#7: An OT Call to Not Spurn Him

I. Introduction
A. The third chapter of Hebrews is very rich, practical and penetrating. We’re going to go a little slower and take four weeks to cover it. I want to urge you to pay close attention to these sermons.
1. Today we encounter a powerful passage, which begins with these words: “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.”
2. Hebrews 3:7-12 is the first section of a long passage, ending in 4:11.
B. Last week in Heb.3:1-6 we saw the author pleading in a warm but urgent way with Hebrew believers – whose faith was wavering – to think about how exalted and preeminent Christ is, and how He is superior to Moses himself.
1. And then in 3:7-12 it is as if the author says, “While I’m on the subject of Moses, let me draw a lesson from Moses to apply to your situation.”
2. Heb.3:12 summarizes the main point of the epistle: “Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God.”
3. And since the author was a Jew writing to fellow Jews, and since he’s been talking about Moses, he appeals to a lesson from the history of OT Israel in order to make his point. Specifically, he refers to the story of the Israelites turning away from God in the wilderness to exhort the Hebrew Christians not to turn away from Christ.
II. Explanation of Hebrews 3:7–12
A. The story of the Israelites in the wilderness was very familiar to his readers, but it might not be familiar to some of you, so let’s review it before we move on.
1. The Jews were slaves in Egypt. God raised up Moses to deliver His people out of Egypt through the Red Sea (the story of the Exodus). But even from the get-go the Israelites responded without faith.
a. They complained about their increased workload imposed by Pharaoh in response to Moses’ request.
b. They demanded water from Moses when they got into the wilderness.
c. Then they whined about the lack of food.
d. After they fed on manna for a while, they began to grumble about that.
e. When Moses went up on Mt. Sinai to meet with God and receive the law, they complained about how long it was taking and then fashioned the golden calf and worshiped it.
f. And when they came to the edge of the promised land at Kadesh-Barnea and sent in 12 spies to scout out the land, they believed the report of the 10 spies who said it was an impossible task instead of believing God’s word that He would give them victory (Num.12-14). This disobedience of Israel crossed a threshold. At this point God declared that that present generation would not be allowed to enter the promised land, but would die in the wilderness: Numbers 14:26–35 gives us Gd’s response to their disobedience: “How long shall this wicked congregation grumble against me? I have heard the grumblings of the people of Israel. As I live, declares the LORD, your dead bodies shall fall in this wilderness, all of those twenty years old and upward, who have grumbled against me. Not one shall come into the land where I swore that I would make you dwell, except Caleb and Joshua. But your little ones, who you said would become a prey, I will bring in, and they shall know the land that you have rejected. But as for you, your dead bodies shall fall in this wilderness. And your children shall be shepherds in the wilderness forty years and shall suffer for your faithlessness, until the last of your dead bodies lies in the wilderness. According to the number of the days in which you spied out the land, forty days, a year for each day, you shall bear your iniquity forty years, and you shall know my displeasure. I, the LORD, have spoken.”
g. This was followed by 40 years of wandering and dying before the children of that generation finally made it into the promised land.
B. Hebrews 3:7-11 is a long quote from Psalm 95.
1. The first half of Ps.95 is filled with familiar words, words we use in our songs like “Come Let Us Worship and Bow Down” & “Come, Worship the Lord.”
2. Then suddenly David shifts to an exhortation based on the story of Israel in the wilderness.
3. He has two OT incidents in mind:
a. The Israelites demanding water in Exod.17
b. The Israelites refusing to go into the promised land at Kadesh-Barnea because of the report of the 10 spies in Numbers 12-14
4. So today this story comes to you in an unusual way. When it happened, it was recorded by Moses in Exodus and Numbers. Then King David picked up on what Moses had written and used it in Psalm 95. Then the author of Hebrews got it from Psalm 95 and wrote it into his epistle. And now finally I am getting it from Hebrews 3 and presenting it to you.
C. 7-9 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.
1. 7a “Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says...”
a. “Therefore” again, referring back to all he’s been saying about not turning away from Christ.
b. “The Holy Spirit says” not “the psalmist says” – Later (4:7) he attributes the words to David.
(1) Though written by human authors, the Bible is nonetheless God’s word.
2. 7b-9a “Today, if you hear his voice, 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”
a. He cites the bad example of the Israelites in the wilderness and urges the Hebrews not to follow it.
b. “on the day of testing in the wilderness”
(1) Suffering/hardship are tests, they prove what’s inside us.
(2) We tend to blame our sin on our circumstances, don’t we? But that’s blaming God, who arranges our circumstances.
