Hebrews 4:1-5 (HCSB)
Therefore, while the promise to enter His rest remains, let us fear that none of you should miss it. For we also have received the good news just as they did; but the message they heard did not benefit them, since they were not united with those who heard it in faith (for we who have believed enter the rest), in keeping with what He has said:
So I swore in My anger,
they will not enter My rest.
And yet His works have been finished since the foundation of the world, for somewhere He has spoken about the seventh day in this way:
And on the seventh day
God rested from all His works.
Again, in that passage He says, They will never enter My rest.
The writer of Hebrews keys in on the rest which God said that those who rebelled against him in the wilderness would never enter. This rest is a figure of the Promised Land as God planned it to be.
The land God promised would be a place which He blessed because of the obedience of His people who lived there, more like the Garden of Eden than the land of Israel in which the Jewish people ultimately lived. No hard toil would be needed to wrest crops from the hard ground, because God would make the land produce abundantly, and would keep the diseases and insects far away. But the Israelites, although they mostly conquered the Promised Land, never got to experience this great blessing, this great rest, because of their sin and compromise with the people and the idols in the land.
But those who enter God’s Kingdom through faith in Jesus can now enter the rest that was promised to God’s people. But this is not the Sabbath rest that God took at the end of creation, a rest of which the Sabbath day is a model. God’s rest today is a rest from striving after salvation and holiness through mere human effort. That striving is and will always be fruitless.
But for those who trust in Jesus for salvation and for a life of genuine holiness, that rest is real. No more striving, no more toil, no more trying to attain by human effort what God is willing to give freely to those who simply trust in Jesus.
Father, I can testify to the reality of this rest. Before I trusted in Jesus, I tried to be godly in my own strength and failed miserably. But in Him I have the peace with You and the upright and righteous life I wanted without striving. And in the process, YOU get all the glory, because it is not my righteousness at all. It is Your righteousness in me. A sweet rest indeed! Amen.