Hebrews 4:3 (ASV) - Forerunner Commentary

Here is a powerful warning that means exactly what it says. If we do not believe God any more strongly and clearly than the Israelites in the wilderness, we will not enter God's rest.

A peculiarity of Hebrews 4:1-3 is that the term rest appears three times in these three verses, and it is used a total of nine times in this one chapter. We have all heard that repetition is the best form of emphasis. And God certainly is drawing our attention to something important in times like the Hebrews faced. That much repetition ought to be enough to make us understand that there is something here very important to our spiritual well being. It is clear that the author knew that the Jews needed to be reminded and encouraged regarding this term's meaning.

One of the usages of that word ought to bring the Sabbath to mind immediately. That, indeed, is one of the things that the author implies in this chapter, but it is not the only thing that the author is drawing attention to here by using the term rest.

Three different Greek words are used by the author and then translated into the one English word rest. The first word is katapausis. In Strong's, it is 2663, and it means reposing down, abode, rest. The second word is katapauo. It is 2664, and it means settled down, or (caused to) desist, cease, rest. As you can probably tell, these two are related to one another and from the same root. The third word is sabbatismos. It is number 4520, and it means the repose of Christianity, rest, Sabbath. It, brethren, is a horse of a different color from the other two, as used in this chapter.

From where would a Jewish Christian of the 1^st century and a modern Christian draw his understanding of the author's use of the term rest in this sort of context? Well, the roots of this term go all the way back to the promises made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The roots of the use of this word are not just a matter of its specific meaning, or of the promises themselves; but also the fact that the Bible clearly shows that much of Abraham's, Isaac's, and Jacob's lives were lived in a rather nomadic and itinerate way despite the fact that they were materially prosperous and had a rich relationship with God to go along with that prosperity.

A settled life they did not live. A settled life was always something hoped for - something off in the future, when their responsibilities would permit them the stability that other people seemed to have. Despite the exceeding wealth of Abraham and Isaac, Abraham never owned a piece of property other than Sarah's gravesite.

Where do I get the idea that God's plan was completed from the very beginning? It comes right out of verse 3.

God had this all planned out before He started. You can confirm this in Ephesians 1:4 and also in II Timothy 1:8-9. Both say that these things were finished from the foundation of the earth. I think this gives us some sort of an idea, an ability to catch just a little bit of a grasp of the immensity of the thinking of God.

When we stop to think that, usually if a man builds a building (whether it is a house, office building, or whatever), he draws up the plans before he does it. But - because men are not God - the plans have to be adjusted, and altered, and changed; and we sometimes start all over again, maybe with a new plan. But God's mind is such that He had everything figured out before He began!

That is so awesome, when you figure what just the earth is like or what just our little universe is like within the Milky Way, and what the Milky Way is within all of the heavens. What a Mind! And yet we worry. We will see that Jesus clarified some things here, just in case there would be a question.

Remember that I told you before that in Hebrews 4:3, this verse is telling us that the plan of God was completed before God even started the creation. But there is something else that is also mentioned here. It is a little bit difficult in the King James Bible, because it is not … . . .

Here is a powerful warning that means exactly what it says. If we do not believe God any more strongly and clearly than the Israelites in the wilderness, we will not enter God's rest.

Where do I get the idea that God's plan was completed from the very beginning? It comes right out of verse 3.

Now, remember, this rest is ‘katapausis’ - the stopping, the ceasing.

We are on the way to that rest.

Now, remember, the works that God did was making the physical creation of the earth. This is a hint that when those who enter the rest of God, they are going to cease with their physical labors and there is something better in the rest of God that they will be doing.

The Israelites' unbelief and rebellion had kept them from the goal. God was leading them to His rest. God was leading them to the Promised Land, which is a clear reference to the Kingdom of God, that is, His nation. He was to rule over them as King. But they did not. They failed to do what God had told them to do. They failed to follow God and they all died in the wilderness.

