Thoughts on Hebrews, God's Rest, Part 11

In the last post we began to look at Israel’s reactions to God’s grace. I was going to keep going with that; but you can run through Exodus. It’s all there for you. So, rather than completing that circle, I’ll leave that to you and turn instead to representations God made about Himself to Israel, because His rest begins and ends with Him.

To start, we must first acknowledge the Egyptian religious context the Israelites had languished in. The Egyptians had a pantheon, a multiplicity of gods with different jurisdictions, rule, and authority whereas God claimed to be One. There are good resources online for learning how God directed the plagues at the meaninglessness and powerlessness of Egypt’s gods and king. Like here and here.

My focus in this post, however, is the One calling Israel unto Himself. Let’s start with Exodus 3:

Then Moses said to God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” 14 God said to Moses, “I am who I am.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘I am has sent me to you.’” 15 God also said to Moses, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘The Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations. Go and gather the elders of Israel together and say to them, ‘The Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, has appeared to me, saying, “I have observed you and what has been done to you in Egypt, and I promise that I will bring you up out of the affliction of Egypt to the land of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, a land flowing with milk and honey.”’

God reveals at least three things in this declaration. Two in connection with His name, and one connecting an earlier promise with His name. First, He give His name as “I am who I am” and “I am.” He will prove that this name is true when He triumphs over Egyptian gods through the , the humiliation of Pharaoh, and the collapse of the Egyptian army. Next He reveals Himself to be the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, their forefathers.

We can’t know exactly what they understood or remembered about God’s dealings with these three patriarchs. But we can assume, based upon the promise He wants relayed to the elders of Israel, that they had some memory, however faint, of a promise of land to their forefather, Abraham.

That said, we cannot be too sure of the strength of this hope or whether it was a real and present expectation after 400 years in Egypt. Unlike Daniel who likely understood from reading Jeremiah that the Babylonian captivity was drawing to a conclusion after 70 years (and he prayed and fasted for three weeks), and unlike Simeon who likely understood from the book of Daniel that the Messiah was imminent (and he waited in the Temple), Israel does not seem to have remembered that God set a limit on their captivity or time in Egypt to 400 years. Their time was drawing to a conclusion too; but they don’t seem to have been expectant; and their adverse reaction to the doubling down of Pharaoh strongly suggests they had not kept or held onto the promise of God to bless the descendants of Abraham and to give a land.

Here is the promise God first related to Abram about the land in Genesis 13:

The Lord said to Abram, after Lot had separated from him, “Lift up your eyes and look from the place where you are, northward and southward and eastward and westward, for all the land that you see I will give to you and to your offspring forever. I will make your offspring as the dust of the earth, so that if one can count the dust of the earth, your offspring also can be counted. Arise, walk through the length and the breadth of the land, for I will give it to you.”

Here the promise again; this time confirmed in covenant God makes (Genesis 15):

As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell on Abram. And behold, dreadful and great darkness fell upon him. Then the Lord said to Abram, “Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years. But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions. As for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age. And they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.”

When the sun had gone down and it was dark, behold, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your offspring I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites and the Jebusites.”

in these verses we see the land would not be possessed until after a 400 year affliction.

Let me stop here for a minute because in these promises we something important about God’s rest. To enter His rest, you have to know His word, His promises, and what He says about His timing. There is an aspect of hope connected with His rest. And hope has to be anchored in something that will hold and not break loose when the storms of life come.

As we read Israel’s initial reactions to Moses and the plagues in succession, they did not have their hope in God. And I would think that means they had not held onto the word spoken to Abram.

We don’t see God faulting them for their ignorance. But He does want them to know He came before the Egyptian gods, and He had a plan for them that had commenced with their forefathers.

In Exodus Chapter 6, God repeated:

God spoke to Moses and said to him, “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 known to them. I also established my covenant with them to give them the land of Canaan, the land in which they lived as sojourners. Moreover, I have heard the groaning of the people of Israel whom the Egyptians hold as slaves, and I have remembered my covenant. Say therefore to the people of Israel, ‘I am the Lord, and I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will deliver you from slavery to them, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great acts of judgment. I will take you to be my people, and I will be your God, and you shall know that I am the Lord your God, who has brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians. I will bring you into the land that I swore to give to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. I will give it to you for a possession. I am the Lord.’”

This additional declaration is interesting because God tells Israel here that He is revealing more of Himself to them than He did to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He is giving them a name related to His being whereas He had revealed himself in power to their three forefathers—by an attribute of His: that is, He is “almighty.”

In these two declarations, God gives Israel a hope: (i) a continuity and connection, from Abraham to them, (ii) His covenant confirmed, not just with their forefathers, but also to them; (iii) His earlier covenant of a land will presently satisfied; and (iv) by implication, they will soon be leaving Egypt.

Another aspect of this hope lies in the new revelation of His Self.: “I am.” The “I am” is not standing alone however. He is gathering Israel to Himself. He has made a clear choice between two peoples for Himself: Israel over Egypt. He has a plan for the people of His election, He has a gift to give them, and He has also made a choice of Israel over many other peoples presently inhabiting the land.

All of this is to say, “You are special to Me, above all others. I have chosen you.”

In His election of Israel, we should see that God’s rest begins with Him (He really does offer it). But we must receive Him in the way in which He has made Himself known in order to enter into His rest. Whether by degree, as in God Almighty, or in fullness, as in Christ Jesus, we must find our rest in Him and His movement towards us. Whether by a material hope, as in a land, or by an everlasting hope, as in eternal life, we must walk in the light we have. Since Jesus has revealed himself to be the light of the world (John 8:12), we have much to place our hope in.

When He gives us hope or gives us Himself to hope in, and, in response, we embrace the hope He extends to us, His rest begins to dawn in our hearts. His hope embraced is the dawning of rest in God and the beginning of a new day in God..

In closing, let’s look again at Hebrews 3:

“Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion, on the day of testing in the wilderness, where your fathers put me to the test and saw my works for forty years. Therefore I was provoked with that generation, and said, ‘They always go astray in their heart; they have not known my ways.’ As I swore in my wrath, ‘They shall not enter my rest.’”

Today He has spoken to us, quite personally, by His Son who is a real hope and a real rest. This issue becomes whether He is our hope such that rest can dawn in our hearts.

Image courtesy of Unsplash and Marco-Olivier Jodoin @marcojodoin