(3) What leads us into sin? James 1:13-15 “Let no one say when he is tempted, ‘I am being tempted by God’; for God cannot be tempted by evil, and He Himself does not tempt anyone. But each one is tempted when he is carried away and enticed by his own lust. Then when lust has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and when sin is accomplished, it brings forth death.”
3. 9b “and saw my works for forty years.”
a. 40 years of the Lord’s works, both providential and disciplinary
(1) Our lives are a combination of divine deprivation and provision, in perfect proportions.
(2) Deut.8:2-4 gives us a glimpse of this divine recipe and its purpose.
b. Of course, there was another design as well. God couldn’t slay them all at once or there would be no parents to take care of the children who were to come into the promised land.
(1) It proves that God can use very imperfect parents to raise up godly kids.
D. 10-11 “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.’ ”
1. We just talked about the tests. Now we see the report card. Most of them failed the test miserably.
2. It’s not like they did everything wrong.
a. They followed Moses out of Egypt, through the Red Sea, into the wilderness. They put blood on their doors to escape the angel of death. They entered into covenant with God at Sinai. They followed the pillar. They donated their gold to build the Ark of the Covenant. They looked up at the bronze serpent to avoid the bite of the serpent.
b. And yet, they kept grumbling, they kept disobeying, they kept not trusting, they were always going astray in their hearts, proving they didn’t really get it (v.10 "they have not known my ways").
c. God was very, very slow to anger. But eventually they crossed the threshold of His anger, and by His oath He banished them from entering the promised land.
3. Verse 11 clearly refers to hell, in terms of the point the auhtor is making. The rest of the passage (Heb.3:12-4:11) and the rest of Hebrews make that clear (e.g. Heb.2:2-3; 10:26-31; 12:25-29).
a. It doesn’t even make sense to use this as a NT admonition if it only applies to entering Canaan.
b. There are some who claim to be Bible-believing Christians who argue that in the end all men will be saved (universalists). And yet it’s hard to imagine how the language of the Bible could be more clear. Here God says that He makes a solemn oath that these people will not enter His rest. Now, I wish that all mankind could be saved. I am very uncomfortable with the notion of eternal hell. But who are we to question God's sincerity in this solemn oath, as if He's trying to scare us as motivation but doesn't really intend on following through?
4. “You always go astray in your heart; you have not known my ways. I swear in my wrath: you will never enter My rest.” It’s hard to imagine a worse thing being said to you than for God to say this.
a. Does that send shivers down your spine? It should.
b. So, what can you do to make sure God never says that to you? The good new is there is something you can do. Verse 12 tells us...
E. 12 “Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God.”
1. This is the point he's been leading up to. In one sense, it's a summary of the whole letter.
2. Unbelief is evil.
3. Unbelief is not for lack of evidence.
a. They saw the ten plagues.
b. They saw the parting of the Red Sea.
c. They saw water come out of the rock.
d. They saw manna miraculously fall from the sky.
e. They saw the pillar of fire and the pillar of cloud.
f. They saw fire and smoke and heard the trumpet sound at Mt. Sinai.
g. They saw the glow on Moses’ face when he came from meeting with God.
4. Take care! Satan will subtly, deceivingly try to turn your heart to be an evil, unbelieving heart!
III. Application
A. The wilderness and the Christian life
1. There are a good number of other periods of Israel’s history: conquest, judges, united kingdom, disintegration, exile. But those periods aren’t used to show us where we are. But Israel’s time in the wilderness is.
2. Paul says as much in 1Cor.10:5–6 (speaking of this same generation of Israelites in the wilderness): “With most of them God was not pleased, for they were overthrown in the wilderness. Now these things took place as examples for us, that we might not desire evil as they did.”
3. Hebrews 3-4 is one of many evidences that we are traveling through a new wilderness (this world), having been saved by the new and greater Moses (Christ) from slavery in our old life (Egypt), and on our way to but not yet having entered the new and greater promised land.
4. So, here’s the picture of life the Bible paints for us: We’re on a journey through the wilderness toward the promised land. God is at work and we can see that but it’s very hard. It’s scary. It’s exhausting. It’s perplexing. There are vipers and enemies. It seems like it goes on forever. It seems like it’s more than we can endure.
5. Are we going to keep following in spite of the hardships? Are we going to remain willing for Him to lead us and trust Him to provide for us? Are we going to “hold our original confidence firm to the end”? (Heb.3:14) Or are we going to let our hearts harden? Are we going to conclude that we can’t trust Him, that we must take care of ourselves?
B. Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.
1. The author has already talked about how God speaks to us through Jesus (Heb.1:1-3). Now the question is, How will we respond to what He says?