Back in Hebrews 3, right in the last few verses, it tells us essentially that their corpses were strewn in the wilderness because of their sin. They could not enter His rest. So the rest, he says, remains unfulfilled. If Joshua did not bring them into the rest, then there must be a rest in the future.

In verses 3-4, he refers to creation and to God's rest on the seventh day in creating the Sabbath. Now this is proof, if you will, that the rest that Paul is suggesting is not ‘repose’ because God is never weary. He does not need to rest to become reinvigorated and reenergized. So the rest he was referring to in that is something different from repose. It is something different from ‘anapausis.’ It is not a physical, reclined rest of that sort. He is talking about a different kind of rest.

We saw that God stopped His creative efforts on the physical earth and then He ceased working, to set us an example of how to keep the Sabbath. That is what we went through when we went through Exodus 20, Genesis 2, and Isaiah 58 - that we stop doing those physical things that we normally do and we do something else. So Paul is implying, by going to these examples, that the future rest (the one we are working toward, the one we still have before us as a goal) is a lot like God's rest on the seventh day of creation, that our rests (God's rest) is a ceasing. It is a stopping. It is an ending of something.

Now, in verse 9, as I mentioned before, we have the other rest - the sabbatismos. This is actually, as far as we know, a Pauline coined word, that he kind of just made it up. He turned the Hebrew sabbath into a Greek noun. This does a couple of things.

It links the weekly Sabbath with the future rest of God, that in our keeping of the Sabbath every week we are prefiguring the rest of God of the future.

It also characterizes the future rest of God (or we could call it maybe the Millennium or the Kingdom of God) as a time of cessation from certain activities, as on the weekly Sabbath (we cease certain activities). Well, in the Millennium, there is going to be a stoppage, a ceasing of certain activities. And, then, because we have stopped doing these certain activities, we can then do the godly activities in imitation of God. We stop doing those physical things and start doing a lot of spiritual things.

Thus Paul clues us in on the goal of the millennial period. The goal of the millennial period is to change the focus of the entire world from doing its ungodly carnal activities in rebellion against God - that is our works, the works of humanity. We are going to cease doing those things and we are going to turn to doing godly, positive, eternal works out of love for God and out of love for fellow man.

Before Christ comes, the whole world, as we know, is under the sway of Satan the Devil and they are doing the things that he wants us to do. When Christ comes, He puts Satan away; we are going to cease doing all those bad things that Satan wanted us to do; and now we are going to turn our attention fully to God and the world is going to begin doing what God wants us to do.

So if we want to put it in a nutshell, as we have heard before, the goal of the millennial period - the goal of the rest … . . .

Now, it is this last bit, that last clause at the end of verse 3 that I am really interested in right now. I wanted you to see the context of it here, because it is important to understand what that clause really means. Paul is showing that since faithless Israel did not enter God's rest - we have no indication that very many of them were converted, and as Paul shows here, most of them died in the wilderness; their bodies were strewn throughout the desert, and so, they could not enter into the Promise Land - having died in the wilderness, that promise is still valid. Somebody has to enter that rest. So, it falls to spiritual Israel, which Paul calls the Israel of God (Galatians 6:16) - His church made up of believers, us - to enter in. It falls to us, and all of those whom God has called and converted throughout history.

So, while it appears from what took place that God altered His plan, the author, Paul, wants to assure His readers - us - that this is not the case. God never altered His plan. That is what he is saying. That is what this last clause indicates.

I want to paraphrase what this says. First, here it is again from the New King James Version: They shall not enter My rest, although the works were finished from the foundation of the world. Here is my paraphrase: God said this, (meaning, ‘You shall not enter my rest,') even though His plans for what He would do were complete from the time that He created the world. Paul is saying that when God finally decided on how His plan would work out, it was before the creation of the world when this happened, and everything has been going according to plan like clockwork. Everything has been going according to plan. There has been no alteration.

