Do you have faith in Christ only under certain circumstances? Only when He is doing miracles, feeding the multitude, walking on water, dividing the Red Sea, raising the dead? Do you have faith only when you can see direct evidence of His strength and power? Well, there is even plenty of that around all the time.
What would be your reaction if you were standing there when Jesus said that there was none greater born of women than John the Baptist and then two days later you saw John the Baptist's head on a platter. Would that destroy your faith? Would the sin of Herod destroy your faith in the word of Jesus Christ? What if you saw Jesus Christ proclaim Himself the Son of God, and then witnessed Him being crucified? Would the sin of those who put Him to death cause you to lose your faith in His Word? We could go on and on with that principle.
One of the keys to keeping faith, trusting, persistently enduring is to understand the time element. When is God going to render His judgment? Nobody knows. But we must understand that His apparent weakness is truly only apparent. It is temporary. He will follow through when it suits His purpose, not when it suits our feelings.
It is just as certain for the young as it is for the old, it is just a certain for any other person on the earth as it is for you: All things work together for good for them who love God and are the called according to His purpose. Do not left sin deceive you into losing your faith.
I think you understand this is true. A person can begin a pattern of sin with a feeling of horror, with a sharp feeling of remorse and shame about what he has done, or maybe what he is contemplating doing. If the sin is entered into, and if the sin is continued, the conscience begins to adjust its feelings. Its intensity becomes less and less until finally the person is the slave of what he formerly felt great remorse about doing, and he is helpless before its onslaught. So you see, even the conscience of a Christian can adjust. Paul gives us this warning in Hebrews 3.
This is especially interesting because the people to whom this was originally written were not violently rebelling against God. That is very clear from the context of the whole book. Rather, they were drifting away through neglect. Hebrews 2 tells us what will happen to us if we neglect so great salvation. They did not hate God. They were drifting away.
These people were neglecting their salvation. If they were material in the sense of something that was sitting out in a field, we would say they were oxidizing away. They were rusting away, as far as their Christianity was concerned, because they were not maintaining it, let alone growing within it. Their lives, their conscience, their heart was gradually becoming hardened.
Slowly but surely, the feeling of intensity they had about right and wrong was slipping away from them and was becoming hardened against the deceitfulness of sin. The heart, and therefore the conscience, will adjust to the place where it becomes so hardened that repentance is impossible. We might say today that a person in this state is becoming inured to sin, and no longer cares. The word inured means to accustom, to accept something undesirable. Its root is the French word for work. Are you beginning to get the drift? What was undesirable was work.
A lot of people do not like to work. They look upon it in their attitude as a necessary evil that must be done, and so they harden themselves to the fact it must be done, and they go do it. That is one attitude a person can have towards work, but it is an attitude one should not have. In our case, it is sin and its effect that is undesirable. But human nature, which is still in us with its enmity towards God, looks upon sin as desirable. We have a choice here. If we give in to human nature, it will gradually accustom the heart and conscience to sin through character until we no longer care. We will be inured.
You will recall God's frequent references in the Old Testament to Israel being stiffnecked, or having hardness of heart. Having one's conscience hardened is another way of speaking the same thing. However, to those under the New Covenant, it is far more dangerous. Indeed, it is the ultimate in departing from God.
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.
We have Christ as our example of being faithful; and then we have the man Moses who is also faithful. We can look at both examples. They are wonderful examples. But Moses led the people into the wilderness to bring them into the Promised Land, a type of our journey to the Kingdom of God. And these people heard the gospel, as we see in chapter 4, verses 1 and 2 there. They heard the gospel, but they did not mix it with faith. They did not believe the gospel that was preached to them. They did not believe the truth of what God was doing with them.
And so what did they do? They rebelled, they disobeyed. And God said, Ok, if this is the way you're going to be, you're all going to die in the wilderness. So He destroyed them and they did not enter His rest. Paul tells us, let us take a look at this example and learn something from it. And the thing we need to learn from it is that we have heard the gospel, we have to mix it with faith, that is, we have to take what we have heard, be faithful, and obey God. Do the things that He wants us to do, in fear that we will not make it, so that we will make it. And be diligent about it! Have some zeal!
That is what He wants us to do. Take what we have learned, and what we continue to learn, mix it with faith, that is, trust and confidence in God that He can get you where He needs you to be and where you want to be, which is the Kingdom of God. Trust Him that the instructions that He gives you in the Bible are apt for your situation. What you need to do, how you need to be, what your attitude needs to be, and do it, obey it, follow it.
