10 Finishing Well

Hebrews 3:7-19

In the long history of this earth, no migration of any people began so well, and with such great expectations, as Israel's Exodus from Egypt. At midnight on that unforgettable night, as all Israel was snug and secure in their homes, with the pleasing aroma of roast lamb hanging protectively over them, the destroyer struck down all the firstborn of Egypt, both man and beast, and a mournful wail rose from every Egyptian house (Exodus 12:29-30). It was the end of 430 years of bondage.

Stubborn Pharaoh summoned Moses, commanded Israel to leave, and even asked for a blessing (Exodus 12:31-32). So as dawn broke, 600,000 men on foot, plus women and children (about 1,500,000 souls), and all their livestock began an orderly exodus by tribal divisions (Exodus 12:37, 41, 51). It was a proud departure, with each tribe headed by its leaders. Ephraim was particularly noticeable as it triumphantly bore the catafalque containing Joseph's bones, fulfilling his dying wish to have his bones carried back to Palestine (Exodus 13:19; cf. Genesis 50:25-26). Israel left unexpectedly rich as well, as the Egyptians, glad to see them go, "gave them what they asked for; so they plundered the Egyptians" (Exodus 12:36).

And then the most stupendous thing happened as they entered the wilderness — an immense pillar of cloud formed in the sky before them to lead the way. At sunset it became a pillar of fire, so that every night Israel was lighted by its swirling orange glow (Exodus 13:20-22). What a spectacle that must have been against the backdrop of the star-studded desert sky.

Then, of course, there was the ill-fated pursuit by Pharaoh that trapped Israel against the sea. But the pillar protectively moved behind Israel, shielding the people from the Egyptian armies, providing light to the Israelites and darkness to the Egyptians (Exodus 14:19-20). Moses stretched forth his hand, and an east wind began to howl, driving a dry path through the sea for the people of Israel as they followed the pillar to safety (Exodus 14:21-22). Pharaoh's army followed and would have caught them, but God made their chariots swerve out of control. The armies realized too late that God was fighting for Israel, and as they turned to flee at daybreak, Moses again stretched forth his hand and the sea engulfed the armies of Pharaoh (Exodus 14:23-31).

God was with them! The Song of Moses soon rose to the heavens, Aaron's sister Miriam took her tambourine in hand, and all the women followed her with tambourines and dancing:

Wild exaltation gripped the people. What a fabulous beginning! What hopes! What dreams! Soon they would be in the Promised Land, bury Joseph's bones, and there forever enter their rest.

It all began so well — but ended so poorly. Of the 600,000 men (the million-plus Israelites who began so well), only two over the age of twenty ever got to the Promised Land — and that was forty years later. The rest fell, disappointed corpses in the desert. The grand and terrible lesson of Israel's history is that it is possible to begin well and end poorly. In fact, this tragic human tendency dominates much human spiritual experience.

It is this concern that haunts the writer of the book of Hebrews, as we have repeatedly seen. His fear is that the doleful fate of the generation of the Exodus will be repeated in the experience of the Jewish Christians in their storm-tossed little church. He undoubtedly personally knew this little flock. Many of their spiritual exoduses had been beautiful, even dramatic. But now that they were undergoing hardship, would they finish well? Not if they made the same errors as the Israelites did when troubles came.

A SPIRITUAL WARNING AGAINST UNBELIEF

To set forth his concern, the writer did what preachers often do — he appropriated a passage of Scripture that eloquently framed his thoughts — Psalm 95:7-11. Every Jew knew this passage by heart because its opening line served as a call to worship every Sabbath evening in the synagogue with these words: "Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts" (Hebrews 3:7-8; quoting Psalm 95:7-8). These solemn words were intoned week after week, year after year, as a call to carefully listen to the voice of God. Hebrew ears perked up at their sound.

As the writer uses Psalm 95, he is convinced that the warning of the opening line and the extended warning it introduces comes directly from the Holy Spirit to his hearers, and thus he introduces it in verse 7 by saying, "So, as the Holy Spirit says . . ." He understood that originally the Holy Spirit had warned the Psalmist's hearers with these words, and as he uses it 1,000 years later, it is still the Holy Spirit speaking. And for us today, 2,000 years after the use of it in Hebrews, it remains the Holy Spirit's message. There is a timeless urgency to the message. We must listen to the Holy Spirit's message today, for it is God's message for the church in this troubled age. May we listen with all we have!

