Hebrews 4: Jesus is Rest

Introduction

Up until this point in the book of Hebrews we have seen Christ magnified as greater than. That in every respect, He outshines all of creation, He outshines all of our attempts at salvation. He outshines all of our models for greatness. Whatever it is we place up next to Jesus, He more than dwarfs it in comparison.

And that is because of Who He is and What He has done.

Christ is the impression of God exactly and is faithful to complete the very thing He was given to do. He was able to reconcile, bring back together, what we as humanity, had broken.

And now we will begin to see some of the implications of that.

Hebrews 4:1 ESV

Therefore, while the promise of entering his rest still stands, let us fear lest any of you should seem to have failed to reach it.

Therefore, while the promise of entering his rest still stands, let us fear lest any of you should seem to have failed to reach it

We are given a promise, not only of someone capable of handling they very thing we have been looking for, but that, in doing so, He actually enters into the problem we have.

Christ is capable of leading us to the very place we have been looking for all along. And we are all looking for rest. Everything we do is geared toward providing rest. We work, so that we can make enough money for rest. We help, so that others can find rest. We hustle and act and never stop, we answer emails at 9pm so that ultimately we can find a bit of rest. We have retirement funds and savings accounts so that ultimately we can rest. We work hard three seasons of the year and then when summer comes up, we are able to get a break maybe and rest.

You know the feeling of counting down to a vacation you have planned. Of what it’s like to singularly focus on getting away. You know what it’s like hopefully of coming home after a long day and being able to finally rest. To finally be able to relax. we are all looking forward to home

It’s a strange pursuit. Because we drive ourselves crazy with anxiety and work and activity, all so that we can hopefully at the end rest. The problem is we ramp up toward all sorts of unstoppable energy and activity. We whip ourselves up into a frenzy, all so that we can get a little bit of rest at the end. But because we are so attached to our activity, we never really get to the rest part.

We are made for rest, but we hardly ever get there. We get a whiff of rest, a sense of it. And we think it is good enough. We see the finish line, or we get close to home, and we never really stop.

This is the problem of our age. We are exhausting ourselves to death

We live lives where we see what rest is like but then, satisfied with seeing what it is like, we turn around and go right back to it. We live our lives as if we countdown to two or three days before vacation and then, getting close enough, we count it good but never actually go on vacation.

We are compulsive in our acceleration all in order to hopefully find rest. We are driving home to Wisconsin in a month. It is about an 18 hour drive, taken over two days. about 16.5 hours into the drive, after spending a night in Du Bois PA and contending with the traffic in downtown Chicago, we cross the Racine WI border and ultimately make a stop at a fast food place called Culvers. They have some good midwestern food. We always order fried cheese curds because it is Wisconsin state food, perfectly combining cheese and the art of frying foods.

Imagine if we travel the 16.5 hours, eat our fried cheese, get back in the car and head back to Mass. We were close enough, got a little taste of WI, and went home. It wouldn’t make sense at all. You would think we were crazy.

But that is how we live our lives.

There is a great writer named Hartmunt Rosa who says we live in a culture of acceleration, which he says is an “aimless, endless compulsion” that attempts to but can’t relate to the world.

.So we want rest and work frantically to get there but don’t ultimately rest.

We have to break that cycle. Because we were never intended to live at the pace we currently do. We aren’t physically, socially, psychologically or spiritually able to sustain the pace we currently do

And we will need someone to invite us into actual rest that is prepared for us that we don’t have to create ourselves. We have created and created and created and created and have not built something large enough to contain our rest.

We have a desire, we have tried to solve it, and solving it has made us faster and more anxious.

So maybe we need a better solution.

God has commanded we rest. It is in Genesis 1. It is in the 10 commandments. Jesus talks about it. It is part of Jewish law. It has been fixed into culture (Sundays).

I think we were commanded to rest because we are simply so terrible at it. Rest is important because to act on it assumes something. It assumes that there is something in the world that we trust enough to be able to stop for a moment and close our eyes.

We find rest difficult because we don’t feel like there is much we can trust. If we can’t trust our surroundings then we can’t let our guard down. No one takes a nap in a place they don’t trust. So rest comes because we trust something, somewhere, someone enough that we can let our guard down and rest.

As it turns out:

Rest is the place where we communicate the most trust.

We all want something to trust in. And we all want something to rest in. if you rest somewhere, you are communicating that you trust that place and that person.

