more thoughts on the book of hebrews

So, as the Holy Spirit says: "Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as you did in the rebellion, during the time of testing in the desert, where your fathers tested and tried me and for forty years saw what I did. That is why I was angry with that generation, and I said, `Their hearts are always going astray, and they have not known my ways.' So I declared on oath in my anger, `They shall never enter my rest.'” (Hebrews 3:7-11)

The main problem of the Children of Israel in the Old Testament was that they could never keep their knowledge of God straight. They kept on reducing God to stuff. In the Old Testament, they reduced him to idols, trying to encapsulate the glory of the living God into a statue.

By the time of the New Testament, they had reduced him to his Word. They went from worshipping one thing to worshipping another. They went from worshipping idols to worshipping the law. They never could see God as greater than stuff.

They suffered the wilderness wanderings because they would not hear God and believe him, even going so far as to try to make him visible with the golden calf. All the way through the wilderness they kept whining and griping, refusing to look above discomfort and momentary trials to see his face.

They never could see him. So, he promised that they would never see his rest, they would never come into the promises he gave to Abraham back in Genesis 12. They would not keep sight of the promise, so God would not allow them to have the promise.

If we keep sight of what we know to be good and righteous, if we look to the goal that we know to be from God, we will be fine. If we reduce it to fear and anxiety, to what we can do, then we will lose it. God is at work and is in control and will see us to the end if we remain faithful.

See to it, brothers, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called Today, so that none of you may be hardened by sin's deceitfulness. We have come to share in Christ if we hold firmly till the end the confidence we had at first. (Hebrews 3:11-14)

We need desperately to make sure that none of us has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God and turns to fear and despair. For God has not given us a spirit of fear, leading to timidity, but of power and love and discipline (2 Timothy 1:9). It may take all of that discipline that we can raise to keep that faith, but we must keep that faith.

Sin has that deceitfulness that tells us that we have to do stuff, that it is all up to us. A lot of it is, of course. We cannot just sit and wait for God to dump a load of blessings on us with no effort at all on our part.

We are, after all, created for good works (Ephesians 2:10) so that we can praise him by our actions. And we have to have actions to do that.

But where the deceitfulness of sin comes in is when we begin to feel that we have no other recourse than our own strength. God then becomes too small to help us and we fail miserably.

We must hold firmly the confidence we had at first.