Obedience and Belief

Introduction

Experiencing God

Imagine you are an Israelite slave in Egypt. You’ve been suffering for generations. You cry out to God, and God hears your cries. He sends the most incredible prophet in history to save you, your friends and family, your community, your people. That prophet stepped up to the most powerful man in the world, the king who had enslaved your people for generations, and challenged him. Then the miracles came. Judgement after judgement upon the people who had shown you so much hatred and oppression. Plague after plague hits Egypt until this powerful Pharoah is forced to let you go. You are led out of Egypt by this prophet with gifts of gold and silver from the very people who used to enslave you. You make it to the Red Sea and then find you’ve been tailed by the Egyptian army. In this hopeless situation, a strong wind begins to blow and you see the waters of the sea recede, providing a way of escape. After passing through the sea, the waters drown the Egyptian army behind you. From here on, God continues to lead you through the wilderness, provide food and water, and show his power in giving you military victory over your enemies.

It would be fair to say that, after all of this, you have experienced the power and saving work of God in a very real and tangible way.

What we saw last time we were here in Hebrews 3 is that Christians have experienced a much greater salvation than anything I just described.

We were in a greater slavery than Israel, for while they laboured under a mere human tyrant, we laboured under the ultimate tyrant the devil and were bound by the chains of our own sinful desires.

We have a greater Saviour, for while Moses was faithful in all God’s house, as faithful as a sinful human being can possibly be within God’s household, we have the sinless Son of God who is faithful over God’s house. As we saw, Christ is infinately more able to save his people than his servant Moses was.

We have a better salvation, being delivered to a new heavens and a new earth, being cleansed of our sinful hearts through sanctification, dwelling with God in his glory without viel or any obsticle to keep us from him. On top of this, the salvation we have is more complete. Moses sinned and so died before he could enter the promised land, and the Israelites were never able to fully experience God’s blessings as he intended them to because their hearts continued in unbelief.

So when we think about the great salvation that Israel experienced, what you as a Christian have experienced in Christ is greater by orders of magnitude. While not as visibly powerful, the reality of our salvation is infinately greater than anything else ever experienced by the people of God. The glory of a Christians salvation causes being led through a literal sea and being fed in the wilderness with miraculous bread seem like nothing. How wonderful it is to experience the salvation of God.

The Progression of a Hard Heart to Unbelief to Disobedience

And also, how fearful. Think of all the people who experienced the deliverance we just spoke of. Think of the plagues they saw, the pillars of cloud and fire by which they were led, the Red Sea; all of these experienced God’s salvation in such a powerful way, and yet only two of them ever experienced the fulfillment of God’s promises, Joshua and Caleb. With those exceptions, every single one of them died in the wilderness.

Why? Was God unfaithful? Did God fail to keep his promises? Not at all. Our answer is given in the Author of Hebrew’s quotation of Psalm 95. The heart of the problem was this: they hardened their hearts. Interestingly, this was the very sin that Pharoah, the tyrant who had enslaved the Israelites, was guilty of.

Last time, we saw the author of Hebrews use this historical hardness of heart among God’s people as a warning for his contemporaries. This gets at the heart of the point he makes from here into chapter 4, and the heart of that wawrning is this: hardness of heart is just as dangerous for the people of God today as it was during the Exodus.

What does a hard heart look like? It should already be obvious to us that it shows itself in different forms. For Pharoah, his pride and greed kept his heart hard and stubborn against letting the Israelites go. For the Israelites, it was their suspicion and unfaithfulness that kept them disobeying the LORD and going after other gods instead. It also made them grumblers towards God:

Numbers 14:27 ESV

“How long shall this wicked congregation grumble against me? I have heard the grumblings of the people of Israel, which they grumble against me.

for the Christian, a hardness of heart can look diverse. It can be a giving over to anger or lustfulness or any other passion, it can be the desire to conform to a social norm or expectation, it can be a desire to green light a sinful behaiviour that the person relies upon for fulfillment in their lives, it can be cultural, political, or racial tensions. It can simply be a desire for confort and security, a hateful grudge a person is unwilling to let go of, it can be godless fear, it can be the result of suffering and the subsequent challenge to God’s will in the midst of that pain. It can be difficulty with a theological point. It can be a pattern of abuse or narcessistic behaviour. It can be many many things, but it is rooted in the same ultimate cause: an evil, unbelieving heart leading one to fall away from the living God.

