Introduction

We are in Hebrews chapter 3, verses 7-12 this morning if you want to go ahead and get there.  Remember back in week one of our walk through Hebrews we talked about the reality that God spoke. “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke.” We understand that God the father spoke to and through various prophets, including Moses, to give his words, his laws, his promises to his people.  We also saw that God the son, Jesus Christ, spoke.  Christ spoke as both a prophet and God himself, as man, and as our saviour.  He spoke and gave us a new covenant, one of everlasting grace and he certainly also spoke loudly in his actions, specifically his submission unto the cross.  

This morning, we are faced with two specific commands and a warning. The commands are this: Do not harden your hearts, and take care.  The warning is that a hard heart is a sign of unbelief and an unbelieving heart will lead you to fall away from the living God. In giving us these commands and a warning the author completes the trinity speaking by telling us that the “Holy Spirit says.” What we have before us this morning are not words, commands, and calls from the distant past.  We are not combing the text to figure out what God said, no, we are tuning our ears and opening our hearts to hear God, in all his triune fullness, speak to us.  

 13 And we also thank God constantly for this, that when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers. 1 Thes. 2:13

I am doing something dangerously wrong if you are ever excited on a Sunday morning to come hear me speak because I assure you I have nothing worth listening to.  We have a promise much greater and of far more value and that is that when you come to the house of the Lord, you come to hear from him. You come to have his living and active word pierce through joints and marrow down to the very depths of your soul.  I pray that our God moves me out the way so that the power of his word accomplishes his purpose.  

We need to take care this morning.  We need to hear his encouragement and warnings as urgently and as powerfully as they were given directly to those who received this letter.  “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.” May it please the Lord to speak clearly to us today. Stand with me as we read Chapter 3, starting in verse 7. 

 7 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. 10  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.’ ” 12 Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. 

The Spirit Speaks

I want to first establish the authority and the urgency of this message.  As I have already alluded, our passage begins with the statement, “as the Holy Spirit says.” We have already seen this now in Hebrews where the author attributed Old Testament passages to the voice of Christ as though when David penned Psalm 22, for instance, we don’t hear a song of David, we hear the voice of Christ, the real singer of the Psalms.  When the author of Hebrews quotes Psalm 95 this morning he doesn’t say, “as the Psalmist said” but rather brings it forward to the present tense and attributes the words not to the Psalmist but to the Spirit of God.  Take care not to miss what is happening here.  

If the writer of Hebrews can pull forward a Psalm written a thousand years previous and say this is not something that was said but this is something that the spirit of God is saying, do we assume that the same spirit is not still speaking the same words for you today? These are not the author of Hebrews words nor are they my words this morning.  Not in some strange new age, revelatory, prophetic kind of way, don’t hear me say that, but never-the-less when you open your bible to read or come to service to hear the word expounded you are hearing God speak to you.  So please hear the authority in the text. Again, do not come on Sunday hoping that I have put something together throughout the week that is profound because I promise I haven’t and it isn’t but what is profound is that you can arrive in hopeful expectation of being pierced by the very word of God.  When you read, during the week humble yourself not before words on a page, but in the presence of the voice of God.  

There is also an urgency this morning.  “Today” if you hear his voice.  That is to say that the authority of God is speaking to you today.  Not tomorrow, not next week, not when you get that Job you were hoping for, not when you retire and have a little more time to study, not when you clean your life up a bit, today he is speaking.  

Working together with him, then, we appeal to you not to receive the grace of God in vain. 2 For he says,  “In a favorable time I listened to you, and in a day of salvation I have helped you.” 

Behold, now is the favorable time; behold, now is the day of salvation. 2 Corinthians 6: 1-2

The voice of God is speaking to you this morning, the Father, Son and Spirit are together speaking.  Today is the day of salvation, today is the day of forgiveness, today is the day of restoration, today is the day of sanctification, today is the day of forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, today is the day to press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Today is the day. There is authority here, there is urgency here.  

