Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says,
“Today, if you hear his voice,
8 do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion,
on the day of testing in the wilderness,
9 where your fathers put me to the test
and saw my works for forty years.
10 Therefore I was provoked with that generation,
and said, ‘They always go astray in their heart;
they have not known my ways.’
11 As I swore in my wrath,
‘They shall not enter my rest.’”
12 Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. 13 But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today,” that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. 14 For we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end. 15 As it is said,
“Today, if you hear his voice,
do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.”
16 For who were those who heard and yet rebelled? Was it not all those who left Egypt led by Moses? 17 And with whom was he provoked for forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose bodies fell in the wilderness? 18 And to whom did he swear that they would not enter his rest, but to those who were disobedient? 19 So we see that they were unable to enter because of unbelief.
When we lived on Lookout Mountain, in Georgia we would see snow on rare occasions but what we did deal with more frequently, was ice. It would rain ice sometimes throughout the night. When you woke up, the sun shining in the bitter cold and looking outside it was breathtakingly beautiful. The 20-foot tree in our back yard was so covered with ice that my kids could and did, climb to the very top as if walking on stairs of ice.
The mistake that one could easily make is to fail to see through the beauty, to just how dangerous it was. Power lines down due to the weight of the ice, no traction for your car even your four-wheel drive was going to slide around. And even though Lookout Mountain barely qualified AS a mountain, it still could be quite intimidating when the roads were nothing but a sheet of ice. So, you might wake up quite enthusiastic on an ice day, but soon, the difficulties would make themselves known and then the grumbling would start and the questions about what are we to do now, would begin.
That cycle, enthusiastic beginning…unveiling trouble or problems, leading to complaining and worries about provisions…pretty much describes the wanderings of God’s people in the wilderness when coming out of Egypt, which is the context here for the preacher’s warnings that are going to follow.
In our context, the sermon that we call Hebrews, has made it clear that Moses and all of redemptive history was building to the revelation of God’s final word, who is Jesus. He has caused us to think about the place of Moses and the giving of the law and he continues with that historical reference as now we are looking at what happened during the 40 years they spent in the desert before they came into the promised land.
The Exodus had an enthusiastic beginning, but within one week, troubles arose and the complaining started; worried that although God had brought them out of Egypt, they accused Him of not being able to provide for them as they journeyed. During that time, they went through what the writer of Psalm 95 called, ‘the great bitterness’,the time of testing when the people were going to come face to face with life’s ultimate question:
Will you trust the Lord and His word, walking faith-filled in humility with and in the promises of God, or will you put God to the test by demanding that He prove Himself to you, thereby revealing that your heart is hard and rebellious.
The preacher is now asking his hearers, he is asking us to think of ourselves in some way. Here we are, making our way to God’s promised future, will we make the same mistakes that that generation made?
To underscore this point, he quotes Psalm 95:7-11, and he is going to come back to the Psalm, over and over again. In fact, the psalm is center stage until we get to chapter 4:10. The Psalm begins with a call to worship and praise. It is an invitation to be joyful and to make joyful noises, filled with thanksgiving for our God is the rock of our salvation…our response should be, must be that we kneel, we bow down, what else is there to do, for He is the Shepherd and we are His sheep.
But then in verse 7, the mood changes abruptly. The Psalmist is writing hundreds of years after the Exodus, but he recognizes the same thing the author of Hebrews recognizes…namely that it will matter decisively whether or not the people of God, in the wilderness, or in the united kingdom of Israel, or in the day of the apostles, or the 21st century AD…I say it matters whether the people of God will hear the call of the Lord to give ourselves fully to the Lord in repentance, obedience and humility, or not. And the Lord was clear in David’s day, in the context of Hebrews and in ours that if we harden our hearts, if we live grumbling against the Lord, thinking to test him, thinking that God is beholden to what we want…God will turn his back on us, the Psalmist says, God will loathe us and there will be no rest of God for such a person, or for such a people.
And note this; the ancient word of God is a message of perennial relevance. These people can make precisely the same error that Israel made in the wilderness and if they do, they will suffer the same fate and of course the point is…so will we.
The Psalmist and the preacher of Hebrews says Today…Today if you hear his voice. The writer of Hebrews believed passionately that God had acted once for all in Jesus the Messiah and that as a result the new day had dawned for which Israel had been waiting.
“…they had been living in what you might call tomorrow mode, for long enough; now it was today mode…” So, what are you going to do now?
Prayer: Father, I am often overwhelmed by my circumstances, I am easily brought to fear, anxiety and despair. I pray that you would give me a sight of the Christ for me that gives me strength, hope and trust. You have proven Yourself faithful over and over again, please forgive my unbelief. I would this day walk in jumble confidence that You are for me and that I can endure what Your will sends and thereby honor and glorify my God who has loved me with such a great love, through Jesus Christ my Lord, Amen.
Hymn: A Mighty Fortress