Articles, Bible studies, and sermons that contain Hebrews 3:15:
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
