Articles, Bible studies, and sermons that contain Hebrews 3:14:
Hebrews 3:13-19
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.
All of these ideas are being put into a mixture here so that we can understand: The Sabbath, our day of salvation, and the future rest of God in the Kingdom of God from the Millennium onward. Remember, we are talking about these two words being synonymous.
Except for one verse, in Hebrews 4:9, every time Paul (or whoever the author of Hebrews may have been) uses the word rest, he uses the Greek word katapausis (Strong's 2664), which does not mean to rest but to cease, to stop, or to end. In this case, Hebrews 4:9, Paul uses the Greek equivalent for shabbat. Had Paul wanted to say rest, as in the Hebrew word nuach, he would have used a very similar Greek word but with a different prefix: That word is anapausis (Strong's 372). In Greek anapausis means rest, repose, or comfort.
We just saw that these two Greek words are very similar and have the same root, pauo. The base meaning of this word is to cease, to leave off, or to stop. Our word pause derives from the same Greek word, pauo. A pause is a brief stop. We pause or stop a tape player for a small amount of time, hit the play button, and the tape starts playing again.
Notice that these two Greek words, katapausis and anapausis, are spelled very similarly. The difference, however, is in the prefix kata- on the one and ana- on the other: kata- and ana-. Believe it or not, but these two Greek prefixes are opposites of one another: The prefix kata- means down and the prefix ana-, of course, means up. Consequently, the words must have different meanings.
It is possible to combine those two prefixes down and up with the same word or thing, and that is exactly what we have here: katapausis is literally a down-cessation or a down-stoppage, and anapausis an up-cessation or an up-stoppage.
Katapausis is negative or neutral in tone. When we katapausis or down-stop, we are stopping an activity, and the activity ends. Contrary to katapausis, anapausis is positive: We stop-up; it is an up-stoppage, and that is why it means rest because rest is positive, rest is good, rest is comforting. We relax when we rest, and that is the reason why it is more positive.
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.
All of these things are connected together - hearing and rebelling if they fail to hear. And of course, as we see in verse 17 after their rebellion and their sin, they died. But it all started with a lack of hearing. They did not listen. Their bodies, then, were strewn all through the wilderness. And if we are correct about how many people there were, you know, let us say 2-3, 4 million people who were following Moses in the wilderness. There were scores of burials every day for all of the Israelites who came out of Egypt to perish before they came to the River Jordan. Do the math. It is astounding! Take however many people, divided by the time of 40 years, and how many people would have to be buried during that time. It is incredible to think of. Maybe each tribe had a team of rotating grave diggers. But they would have to, I think it is like 70 or 80 burials a day that they would have to do. So literally, their bodies were strewn across the wilderness. You wanted to find out where the Israelites had been, just look for the graves. But think, if they had truly listened, if they would have taken in what God had given them, if they really would have heard and understood what God said they should do, they would have lived. They would have lived well because they would be fulfilling their part in the covenant and God would have blessed them. He always comes through. Hey, if you do your part, God is always going to come through and give you the blessings that you need. But they did not get that far, they did not fulfill the terms of the covenant, even in the simple thing of listening, and so they died. They did not get the blessings, they got the curses.
The recipients of this epistle were not violently rebelling against God, as the context of the book makes clear. Instead, they were drifting away through neglect, neglecting their great salvation. They did not hate God but were simply allowing their Christianity to rust away by not maintaining or growing in it.
Consequently, their lives, consciences, and hearts were gradually hardening. The intensity of their feelings about right and wrong was slipping away, hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. The heart and conscience adjust to such a hardened state that repentance becomes impossible.
A person in this state becomes inured to sin and no longer cares, accustomed to accepting the undesirable. Sin and its effects are undesirable, yet human nature views sin as desirable due to its enmity toward God. Yielding to human nature accustoms the heart and conscience to sin until indifference sets in.
This hardening of conscience echoes Old Testament descriptions of Israel being stiffnecked or having hardness of heart. It expresses the same phenomenon. For those under the New Covenant, however, it is far more dangerous, representing the ultimate departure from God.
That is pretty scary. To think that they were given such a great salvation at the Red Sea and all they had to do was maintain their course with God, and they could not do it even though God was with them, visible to them in the pillar of fire and in the pillar of cloud. For 40 years, He was there amongst them and they still all sinned and died. It is a horrible negative example to us. God wants us to understand it. He wants us to see their mistakes and learn from their failures so that we will not do that. That is what I Corinthians 10 is all about. Do not do like the Israelites did. That is bad.
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, 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.
This very stern warning is to all who are on this pilgrimage to the Kingdom of God. Those who hardened themselves to not listen will not believe. Failure to believe and use what faith they had is what caused Israel to fail to reach the goal.
Faith must be used. It is of supreme importance, because without it there will never ever be any love.