I cannot sleep in airports. I am too alert, too much on the watch. I don’t know the people around me, they are heading all over the world, so I don’t trust it. I don’t sleep. We let our guard down when we trust someone. To rest is a personal proclamation of trust.

So in Hebrews, given what we know about Jesus. He is God’s son, He is the High Priest. So He is greater than all things and He is faithful in all things.

Based on that information, we are invited to rest.

Hebrews 4:1–4 ESV

Therefore, while the promise of entering his rest still stands, let us fear lest any of you should seem to have failed to reach it. For good news came to us just as to them, but the message they heard did not benefit them, because they were not united by faith with those who listened. For we who have believed enter that rest, as he has said, “As I swore in my wrath, ‘They shall not enter my rest,’ ” although his works were finished from the foundation of the world. For he has somewhere spoken of the seventh day in this way: “And God rested on the seventh day from all his works.”

We see that the promise of rest still stands. That those who trust and have faith, who believe, are invited into rest. The very thing all of our humanity is pointing toward.

God solves this issue for us in Genesis chapter 1. We have a hard time with it, reject Him with our own solutions and create sin, and then rest is recreated through Jesus in reconciling us to God.

But let’s look at God’s first understanding of rest.

In Genesis 1, God creates the Heavens and the earth. We see in the beginning of Genesis 2, God rests from His work

Genesis 2:1–3 ESV

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.

Now when God rests, the understanding is that He sits down and sees His creation. He looks over the span of His work, and He calls it good.

When God rests after creation, He blesses that rest and admires it. Calls it good in fact. But God’s actions in resting go beyond admiration. When God sits back in rest, when He calls His work complete. He is simulataneously admitting His rule over it. God stops His work, and He sits, but He sits on a throne. That action of sitting is like a King who sits on his throne.

in the world of the OT, When a deity rests He is taking control and command.

He, in rest, is taking his proper and rightful place. This is the rightful view of what God is doing in Genesis 2. He is taking control of the universe

So assumed in the call to rest is the call for God to rule. Which means for us to rest is for us to confess God’s rule in our lives. When we stop we have to trust someone to look out on our behalf.

This is the difference between when someone tells us to “relax” sarcastically and when God calls us to rest. When someone tells us to “relax!” they don’t mean you can calm down, slow down and breathe more deeply. It means to stop freaking out even though there is no solution.

God approaches us from sustaining all of creation. He sees it all, has authority over it all, and from that point doesn’t say “relax!” HE says, “rest.”

And for the Christian’s sake, God is the One who is ruling.

On our end we practice rest, on God’s end He maintains His rule.

Rest communicates that Christ is the complete sufficiency of our work

Hebrews 4:9–10 ESV

So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his.

For us to rest in Christ is to trust that Christ is ruling. He is the One with authority and with power. He is the One who is far superior and has beaten death. He became Human and did for Humans what humans couldn’t do for ourselves.

And He does it so well He then invites us to rest. No one understands the human condition more than the one who created it. He knows how we work and how we function. So He knows we need rest. We will need to stop.

Maybe the most countercultural thing the church can do is to rest in such a way that it confesses God’s ultimate authority in the world. Now I’m not saying we should ignore the world around us or not respond or not pay attention.

But we should be able to trust that God is still moving and that He is sustaining all things. But if the church is just as accelerated as everyone else, we carry with us no witness.

So the church can slow down, we can speak the right things at the right time but not have to keep up. In fact, to rest is to make room for other things. It is the ability to trust and let go of all the things we hold onto all the time. When you do that you can’t see anyone else.

To rest is witness to God’s goodness.

If the human condition does not thrive on frantic pacing, and if all the culture is doing is running frantically, then it cannot flourish as is. It is caught up in itself. We get caught up in it as well.

Our ability to flourish as humans does not does not happen without outside help. Human flourishing does not exist that some kind of external help. Otherwise we just get caught up in our ability to try and fix our own self and in doing so just try and lift ourselves up by our own hair.

We can rest by trusting in Christ. We can enter into our rest, which is a picture of the peace that surpasses all understanding. Which reflects our eternal position in Christ.

But it has to begin with trust and trusting Christ enough to stop.

Our witness is our pace. Our witness to greater things, to greater amounts of trust is found in our ability to stop. To rest.

To linger.

This week would you trust Christ enough to lay down whatever frantic pace you’re tempted to carry on. Be countercultural this week, when the world is calling you to by endless toil, would you lay down whatever it is You’re tempted to clutch and linger over the goodness of God and point to greater things.

How can you rest this week that is a witness to your trust in Christ?