Do Not Harden

So what then is the message that is both urgent and authoritative? First, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.  The people of God spent 400 years enslaved in Egypt.  Forced into hard labor with little reward and little hope.  The grace of God sent Moses to deliver them from their bondage and that same grace spared them from the death angel through the sprinkling of blood.  That same grace parted the Red Rea so they could escape.  His grace led them with a pillar of fire and smoke, he sent bread down from heaven to feed them and water from a rock to quench their thirst.  All these things our God did for them in his grace, but how did they respond when their expectations were not met? 

2 And the whole congregation of the people of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness, 3 and the people of Israel said to them, “Would that we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the meat pots and ate bread to the full, for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.” 

I say again, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.  As a few of us discussed on Monday night, consider John the baptist who came before Christ preaching “repent, the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” And when he looks upon Christ proclaims, “Behold, the lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” Not too long after, John found himself in prison for preaching this good news and telling the truth.  It is quite evident that John’s circumstances did not align with his expectations and when he heard about all the things Jesus was doing while he sat in prison he sent word to him with this message, “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?”  Today if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.  

We look at such examples and say, “what fools these people were” but I say if you were not prone to and guilty of the same error the spirit would have no need to say to you today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion. Because he does say that to us today, it tells us that you and I are just as quick to turn against God.  Over and over again our gracious God has provided for you.  He has guided your steps and given you great joy.  He has been with you and comforted you through your dark days.  He has sustained you when you weren’t sure you had an ounce of strength left.  He has kept you in him despite you wandering.  He has preserved your life in spite of all your irrational behavior.  He has blessed you, cared for you, and kept you. 

Let it not be said of you, “they always go astray in their heart, they have not known my ways.” May it never be that words of God apply to you, “How long will this people despise me?” “And how long will they not believe in me, in spite of all the signs that I have done among them?”  Trials come, difficulty in exile is inevitable but this must never be the cause of a hardened heart in us.  A.W. Pink says this, 

Testings reveal the state of our hearts—a crisis neither makes nor mars a man, but it does manifest him. While all is smooth sailing we appear to be getting along nicely. But are we? Are our minds stayed upon the Lord, or are we, instead, complacently resting in His temporal mercies? When the storm breaks, it is not so much that we fail under it, as that our habitual lack of leaning upon God, of daily walking in dependency upon Him, is made evident.

I contend that Pink hits on the root cause of this hardening.  We harden because we have exchanged dependency upon God for dependency upon ourselves.  Our hearts are hardened in trials because the trials reveal that we haven’t been depending on God in the first place.  More specifically we have been resting in the temporal mercy of God as opposed to resting in God himself.   We cling to his gracious gifts as opposed to the gracious giver of the gifts.   

You may say, “ok I get it but what does it look like to depend on God? I want to show you the positive application of this.  Jonathan Edwards experienced a very untimely death as the result of a smallpox inoculation gone wrong and 2 weeks after his death Sarah Edwards, Jonathan’s wife, wrote the following letter to their daughter.  

My very dear child, 

What shall I say? A holy and good God has covered us with a dark cloud. O that we may kiss the rod, and lay our hands on our mouths! The Lord has done it.  He has made me adore his goodness, that we had him so long, but my God lives; and he has my heart.  O what a legacy my husband, and your father, has left us.  We are all given to God; and there I am, and love to be. 

But that all of us could have half so much dependence on God surely we could persevere in trials.  This surely doesn’t mean that we don’t grieve over loss or that the call is to live in a mechanical or robotic way.  But it does mean that through seeking God in his word and prayer we can become so thankful to him for his mercies, so dependent upon him for his grace that any and all circumstances become greater and greater means by which we may love and give ourselves to him.  Again, the spirit says, “today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.”  

Take Care

The second command from our text is to, “take care.” Take care of what, is the question? Take care that our hearts are not unbelieving.  With the previous references of the Israelists in their rebellion and John the Baptist as context we see that grumbling and complaining are the clearest indicators of a heart that is stricken with unbelief.  Doug Wilson says, “Complaint is the flag of ingratitude, and it waves above the center of unbelieving hearts.”  Romans 1: 21, “For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him.” In a word they were ungrateful.  The root of ingratitude is unbelief. 