This is interesting too - there has been an idea in the churches of God that in the Garden of Eden when Eve took of the fruit and ate of it, that God had to suddenly switch to plan B. We can use this same argument. But, no, He did not. He knew exactly what He would do, and that both Adam and Eve would sin. Therefore, there would be a need for a Savior, and all that has gone on since then.

So, what he is saying here is that God has had this all planned out to the most minute detail from the very beginning - from before He created the world.

In other words, in this particular context in Hebrews 4, God never planned for Israel to enter His rest at that time (1400BC). That was not the plan at all. He knew what Israel would do. He knows us, our frame, our nature; He knows Satan the Devil, and his abilities; He knew that they would fail. He had always planned - always planned! - for His firstfruits, those who are part of the first resurrection, to enter His rest first. He had always had the plan of having a church of those specially called-out ones that He would train to be firstfruits to enter that rest. And that is for us to do. Israel would be converted later. They were merely a type that was allowed to exist under His covenant for a long time to give us instruction, and to show us the things that we need to understand for our conversion, and growth toward our change.

The overall point of what we have seen so far is that God is a planner, and a preparer. God takes the time to sketch things out, and to get them absolutely, perfectly right, and then executes them perfectly from the beginning to the end. He is a planner and a preparer.

Each step - here is another interesting point - of the plan is a preparation for the next step in the plan. They all happen in order, so one thing happens, and then it has set up the next thing. And then that thing happens, and it sets up the next one. This just keeps on going and going. Each thing is built, one upon the last until the end is reached.

And it follows - and this is an interesting point that we should understand for the rest of the sermon today - that those physical people who are involved with Him, in any one of those steps, have the job of helping Him to prepare for … . . .

Let us go now to Hebrews 4:1-3. By the time we get to this place, Paul is reaching a sort of conclusion. It is not the conclusion to the whole book, but it is an important conclusion of what he had just discussed with the people in chapter 3.

In other words, the hope that God was drawing these people towards had already been established before the people, and God had established it in His own mind before He even began the whole project. This is where I am going to take them. So how many made it? Joshua, and Caleb, and probably their families. Two families of people. All the rest altered the responsibilities that they had agreed to. They altered their hope. They did not sanctify God as Lord, their Master in their hearts, and so they went off the path, and they ended up dead. Each person made his own adjustment as he went along.

That is a stunning record of this principle that a little leaven leavens the whole lump. How much leaven does the Outcome-Based religion have in it? For you and me it may be easily seen, but if we cannot learn anything from this, what good does it do to look at them? We have to recognize that we have taken on responsibilities because we have made the New Covenant with God. The responsibilities of the New Covenant are that we are to explicitly believe in God and trust Him.

In one sense it is exactly the same thing that the Israelites were required to do, but in another sense the standards are a great deal higher for us now. We have a great deal more help than they did. The responsibility in one sense, brethren, is even greater for us. To whom much is given, the much more is required. We have far more in terms of knowledge. We have far more in terms of spiritual help. They did not have access to God. We do.

In Hebrews 4:1-3, Paul states clearly why they failed so miserably. They simply did not believe what Moses said, and so they did not reach the rest. So please, brethren, do not shut your mind. Do not harden your hearts, because we are dealing with the same God. He will act and react consistently. We have to learn to listen to the warning lesson of Israel's example in the wilderness. That is there for our benefit that we are not to do as they did. We are to follow Joshua. We are to follow Caleb, because they were following Christ.

Now does this mean in any way that I am saying that the Church of the Great God, or even the whole Church of God, has perfect doctrine? Not at all, brethren. That seems to me to be pretty presumptuous to assume such a thing. However, from what I am able to judge, the Church of God is so far ahead of whoever is in second place, they are almost out of sight by comparison.

We have seen one major violation of biblical principles that has established the explosive growth of the Outcome-Based religions, and that is to make growth of membership the standard for success. But there are other principles that are hand-in-glove with this approach. Actually, before we are done with this whole series, we are going to see a lot of things that add to this approach they have, but I will show you that as we proceed. There are seven major ones that seem to under gird all of the others.