And you know what that is going to do? That is going to land you in His rest. The Promised Land is yours. God will not destroy you in the wilderness. The Kingdom is open to you. Hear the gospel, add some faith, follow the instructions, enter His rest. Sounds easy, does it not? We know it is not. But that is the formula. Hear, faith, follow, firstfruits. Simple to say; hard to do. But that is the general formula.
We are also cautioned by Paul to hold our confidence firmly to the end and not, like the ancient Israelites, harden our hearts as they did in their rebellion in the wilderness.
Verse 15 is quoted from Psalm 95:7. The psalmist states that God's people could be cut off from the covenant, if they refused to heed it. Paul warns us, in verse 14, that we become sharers in God's Kingdom only if we persevere to the end. A person cannot despise something, and continue to persevere in it. Perseverance is rooted in confidence in God.
Faith requires perseverance, because the world hates Christians, and works to discourage us from finishing the race. In perseverance, strength comes from God, and God is glorified by it. He notices our perseverance, and rewards us with his compassion and mercy. Perseverance is very, very important in the development of a Christian.
Today, people are always trying to steel their nerves and feelings and they regard it as weak to feel things. We steel ourselves and put on this bold front and the result is that when things do go wrong and when God chastens us, we do not pay any attention to it. Instead of paying attention, we deliberately ignore it, and do not allow it to bother us. That is not persevering, that is despising.
There is very little that is more dangerous to the human mind, especially the converted mind, than to cultivate this impersonal attitude towards life that is so common today. In this society it is so easy to fall into it, and to adopt or fall back into that impersonal attitude.
It is because of this, in great part, that people become loosely attached to husband or wife, loosely attached to their own family. It is because of this that they can walk out on their responsibilities, on their families, on their friends, and on their jobs. If we are not careful, it is possible for that attitude to creep into our lives, and cause us to despise even the chastising of the Lord.
Secondly, another wrong reaction to chastisement is discouragement.
This series of verses provides a broad, general explanation as to why Israel's relationship with God degenerates. It also pinpoints the basic reason for Israel's faithlessness. This faithlessness stands in vivid contrast to the faithfulness that is the subject at the beginning of the chapter. Paul points to the faithfulness of Jesus, and the faithfulness of Moses, noted in verses 2 and 5, indicating God does not want us to be like unbelieving Israel in her faithlessness. He wants us to be believing and faithful in the carrying out of our responsibilities to Him in the keeping of the New Covenant.
We can expect that God will continue to follow the pattern He has established in the past, in that He will throw us right into the fire, because He wants to test us to see whether we really do believe Him.
This unbelief, combined with Israel's fervent desire for variety of experience, set her up as almost easy picking for the alluring heart of the Babylonish system - the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. Babylon, the system, promotes fulfillment in material things, excitement and gratification of the flesh. Babylon's way promotes gambling, not in the sense of a casino, but in life's choices, betting that one will be able to beat the odds that the wages of sin is not death, even as Adam and Eve did.
One of Israel's great leaps of faithlessness - one of the greatest of all - was achieved in I Samuel 8, when they rejected God as their ruler in favor of having a king just like the Gentile nations around them - a constant desire for something different. They thought this was the solution to their problems. This was especially significant, because the major issue in life is government. Whom will we permit to be governor over our life? Whose way will we be faithful to? Will it be Satan and this world, or God? Adam and Eve gambled, and chose Satan's way, and they died. We must not repeat their faithlessness.
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.
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.
Israel was always seeking ways to avoid confronting issues important to her relationship with God. We find a very important statement regarding overcoming these things in the book of Hebrews, chapter 3, verses 12 through chapter 4, verses 1 and 2.
It's right here that the Apostle Paul puts his finger on the fountain that spewed forth all of the fickle-minded disloyalties of the people of Israel - an evil heart of unbelief.
Like an inexperienced and immature teenager, Israel most of the time believed that she knew better than the Creator, and that sinful unbelieving heart stands in marked contrast to the faithfulness of Jesus. Let's note this in Hebrews 3:2.
Deceiving ourselves about our own spirituality and running from the truth are serious impediments to overcoming. If we remove our self-imposed blinders from our eyes, we will have taken the first step toward overcoming.
The Books of Isaiah, Jeremiah and the Revelation of Jesus Christ, all expose large groups of people deceiving themselves. Here is one quick example:
I was going to go to Hebrews 3:7-15, which kind of summarizes all of this, that Do not harden your heart as in the rebellion, like those Israelites did. I do want to just read just a little part of it.
Now, because our hearts have been transformed by God's Spirit we do not have to follow that sinful destructive pattern of Israel. And as Peter writes,