God says of Israel, “They always go astray in their heart; they have not known my ways.” How is it possible that after all that God did for Israel they still did not know his ways? How is it possible that the religious men of Jesus’s time, who were supposed to be watching and waiting for the Messiah, could look God incarnate in the face and not see him? They didn’t believe.  They were so hardened in their own self-righteousness, so caught up in their own self-dependency, so stubborn to have their life and their God meet their own expectations that when God sends bread down from heaven the response is, “what, no meat.” When the very one who formed them in their mothers womb stands in their presence they say, “crucify him.” Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart.

The heart of the issue is a failure to know, believe and trust in our God.  Jesus in his high priestly prayer, prays this, “This is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” The high calling and command then is very simple in statement but impossible without God.  Know the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.  So often what happens is that we tether our belief and trust in God to material blessings.  The reality is that because our God is so good and so gracious he pours out his blessings lavishly upon even those who hate him.  He sends rain on both the just and the unjust, he causes the sun to rise on the good and the evil so blessings can’t be the measure of a believing heart.  If it is, you will only believe so long as the blessings continue and when they slow or cease the unbelieving heart is exposed and you fall away from the living God.  If you think that is not true, read your bible.  Salvation, that is true and sustaining belief has nothing to do with knowing blessings and everything to do with knowing God, the one who blesses.  

That’s not even a subtle distincting it’s a clear and massive one.  So the commands to not harden our hearts and take care lest you have an evil, unbelieving heart come with them the warnings that if one doesn’t heed those commands there is no rest for them and they risk falling away from the living God.  Let me make it personal.  If you do not heed those commands there is no rest for you and you risk falling away from the living God.  

Conclusion

I am pouring a lot of guilt on you this morning aren’t I?  That’s ok, hang with me because it’s getting good now.  Consider the temptations of Christ, there were three of them.  He was tempted with food when he was hungry, with bread, and rather than grumble and complain over his hunger he declared, “man shall not live on bread alone but on every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” Where Israel failed to depend on God, Christ succeeded.  He was tempted to test or try God and replied, “you shall not put the Lord your God to the test.” Where Israel failed to obey God, Christ succeeded.  He was tempted to turn from God and worship another and said, “you shall worship the Lord you God and him only you shall serve.”  Where Israel hardened and rebelled, Christ worshiped and served.  

Where Israel wandered through the desert with evil, hardened, and unbelieving hearts, Christ went through the wilderness in trust and obedience, perfect trust and perfect obedience.  Make no mistake, Israel’s temptation is a hard and stark warning against failure and their story should give us pause, and cause us to think and evaluate.  Their failure should shake you to ask, “Am I grumbling against God?” “Have I forsaken my dependence upon him in favor of some temporal mercy?” “Have I turned to worship another?” 

Don’t miss though that Christ’s temptation, which was a near copy of Israel’s, is a declaration of success.  The glorious good news of the gospel is that despite the fact you have and are going to grumble and complain, you are going to try and test our God, you are going to exchange his glory for another, Christ has stood in your place to do that which you could not do and give you a righteousness you could never earn.  

By that amazing grace, he has now given us the power to walk, that is to believe, to depend, and to obey, according to this righteousness that he has so graciously given.  We can confess this morning with Paul, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”  You must not harden your hearts and you will not harden your hearts.  You must not have an evil, unbelieving heart and you will not have an evil, unbelieving heart because it is no longer you who live but Chirst who lives in you.  

The remedy and the defense then is trust in Christ.  Trust Through trial, trust Through success.  Trust against self-righteousness or unmet expectations.  Trust in all things, at all times.  Trust that we will make it through this exile, that he will provide for us and care for us if we would only trust in his provision, our Lord and saviour Jesus Christ.  

So I ask you today, what have you trusted and have been trusting? Are you listening to the authoritative and urgent message from your God? Today is a favorable time, Today is the day of salvation.  Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.  Take care, dear brothers and sisters, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart.  Instead, Oh come let us sing to the Lord, let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation.  Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving, let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise.  For he is our God, and we are the sheep of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand.  

Oh come let us adore him, Christ the Lord. Amen. 

Bibliography

Phillips, Richard D. 2006. Hebrews. Edited by Richard D. Phillips, Philip Graham Ryken, and Daniel M. Doriani. Reformed Expository Commentary. Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing.

The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016)