2. How do you relate to the word of God? How do you relate to what God says?
3. Are you eager to hear it? Or do objections rise quickly in your mind?
4. When you see a Bible, what thought comes into your mind? “That’s my book! I love that book! I can’t wait to read it some more!” Or, “Boring! Irrelevant! Confused! Barbaric!”
5. Hebrews makes it clear over and over again: the problem with our relationship with the Bible is not that it’s too ancient & inaccessible, it’s not that it’s too difficult to figure out. The problem is our hardness of heart!
6. Young people, you have a long journey ahead of you. It may seem easy to follow Jesus right now.
a. It all comes down to, as you journey through life, how you will react when you hear God’s voice.
b. “Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God.”
7. You can’t separate how you relate to God from how you relate to God’s speech to you.
a. Hardening your heart toward what He says is the same thing as having an evil, unbelieving heart, and falling away from God.
b. Remember that Jesus is the word of God (John 1:1ff.)
8. Often when God speaks it doesn’t seem like He’s speaking. It’s not like when God sppoke to Noah or Moses at the burning bush.
a. You won’t hear it unless you’re listening for it.
b. For the Israelites the assurance of God was drowned out by the scary visions of Canaan.
c. Listen to Psalm 19:1-4 “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. Their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.”
(1) And if that’s true about the moon, the stars the clouds and the sunsets, it’s also true about the mountains and the flowers and the leaves and the food and the music.
d. Every church you pass, every time you see a Bible, every fish sign on the back of a car — God speak, God reminds of Himself.
e. How about at church? Does the idea of someone teaching from the Bible excite us or bore us?
(1) During responsive readings, do we grab as much as we can as it goes by?
(2) Do we listen to the songs or just sing them?
f. How about all the times He’s spoken to you in the past? All the Bible stories you’ve been taught, all the verses you know, all the truth which already resides in your mind? Don’t harden your hearts to all that either.
g. How do you think about those things? Do you mull them over and ponder them as precious? Or do you leave them locked in a closet hoping they’ll go away?
h. The memory is funny. It can be very selective. E.g. For years I tried to forget about the extra $100 check my dad gave me.
i. Most of the time, unless you want to hear from God, you won’t even know He’s speaking.
j. But if you spend your life refusing to listen to God, I can guarantee that there will come a day when every one of those thousands of opportunities to hear God will be presented as evidence against you, and you will have no excuse.
C. The anger of God
1. These are angry words in v.10-11 “I was provoked with that generation and I swore in my wrath, ‘They shall not enter my rest.’ ”
2. If you think God is too gracious to slam the door and leave someone in the outer dankness, then you’re not getting your information about God from the Bible.
3. Today there is a great outcry against the concept of an angry God.
a. Suppose they circulated a petition protesting God’s wrath and His threats of eternal judgment. How many signatures would be required in order to get God to back off? Do you think if we could get every single human being to sign it that God would bow to political pressure and change His mind?
b. I don’t think so. He is who He is. “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever.” (Heb.13:8)
4. Interestingly, Hebrews is the NT book which talks most about the change from the OT to the NT. But it’s also the book which most frequently draws from the OT to apply to our NT lives.
a. He’s arguing against OT religion, and yet he frequently uses the OT to call the people to Jesus.
b. That’s what’s happening in our passage this morning.
5. We prefer a nice, safe God, a God who is not merely slow to anger, but who NEVER angers.
6. But when we object to how God works (e.g. His anger), we are doing the very thing we are being told not to do in this passage. We’re resisting God’s word instead of welcoming it.
D. I’d like to finish by thinking about Jesus.
1. Like the Israelites, Jesus was tested in the wilderness, going without food and being badgered by the Serpent. But He didn’t harden His heart like the Israelites did.
2. In fact, His resisting temptation is a terrible criticism of you and me. It ruins all our excuses.
a. All the times we blame our sin on hunger or fatigue or headache or sickness. All the times we point to our situation, our loneliness, our lack of support.
b. Circumstances don’t cause you to sin. Circumstances merely bring out what’s already in the heart.
c. Jesus didn’t sin even in these terribly agonizing circumstances, because there wasn’t any sin to bring out.
d. “In my heart there is a treason, one that poisons all my love.” Jesus didn't have this.
e. He’s the One who succeeded where all others failed. Because of this He can save us.
3. That same Jesus is the one who’s in mind in Hebrews 3. He’s the One leading us through the wilderness. He’s the One leading us to the promised land. He’s the One warning us about missing out on His rest. He’s the One calling out to us, “Come unto Me and rest.” (Matt.11:28)
4. Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your heart.