Psalm 95 Regarding Hardening

As we have indicated, the Psalm begins with an explicit warning against hardening:

Two key words in these verses help us understand what it means to harden one's heart. They are the words "rebellion" and "testing" in verse 8. The renderings here come from the Greek Septuagint, but the original Hebrew behind the word "rebellion" is meribah, and behind "testing" is massah. Check Psalm 95:7-8, as it is rendered in your Old Testament, and you will read: "Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as you did at Meribah, as you did that day at Massah in the desert."

These words point us directly to Exodus 17, where early in their wilderness experience Israel was camped at Rephidim by Mount Sinai and ran out of water and began to quarrel with Moses. There, "Moses replied, 'Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you put the Lord to the test?'" (Hebrews 3:2). And then, following God's direction, he struck the rock, and it gave water to Israel. The account concludes with this postscript: "And he called the place Massah [i.e., testing] and Meribah [i.e., quarreling] because the Israelites quarreled and because they tested the Lord saying, 'Is the Lord among us or not?'" (Hebrews 3:7, italics added). Significantly, the word Meribah is used in one other place, and that is forty years later at Kadesh when Israel is again out of water and threatening rebellion, and Moses tragically strikes the rock twice (Numbers 20:1-13, esp. Hebrews 3:13). The point is, the mention of these words at the beginning and end of the wilderness sojourn is meant to tell us that this conduct was repeated many times during that whole period of wandering.

What we deduce from these accounts in Exodus 17 and Numbers 20 is that the hardening that took place in the wilderness was rooted in unbelief. Many of those, perhaps most, who left in the Exodus had an inadequate faith in God. At first, due to their miserable plight of 430 years of slavery, the brilliant leadership of Moses, the repeated miraculous plagues on Pharaoh, and the grand miracles of the pillars of cloud and fire and the parting of the sea, they were ready to follow God anywhere. But as soon as the initial glow wore off, they outrageously cried, "Is the Lord among us or not?" (Exodus 17:7). It was a fair-weather, herd-instinct faith — good until the first trial, when it dissolved in unbelief.

The depth of their defective belief produced one other subsidiary characteristic — contempt/irreverence. Hence all the railing against God and his faithful servants. Thus we understand that the pathology of a hard heart originates in unbelief that spawns a hardened contempt and, as we shall see, a hardness that works out in sinful disobedience.

For the Psalmist who wrote Psalm 95, the apex of this hard-heartedness came in the events recorded in Numbers 13-14: Israel's catastrophic unbelief at the border of the Promised Land, Kadesh-Barnea, when the twelve spies returned from their forty-day mission with conflicting recommendations.

The only thing they could agree on was that the land was rich in grapes and pomegranates and figs — truly flowing with milk and honey (Numbers 13:23-24, 27). The majority (ten out of twelve) said the land was untakable — "The land we explored devours those living in it. All the people we saw there are of great size. We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them" (Numbers 13:32-33). That night, unbelief was rampant in Israel. All the people wept. Speaker after speaker called for deposing their leaders and returning to Egypt (Numbers 14:1-4). Everyone talked about stoning Joshua and Caleb, who dared to believe God would give them the land (Numbers 14:10).

But then God answered: "Then the glory of the Lord appeared at the Tent of Meeting to all the Israelites. The Lord said to Moses, 'How long will these people treat me with contempt? How long will they refuse to believe in me, in spite of all the miraculous signs I have performed among them?'" (Numbers 14:10b-11, italics added). Again God has indicted the hard hearts of Israel. They were unbelieving, refusing to believe. What an astounding phenomenon! They had the mutually attested miracles of the Passover and the Exodus. No one could dispute the reality of those amazing supernatural events. They also still had the daily provision of the cloud by day and the fire by night. They had been regularly fed with manna and quail from Heaven — but they refused to believe God for the land. The unbelief of God's people is even more amazing than belief!

