Hebrews 3:12-19 (HCSB)
Watch out, brothers and sisters, so that there won’t be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. But encourage each other daily, while it is still called today, so that none of you is hardened by sin’s deception. For we have become participants in Christ if we hold firmly until the end the reality that we had at the start. As it is said:
Today, if you hear his voice,
do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.,
For who heard and rebelled? Wasn’t it all who came out of Egypt under Moses? With whom was God angry for forty years? Wasn’t it with those who sinned, whose bodies fell in the wilderness? And to whom did he swear that they would not enter his rest, if not to those who disobeyed? So we see that they were unable to enter because of unbelief.
The writer of Hebrews continues to exhort the Jewish Christians to not turn away from the living God by falling into sin. And, again, he points back to the ancestors of the same Jewish Christians who had turned away from the God who had saved them during the Exodus, and so were lost.
Notice the conditions that are put on salvation by the writer: we participate in Christ IF we hold onto the reality of what we have believed until the end. So many of the Jewish Christians were being persuaded to rely on a “Jesus and” faith. Jesus and good works saves you. Jesus and adherence to the ceremonial law saves you. Jesus and synagogue attendance saves you.
But the writer understood that the gospel is solely about Jesus. Faith in Him and in Him alone is what saves. All the rest, good works, worship, and whatever other good things someone might engage in are fruit of that salvation. But they add nothing to the saving work of Jesus. And to think that they do merely denigrates the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus, saying basically that they are ineffective unless supplemented by man’s work.
The writer reminds his readers that those who were judged by God and who fell in the desert were not those who were “unsaved”, but those had been rescued by God from Egypt. They were those for whom He had provided manna and water each day, those whom He led by the cloud and the fire, and those whom He had promised the Land if they would only be faithful to Him.
But the people, though saved and thus heirs of the promise, rebelled against God’s commands and refused to have faith that He could deliver the Land to them, no matter the size and number of their foes. They turned away from God’s promise and determined that their old life was better. In fact, they were making plans to return to Egypt! But the rebellion doomed them. They were not allowed to return to their old lives in Egypt, and they were not allowed to enter the Promised Land. So, they ended up merely existing in the wilderness until they died.
Father, this is depressing to contemplate. But the writer of Hebrews obviously knew that it was possible to not rebel against You, to stay true to our faith in Jesus all the way to the end, so that we do not fail to enter into Your promised eternity. Lord, help us to not only stay true ourselves, but, as the writer instructs us, to also encourage one another to stay true as well, so that together we may enter Your kingdom, and ultimately Your rest. Amen.