Along with the growth of membership goal for the church, they have elevated the value of fellowship above the value of truth. Mark that one down in your notes. Another way of stating this is that they have forsaken the superiority of correct doctrine in favor of unity which they call community. We will see more of that a little bit later too, because that word community has very interesting attachment to things that are taking place completely apart from the world of religion. Not really so completely apart, but there is an interesting tie. They call their unity community.

The application of these two issues is really interesting. They are attracting many people into their fellowship. These people hold with many, many different concepts of God, and what is important to life, and reaching for the … . . .

Now, the next section in Hebrews 4:3-10 on God's rest is a fascinating contrast to the author's approach elsewhere in the book. The author takes down other things a notch to bring Christ more clearly into focus. Yet when it comes to the Sabbath, the author does not do any sort of take-down. This does not mean the Sabbath is more important than Christ - far from it. Yet the seventh-day Sabbath forms the foundation of his argument in this section as something still being observed and something to pay attention to. There is no implication that they should pay less attention to the Sabbath so they could see Christ more clearly.

A number of translations try to soften or even leave out the plain wording of the Greek in verse 9. It contains the Greek word sabbatismos (Strong's 4520). It is not talking about rest in general, but Sabbath-keeping. The Greek literally says, There remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God. For his authority, the author does not draw on the covenant with Israel, but on God's example when He made the seventh-day holy at creation. And while the weekly Sabbath is not an end unto itself but points toward something greater, it only points to the greater rest for the ones who observe it. This was written some 35 years after Christ's death, and the author uses the Sabbath as an institution that still has a current application and great relevance. The author does not take down the Sabbath; he builds on it.

The Sabbath example fits into the overall warning of Hebrews perfectly because the Sabbath is frequently an area where spiritual hardening starts to show up. We may notice symptoms such as carelessness with the holy time, and taking more liberties than God allows. Sabbath-breaking was a significant part of Israel's apostasy, as well as the apostasy of the ‘80s and ‘90s. The author's use of the Sabbath suggests the Hebrews' approach to the Sabbath may have been part of what was deteriorating. He thus brings in the Sabbath as part of the solution. The Sabbath is one of God's gifts to help us strengthen our relationship with Him, which helps keep us from becoming sclerotic.

As the test commandment, whether we keep the Sabbath holy can be an early warning of spiritual sclerosis. Sabbath-breaking probably won't begin with going into the office on Saturday, but with finding ways to justify doing what we want to do with God's holy time, rather than wholeheartedly seeking His perspective. And that seeking of His perspective begins by studying into what He has already said on the matter, as well as related principles, so that we do hear Him who speaks from heaven.

Our Sabbath-keeping shows whether we are willing to sacrifice our valuable things - our time and interests and pleasures - for the sake of sanctification, spending time with God, and learning from Him. It is core to our relationship with Him. It's a whole day He set apart for us to pursue Him, if we are willing to make use of it.

Years ago, I talked with a man who knew that the Sabbath was Saturday. His response, though, was, If it is important, God will show me. But he wouldn't do the study that would reveal whether it is important to God. This man wanted a direct message from God before he would believe it. On a human level, he was a great guy, but his heart was hardened in this area and didn't want to change - didn't want to sacrifice. So, he tried to make God responsible by requiring that God personally confirm the Sabbath before he would keep it. It's an example of refusing Him who speaks by declining to look at what He already said.

The original Israelites failed through lack of faith and through disobedience. Then he mentions Joshua and the fact that even this new generation of Israelites that God commended may have entered the land, but they did not enter God's rest because the psalm speaks of another day in which the rest would be entered, the day in the future.

The author here says it is still out there. You can still enter God's rest. You are on the road already, and make sure you enter God's rest, and you can do this by being diligent, by obeying, by being faithful, or as Jesus says, by enduring to the end in your calling.