Last time, we saw that the answer given to us, the way that we may avoid such an evil heart, is the church. It is an encouraging and gentle correcting of one another, not just when things are going wrong, and not from a place of judgement or condemnation, but rather like two team mates in a sport pushing each other towards the finish line and away from any thought of quitting or slowing down in the great race. For the author of Hebrews, this is an indispensible and central purpose of the church the lives of Christians. As we’ll see, Christ knows how hard temptation is, he is able to sympathize with our sinful weakness. He is a merciful high priest who loves us and knows how susceptible we are to an evil heart. That is why he gave us each other; his own presence within the church. And that is why we cannot truly be the church if we do not practice the spiritual discipline of exhortation among ourselves.

The Warning Intensified

Now, from verse 15 until the end of the chapter, the warning is intensified as the author brings our attention towards the OT examples on which Psalm 95 is built. As we saw last time, there are two events in mind when the Psalm warns against a hard heart. One is the grumbling of the Israelites for water and the other is their refusal to enter the promised land because of the report of the ten spies. The author asks three questions which he answers with three more rhetorical questions. All of these are really one question and one answer asked in different ways.

Who was it? This is the question at hand. Who is it that Psalm 95 is talking about? Who are these people whom the Psalmist uses as negative examples, as warnings of what to avoid in life?

Verse 16 gives us a shocking and disturbing answer with the inclusion of one word: all. This was not a rebellious minority, this was not half the population, this was not simply the common rabble or the rotten apples among the people. It was all those who left Egypt led by Moses. At the beginning we imagined what it would have been like to have experienced all that they did, every miracle, every act of salvation, even walking through the Red Sea while the most powerful army in the world drowns behind you. They experienced God’s salvation to such a high degree, and yet they all fell away. They all sinned consistently and unrepentantly. They all disobeyed God at almost every chance they got. They all died in the wilderness. Numbers 14:22-23

Numbers 14:22–23 ESV

none of the men who have seen my glory and my signs that I did in Egypt and in the wilderness, and yet have put me to the test these ten times and have not obeyed my voice, shall see the land that I swore to give to their fathers. And none of those who despised me shall see it.

Numbers 14:29–30 ESV

your dead bodies shall fall in this wilderness, and of all your number, listed in the census from 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 the son of Jephunneh and Joshua the son of Nun.

These people saw God’s great works. They experienced his salvation. They heard his voice. They heard his promises, and yet their continued rebellion against God, the hardness of their own hearts, would lead them eventually to recieve another promise from God, the promise that they would never enter his rest.

Unable to Enter God’s Rest

As we get into chapter 4, we will look at what this rest is, exactly. We will see that rest doesn’t mean inactivity or ceasation of action, but rather peace and security. But in our text today, our text concludes by answer the question: why were God’s people who left Egypt unable to enter God’s rest? Here, the answer may be confusing, because in verses 17-18 the answer seems to be sin. But in verse 19, the answer that is given is unbelief. This may be confusing because, as Baptists and Protestants, we firmly believe that someone is saved by grace alone through faith alone and not a result of works. The only thing that can remove someone from salvation is unbelief and, while Christians may fall into sin, as long as they have faith they will be saved.

This text exposes what is often a simplistic view of faith and works and can place a bit of a false dichotomy. Faith and works are not the same thing, but they are intrinsicly related. While Paul in Galatians 3 and Romans 4-5 makes it clear that faith alone justifies us before God, James 2 also makes it clear that it is impossible to separate works from faith. Faith without works is a dead faith, and does not deserve to be called faith at all, but merely empty profession. It is a false advertizing of the soul.

In the case of the Israelies leaving Egypt, it is not that their sins were too much for God to forgive. Rather, their sin was consistent enough to show that their hearts were unwaveringly hard towards God. They grumbled because they didn’t trust in God’s provisions. They worshipped other gods just in case YHWH didn’t come through for them. They turned away from the promised land because of the report of giants which they thought they had no chance in defeating.

Conclusion