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.
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.
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,