So speaking of the generation that Joshua led, though their conquest in the end was incomplete, they did far better than their parents. But the author implies that those events that occurred back then are to us only types. We are not to take them in terms of the reality of their incompletion, but we are supposed to think of them as typical, as metaphorical, as symbolic of the journey that we make in order to enter His rest in a spiritual way, in the only way that really matters.

And he then says that the Sabbath is a type of the rest of God, and that in itself is a foreshadowing of the Kingdom. Just so we get all our ducks in a row here. So we can say God's real rest, the one that He has been shooting for all this time, giving us all these examples from the Old Testament and elsewhere, even in the New, that is still future. The rest of God is still future and it is now open to God's elect. And it is still Israel that is journeying to God's rest, but as Galatians 6:16 says, it is the Israel of God.

It is a different group. It is a spiritual group. We call it just generally spiritual Israel. And it is the church, the Body of Christ. Lots of different names, but the same people. God's people whom He has called to take up this journey.

And so we will enter it only if we remain obedient and faithful, unlike ancient Israel.

This has all been a big, long explanation of why I think the conquest constitutes a second type of our spiritual journey toward God's Kingdom. This time, in the second type, it is concentrating on a faithful, obedient people dealing with and overcoming the obstacles in the way. Just as we endeavor to come into full possession of our inheritance, they were trying to come into the possession of their physical inheritance, the land of Canaan. But we in the antitype are coming into our inheritance in the Kingdom of God. And then having done that, at the return of Jesus Christ, we will enter God's rest.

So what I am going to do as a kind of frame for talking about this group of people and how they apply to us in our walk to God's Kingdom, the sermon will focus on the four astounding miracles found in the book of Joshua. That is my frame; that is my organizational template here for this sermon. And my aim in giving these, talking about these four miracles, is to highlight what God is willing to do to aid us in our journey to His rest.

That is, what He is willing to do to aid us in our Christian fight over sin and Satan and this world. Because He accompanied them on their journey in the conquest, just as He is accompanying us. And so the types pop out when you go through the book of Joshua.

I want to reinforce that concept just a little bit by showing some other scriptures. I want to show you that, whoever the author of the book of Hebrews was, he was not way out on a limb when he said the works were finished from before the foundation of the earth.

He had that all planned out. He knew where He was headed.

Paul was not the only one who wrote about this.

That ties right into Ephesians 1:4, but Peter makes this very clear in verses 18-20.

Those five verses together essentially mean that, at the very least, the major steps involved in His plan - and most assuredly the overall purpose and final goal - were already determined before the earth was ever created.

Now, how long ago was that? It was previously suggested by the scientists who look into these things that the earth gave indication of being four billion years old. But recently I heard a program that mentioned that it might be in excess of ten billion years old. For mankind, it has only been about 6,000 years since Adam and Eve.

In regard to time, and having a goal I want to accomplish, I know that my proclivity is to get on with what I want to do immediately. I can hardly wait to see what I want accomplished done and over with, so that I can enjoy the fruits of my labor.

Men really do not know the age of the earth. At best, it is an educated guess. But they toss figures like billions, and even trillions, around as if we can somehow comprehend them. How long is a second? It is just a blink of an eye. One billion, though, is so large a figure that it is difficult for us to grasp that it takes 31 years and 9 months to consume one billion seconds. One trillion is one thousand billion. So we have to add three zeros on to that. Thus, one trillion seconds ago was almost 32,000 years ago!

One thing I know for sure is that God's operations are huge! So huge are the distances involved in space that scientists measure them in light years. A single light year is the distance that light travels in one year's time while moving at the rate of 86,000 miles per second. That is over 5 million miles in one minute, and 309 million in one hour. The nearest star, other than our sun, is 4.6 light years distance.

I do not know how far the edge of heaven is, but I do know that God has populated it with billions of galaxies, each containing roughly (so say the star gazers) 100 billion stars. How many planets spin their way around those stars must be beyond counting.

