Articles, Bible studies, and sermons that contain Hebrews 3:13:
Hebrews 3:12-14
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.
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.
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.
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,
