Hebrews 4:1-10

4 Therefore, since the promise of entering his rest still stands, let us be careful that none of you be found to have fallen short of it. 2 For we also have had the good news proclaimed to us, just as they did; but the message they heard was of no value to them, because they did not share the faith of those who obeyed.[a] 3 Now we who have believed enter that rest, just as God has said,

“So I declared on oath in my anger,

    ‘They shall never enter my rest.’”[b]

And yet his works have been finished since the creation of the world. 4 For somewhere he has spoken about the seventh day in these words: “On the seventh day God rested from all his works.”[c] 5 And again in the passage above he says, “They shall never enter my rest.”

6 Therefore since it still remains for some to enter that rest, and since those who formerly had the good news proclaimed to them did not go in because of their disobedience, 7 God again set a certain day, calling it “Today.” This he did when a long time later he spoke through David, as in the passage already quoted:

“Today, if you hear his voice,

    do not harden your hearts.”[d]

8 For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken later about another day. 9 There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God; 10 for anyone who enters God’s rest also rests from their works,[e] just as God did from his.

Dig Deeper

We have a big problem in our twenty-first century world.  We are steeped in technological advancement and luxurious opulence that is readily available to more people now than at any time in the world’s history.  We have more access to information and knowledge than anyone has ever had.  At any given moment, most of us are just seconds away from finding any bit of information we could ever imagine.  In fact, scientists have recently discovered a change in the way we think as humans in that most people (at least in the first world), when faced with a question, now think of where they could find the answer on the internet rather than thinking of what the answer might actually be.  Because of this ease of access to knowledge, we also have instant access to a seemingly infinite cornucopia of beliefs and philosophies.  But that’s where our big problem comes in.  The Western-dominated world has, in large part and parcel, accepted an understanding of the word “belief” that is exceedingly dangerous.  We have reduced the word to refer to something that someone understands and accepts.  That is it.  If you accept something as true then you “believe” it.  The problem is that this often creates a wide divide between what we accept and agree with and what we actually do.

That was not the way that the average person in the first century would have thought.  That’s certainly not the biblical understanding of concept such as “belief” and “faith.”  In their eyes “belief” was an action verb.  They went beyond even saying that your actions demonstrated your faith.  They would say that what you did was your faith.  If you committed adultery, for instance, then the ancients would not accept that you didn’t believe in adultery but had made a tragic mistake in action.  They would say that the problem was that you did in fact believe, at some level, that adultery was okay and that’s why you did it.

That understanding is at the heart of the stern warning that Hebrews continues to lay out for those who were following Christ as their Messiah.  At issue in this section is the topic of “belief.”  They must be careful that they believe properly because their beliefs were their actions.  He wanted them to make sure that they continued in their belief in Jesus Christ and did not abandon their faith in the life of Christ.

This issue of belief was vitally important because the stakes were high.  They were talking about nothing less than the promised rest for God’s people.  They weren’t living in some post-promise time that paled in comparison to the great promises and opportunities available to God’s people long ago during the days of Moses and Joshua.  God had made promises to his people back then, but the full thrust of those promises still lay wide open for them to enter into and keep hold of that.  That made the issue of their belief a matter of life and death.  Abandoning the Messiah and no longer being part of his family was a matter of belief.  They certainly had better not toy with the idea of leaving the Messiah’s people and returning to their former way of life all the while fooling themselves that they still believed in the truth of God and in the Messiah deep down somewhere in their hearts.

Before we go any further, however, we should take a moment to consider what Hebrews means by this idea of God’s rest.  He uses the term in three different ways in this passage, but all point to the larger truth of what he means by this term.  “Rest” refers first of all to the rest that God declared after his work of creation, an act that served as a pattern for humans to take periodic rests for their own good and to remember God and focus on his presence.  But he also uses “rest” to refer to the entrance into the promise land for the Joshua generation.  Their long journey in the wilderness would come to an end and they could enter into God’s rest.  But both of those things point in different ways to the ultimate rest that God wants for his people.  Hebrews will not fully elaborate on the meaning of this rest until chapters 11 and 12.  Simply put, the “rest” is that time when God’s people will fully be embraced in God’s eternal presence.  This is variously referred to as the resurrection age, the age to come, and eternal life, among others. The “rest” is the purpose of God’s creation.  God wants to be the king of his people and to spend eternity with them as they dwell in his presence.  This is the great promise for all of God’s people for all time and the act of walking away from God’s own Messiah, they were also walking away from God’s rest.