As one of my mentors, the late Bob Hoops, declared, the weekly Sabbath is a miniature or foretaste of the annual Sabbath - the Feast of Tabernacles, which is itself a miniature or foretaste to the Kingdom of God in the wonderful world tomorrow, ushering in the New Heavens and New Earth. The Millennium, symbolized by the seven days of the Feast of Tabernacles depicts a sanctified thousand years when the world will be at peace, resting from the horrible abuse and mis-governance it had endured for 6,000 years on mankind's tyrannical and irresponsible misrule.

Before that Millennium arrives, God's called-out ones, by faithfully honoring God's weekly and annual Sabbaths, are promised much needed tranquil rest and spiritual reinvigoration for our lengthy and arduous spiritual journey.

In this sermon, Richard made two illuminating points (a long-ranged point and a short-ranged point) about our striving to enter God's rest, as referenced in Hebrews 4:1-11, one of our lead-off scriptures.

The long-ranged point is that we need to be diligent to enter the rest that is the Kingdom of God. That is the rest we are looking for. That is when God will cease from His spiritual labors, when we have come into His rest in the Kingdom.
The short-ranged point is in verse 9 of Hebrews 4: There remains therefore a rest for the people of God. That word rest is sabbatismos - the Sabbath rest. In fact, there is another translation that says: We must therefore keep the Sabbath as the people of God.

But the point I am getting at is that the Sabbath is a type of God's rest. Richard continues, We have a weekly, twenty-four-hour period of time when we can be still. God gives us one day in seven as an opportunity to be still and come to know Him. That is one of the reasons we have the Sabbath day. People of God need this one day - to pull out of the world, to take it easy, to get out of the rat race, and to get into communion with God. We need to use this time, on the Sabbath day: to get into the right attitude, to see godly reasoning, to receive instruction, to see God at work, and to get to know Him.

We have just participated in a week-long annual Sabbath depicting a world at peace which should supercharge us with the will and power to forge ahead on our taxing spiritual journey into our Promised Land - our inheritance - God's Kingdom. Please turn once again to my second favorite scripture in the Bible.

Paul then concludes, Look at the children of Israel. How many of them died? All of them! They did not enter the rest. Since God's promise is sure, this must mean that this rest is still future.

In Hebrews 4:3-4, we saw that Paul refers to the creation and God's rest on the seventh day and creating the Sabbath. This proves, if you will, that the rest Paul is addressing here is not from fatigue or due to the fact that we have done some work because God is never weary.

Had it been fatigue or God allegedly resting because of work, Paul would have had to use another example. Since God never gets weary, He needs no rest, so this rest must be something other than relaxation or taking our shoes off after a long day of hard work.

In Hebrews 4, Paul reminds us that God stopped or God katapausis. Paul uses the Greek word katapausis for God stopping. That is a down-cessation, God's down-cessation. God stopped His creative efforts on the physical side of things. As we already saw last time, God stopped His physical work and picked up a spiritual work on the Sabbath. God ceased working to set us an example of what we have to do. It is an example of what we have to do on the Sabbath: We too have to cease working.

Paul is telling us very pointedly here that the future rest, the one that has not been entered into fully yet, contains elements of the Sabbath rest: a very simple point showing that stopping from physical works is a large part of it.

One of the major things Paul points out here is in its full completion, God's rest will feature a complete cessation of human works - physical works, works of the flesh, and works of our carnality. The main attribute of God's future rest is the fact that the works of the flesh and the works of the human mind, driven by carnality, will have stopped and ceased.

We could go to II Peter 3:13 where God says that no unrighteousness will dwell in the new heavens and the new earth: In God's future rest, unrighteousness will have stopped.

I should also mention that once human works will have been eliminated true rest can be experienced. This will result in the condition we already read in Revelation chapter twenty-one. These are all the things that are going to stop:

Let us go to Hebrews 4. This section has two points that I want to make here.

Now, what are the two points? The first is a long-ranged point, and the second is a short-ranged point.

