Thoughts on Hebrews: God's Rest, Part 9

Well we’ve come a long way. But we haven’t gotten very far it, or gone quite far enough it seems. We have not spent any time on the rest part. Sorry to say we won’t get there today either.

We looked at Pharaoh’s hardness of heart. The word of the Lord, the grace of God, has the opposite effect we would expect—and expect in our own lives. We see this of course when we muse on being present when Jesus was alive in Nazareth and Capernaum, etc. As if “only of . . .” That excuse is a hardening if we aren’t careful because in Christ Jesus He has given us everything—everything—pertaining to life and godliness. So says Peter in his second general letter.

I raise that point initially because it is too easy to ascribe Pharoah’s hardness, or as we will see Israel’s hardness to an ancient ignorance—a primitive, unenlightened sort of hardness, which we could not now fall prey to. So that we would be disabused of that progressive rationale the writer of Hebrews presents Israel’s hardness of heart as illustrative of two things: the decision laid before his readers, and the dangers that attend the wrong choice.

I see only parallels today—and I believe it is no accident that God employs that very word, Today, and the writer of Hebrews follows with “while it is still called Today..” Stepping back for a moment from where I would like to land in this post, let me add I love this. God’s notion, broad notion as it is, of Today skewers our self-idealized notions of enlightenment, post-enlightenment, modernity, post-modernity and whatever will come after that. While we shift the sands we build on, God offers us simply Today. It’s a beautiful rejoinder to the towers of Babel we continue to build today.

Let’s turn to Israel to see whether they fare any better than Pharaoh.

In Exodus 4, we have a very good beginning:

Moses and Aaron brought together all the elders of the Israelites, and Aron told them everything the Lord had said to Moses. He also performed the signs before the people, and they believed. And when they heard that the Lord was concerned about them and had seen their misery, they bowed down and worshiped.

But when Pharoah rejected Moses’ first plea, and oppressed the Israelites further. What was an initial sigh of relief turned to invective in Chapter 5:

When they left Pharaoh, they found Moses and Aaron waiting to meet them, and they said, “May the Lord look on you and judge you! You have made us obnoxious to Pharaoh and his officials and have put a sword in their hand to kill us.”

In Chapter 6, Israel does not listen to Moses or the promises God told Moses to relay to them:

God also said to Moses, “I am the Lord. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob as God Almighty, but by my name the Lord I did not make myself fully known to them. I also established my covenant with them to give them the land of Canaan, where they resided as foreigners. Moreover, I have heard the groaning of the Israelites, whom the Egyptians are enslaving, and I have remembered my covenant.

“Therefore, say to the Israelites: ‘I am the Lord, and I will bring you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians. I will free you from being slaves to them, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment. I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God. Then you will know that I am the Lord your God, who brought you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians. And I will bring you to the land I swore with uplifted hand to give to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob. I will give it to you as a possession. I am the Lord.’”

Moses reported this to the Israelites, but they did not listen to him because of their discouragement and harsh labor.

This should sound familiar. Remember Jesus’ parable of the sower?

Others, like seed sown on rocky places, hear the word and at once receive it with joy. But since they have no root, they last only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, they quickly fall away.

This is what we see with the Israelites; and it’s understandable I think after centuries of hardship and suffering—faith has little soil in which to take root.

But what about after the signs and wonders by God’s strong hand, and the saving of their firstborn, and the destruction of the Egyptian firstborn? Before the great deliverance from the Egyptian army through the way in the Red Sea, we hear this in Exodus 14:

As Pharaoh approached, the Israelites looked up, and there were the Egyptians, marching after them. They were terrified and cried out to the Lord. They said to Moses, “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die? What have you done to us by bringing us out of Egypt? Didn’t we say to you in Egypt, ‘Leave us alone; let us serve the Egyptians’? It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert!”

They saw God’s deeds in Egypt and heard His many promises through Moses—and to this critical point they still have no faith. But here the hardening begins because they are beginning to impugn God’s motivations as diabolical and tyrannical.

That should sound familiar. Remember when Jesus was accused of being in league with Beelzebul in Matthew 12?

Then they brought him a demon-possessed man who was blind and mute, and Jesus healed him, so that he could both talk and see. 23 All the people were astonished and said, “Could this be the Son of David?” But when the Pharisees heard this, they said, “It is only by Beelzebul, the prince of demons, that this fellow drives out demons.”

. . .

And if I drive out demons by Beelzebul, by whom do your people drive them out? So then, they will be your judges. But if it is by the Spirit of God that I drive out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.

. . .

Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters. And so I tell you, every kind of sin and slander can be forgiven, but blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but anyone who speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come.

Let me stop here because His rest is coming into view. First, we see repentance from something is elemental. In this case, Israel had to repent from Egypt. Second, we see faith towards God is elemental. In this case, Israel had every reason to believe; God gave them overwhelming evidence of His love and heart towards them. Third, we see a baptism is elemental.

And we should be reminded of Hebrews 6 (“Therefore let us leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity, not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God, and of instruction about washings, the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment. And this we will do if God permits.”).

In keeping with this line of thinking I want to leave you with the words of Paul to consider from 1 Corinthians 10 because in them we should hear the echoes of “Today, if you hear his voice . . . “:

I do not want you to be unaware, brothers, that our forefathers were all under the cloud, and that they all passed through the sea. They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. They all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ. Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them, for they were struck down in the wilderness.

These things took place as examples to keep us from craving evil things as they did. Do not be idolaters, as some of them were. As it is written: “The people sat down to eat and to drink, and got up to indulge in revelry.” We should not commit sexual immorality, as some of them did, and in one day twenty-three thousand of them died. We should not test Christ, as some of them did, and were killed by snakes. And do not complain, as some of them did, and were killed by the destroying angel.

Now these things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us, on whom the fulfillment of the ages has come. So the one who thinks he is standing firm should be careful not to fall.

Image courtesy of Unsplash and Sandro Steiner