What seems like a gentle warning in verse one to be careful to not miss out on God’s rest is actually worded in a much stronger way in the Greek language.  Hebrews literally warns the readers to “be very afraid” of missing out on God’s promises and his will for his people.  It is a terrible thing to miss God’s rest and stumble back into the realm that will know only his wrath.  That was the problem with Moses’ generation.  They stopped believing.  In other words, they stopped living like God was truly their king and as a result, they found themselves subjected to his righteous judgment and anger rather than his peace and presence. 

One of the most interesting elements of this passage is that the author makes another of his comparisons between Jesus and an Old Testament character, but this one is both subtle and obscured and so is easily missed.  In the Hebrew language the name “Joshua” and the name “Jesus” are the identical name “Yeshua.”  “Joshua” is the English rendering of that name while “Jesus” is the Greek rendering which is then brought into the English giving them the appearance of being different names.  But with that in mind, the point becomes quite clear.  God had promised the Joshua generation the opportunity to enter into his rest, an opportunity that the Moses generation lost because of their disobedience and lack of faith.  But the author of Hebrews makes a point in verses 7 and 8 on which this entire passage rests.  The promised rest in Joshua’s day did indeed refer to the promised land but David, in writing Psalm 95, wrote to encourage the people of his day to not miss on out God’s rest as the Exodus generation did.  The logic, then, is as follows.  If God promised Israel that they would enter into his rest, then that rest had to be much more than just the immediate and partial fulfillment of entering into the promised land because David continued to urge the Israelites of his day to enter into God’s rest “today.”  They were already living in the promised land, so the promised land must only have been a small picture of God’s rest.  The Old Testament Yeshua could not bring people into God’s rest, but the New Testament Yeshua had done just that.

God’s rest, in its fullest sense, was something that Joshua’s generation was urged to look forward to and not harden their hearts towards.  It was also something that David’s generation was urged to strive for.  Well, if the promised rest was more than just God’s resting on the seventh day of creation and it was more than the Jews entering the promised land then it was a promise that was still out there, available and yet somehow not completely fulfilled.

Those in Christ have now entered into that rest, the life of the age to come, and yet still await it fully.  When God completed his creative acts in Genesis 1 and 2, we are told that he rested (many rabbis pointed out that the day 7 of God’s rest from his creative acts are the only day that is never described as having an evening and coming to end, indicating symbolically that God had completed that phase of creation and continued to rest from that aspect of his work).  The Jews of David’s day were urged to labor and look towards God’s promises of his ultimate rest because, even though they were in the promised land, they had yet to attain the true fulfillment of that promise.  But now, in Christ, that rest was available.  We can enter into God’s rest not based on labor or waiting patiently for the promise to come but by having faith.  In Christ we can begin to live out and anticipate what the full consummation of God’s rest and presence will be in the age to come.

But it all hinges on belief, on having faith.  Not our cultural definition of it, of course.  If all the writer of Hebrews cared was that the people agreed with him that Jesus was really great and that being a Christian was the ideal course of action, then walking away from the Christian community would not be the worst thing in the world.  The problem was not what they thought but what they did, because he knew that those were one in the same.  Entering into God’s rest means to live as though God is truly your king.  That’s what Hebrews was calling his readers to.  The matter is just as pressing for us.  As God’s people today, we must answer the call to enter into his rest “today.”  We must constantly work out what it means to live with God as our king every day and in every moment. 

Devotional Thought

Is God really the king of your life?  Is he the king of every area of your life or are there certain places and times when you lay down his kingship and do what you want.  The struggle is to truly recognize God’s sovereignty over our lives and actions at every moment of each day.