1. The long-ranged point is that we need to be diligent to enter the rest that is the Kingdom of God. That is the rest we are looking for. That is when God will cease from His spiritual labors, when we have come into His rest in the Kingdom.

2. The short-ranged point is in verse 9: There remains therefore a rest for the people of God. That word rest is sabbatismos - the Sabbath rest. In fact there is another translation that says: We must therefore keep the Sabbath as the people of God. (I am not saying that is right or wrong; but it seems a good translation to me.) But the point I am getting at is that the Sabbath is a type of GOD's rest.

We have a weekly, twenty-four hour period of time when we can be still. God gives us one day in seven as an opportunity to be still and come to know Him. That is one of the reasons that we have the Sabbath day. People of God need this one day - to pull out of the world, to take it easy, to get out of the rat race, and to get into communion with God. We need to use this time, on the Sabbath day: to get into the right attitude, to see godly reasoning, to receive instruction, to see God at work, and to get to know Him. (Those are the five points that I just mentioned a few minutes ago.)

We have the Sabbath day to be still; but it is not just limited to the Sabbath day. Those of us, who are lucky, find time during the week (and, during the year) when we can be still. This time of the year is one when we need it the most. That is, to be still before the Passover - to get our minds in the right attitude and get the right instruction so that we are in the proper way of thinking (in the proper mode) for the Passover and the holy days.

It is not restricted just to now. Also before Trumpets and Atonement, and the Feast, is another time when it would be good for us to find a time of stillness. Any time, when we are in need of self-evaluation, is a time when it is best to be still.

I think that lays it out pretty clearly here.

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.

Now this is a very theologically rich passage, but the essential truth, here, is that God's rest - the Kingdom of God - is still before us. We have not entered it yet. The only One who has entered God's rest is Jesus Christ. And it is kind of interesting that He has not stopped working because we have not entered that rest yet.

However, Paul gives a very stern warning here. He says that what befell the Israelites in the wilderness (and they fell by the tens of thousands, through sins of various sorts through their wilderness trek) that same fate could befall us also. The lesson here is that if we want to enter God's rest, of which the Sabbath is a type, of which the Promised Land was a type, we have to continue walking, and we have to continue working to overcome sin. We have not yet entered God's rest. Have you noticed?

So our work, as verse 10 says, has not yet ceased. The work is not over until we enter the rest. God worked six days, and He rested on the seventh, and hallowed it for us, to give us right there in the second chapter of the Bible what He wants us to do.

So Paul's advice, keep up the good work all the way into the Kingdom of God.

We are told that we are to be partakers of Christ, and that entails if we hold to the beginning of our confidence with the foundation, as I mentioned. We are told not to neglect our salvation or let this world take your crown. We must not allow our hearts to become hardened. He tells us that we should not be like those that came out of Egypt. They saw the miracles of God and the awesome power of God, and then rebelled against Him and troubled Him forty years and died short of the rest that was set aside for them.

Our journey, brethren, is to the Kingdom of God and our rest is the Kingdom of God. Who is it that could not enter that rest? Those who hardened their hearts.

The apostle Paul knew that he was on a journey, and that he had two hearts, or two ways of living, in him. One of these hearts was to fight against and the other was to fight for.

You might wonder why this happened on the Sabbath. What is the significance of this being done on the Sabbath? It is the Sabbath that commemorates God, our Creator. This is the same God who rested on the seventh day of creation. This is Jesus Christ - the Word of God!

The word sabbath, in Hebrew, even means rest. That is the basic idea of the Sabbath - it is a rest. It looks back on creation. Now to what does this rest, the Sabbath, look forward to?

Now what happened when Jesus Christ was raised from the dead? He entered His rest! And guess when Christ was resurrected? On the Sabbath, when the wavesheaf was cut!

They all tie together. So by a resurrection from the dead, we inherit and fully enter the Kingdom of God. We could call it the World Tomorrow, or maybe a few other terms may come to mind.

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