This unbelief amounted to a contempt for God and spawned an ugly family of behavioral step-children. There was negativism — the "grasshopper complexes" — people like Robert Fulton's detractors. When Fulton tested his steamboat, people actually stood on the shore and chanted, "It will never start, never start, never start." Then, when it started and began to move, they changed the chant to, "It will never stop, never stop, never stop." Faithlessness makes small mountains unclimbable and miniature seas uncrossable!

Negativism, of course, has a congenital sister in grumbling. The account of Israel's failure at Kadesh mentions grumbling no less than four times (Numbers 14:2-27, 29, 36). Grousing, grumbling, grimacing come naturally to a fading faith. And, of course, this spawns quarreling, the daily menu at Meribah and Massah and in between. Finally, faithless children disobey, just as they did in trying to do it their own way at Kadesh-Barnea (Numbers 14:41-45).

So we are not left in the dark regarding the hard-heartedness that the Psalmist warns against. In fact, the Scriptural description of it is mercifully clear because it even presents us with telltale behavioral signs of hard-heartedness. Hardness of heart originates in unbelief, which produces contempt for God, which in turn shows itself in distinct behavioral patterns — namely, negativism, grumbling, quarreling and disobedience.

We owe it to ourselves to hold this practical mirror of God's Word up to our hearts, so we can take an accurate reading of our spiritual pulse. What does our behavior indicate? A hardening, unbelieving heart? Or the blessed tenderness of a faithful heart?

Psalm 95 Regarding Judgment

What was the result of Israel's hardness of heart according to Psalm 95? Withering judgment. Israel was debarred from the Promised Land, the place of God's rest. God said:

God forgave his faithless people, but the judgment remained:

The Lord replied, "I have forgiven them, as you asked. Nevertheless, as surely as I live and as surely as the glory of the Lord fills the whole earth, not one of the men who saw my glory and the miraculous signs I performed in Egypt and in the desert but who disobeyed me and tested me ten times — not one of them will ever see the land I promised on oath to their forefathers. No one who has treated me with contempt will ever see it." (Numbers 14:20-23)

No one who was over twenty at the Exodus entered the land, except for Joshua and Caleb (Numbers 14:29-30). The rest filled a million sandy graves during the next thirty-eight years.

While God gave a general pardon to Israel for the faithless display at Kadesh, with only two exceptions they all died in the wilderness. The point the writer of Hebrews wants his readers to see is that it is possible to have a remarkable spiritual "exodus" and yet fall by the way when trouble comes. This was the Holy Spirit's message to the beleaguered little church from Psalm 95, and it is his message to us.

If we have been Christians for any length of time, we have seen this lived out. During my years as a youth pastor, I had a spectacular "convert" in my group — a classic hippie who turned overnight into a classic "Jesus person." He was intelligent, winsome, handsome and spiritual. Just a few weeks after this "exodus," he would stand regularly to give testimony, entrancing all who heard. He even reproached the lukewarm. I was so proud!

But it all came down in one unforgettable week when a relationship he was pursuing fell through and he hurt himself in a church softball game. The result? Rejection of Christ — and a lawsuit against the church!

Jesus said of such, "What was sown on rocky places is the man who hears the word and at once receives it with joy. But since he has no root, he lasts only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, he quickly falls away" (Matthew 13:20-21). The problem today is that so many people when asked about faith point to their "exodus" — when they began with Christ. They can wax eloquent about their experience. How dare anyone question that! They "went forward" — they left Egypt — they were baptized and identified with God's people — they visibly drank from the same rock (Christ) — they use the same redemptive vocabulary with the same pious inflections. But troubles came, and they turned away. Their "exodus" is a convenient memory. But to trust God now? That is a problem, for their faith is dead.

A PERSONAL WARNING AGAINST UNBELIEF

The writer, having raised everyone's tension with the warning from Psalm 95, now proceeds to give personal exhortations meant to allay disbelief. The opening and closing verses of this section, verses 12 and 19, mention that subject.

Protect Your Heart

"See to it, brothers," says the writer, "that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God" (Hebrews 3:12). "Turns away" means to willfully apostatize.

Such turning away incurs a huge penalty. Because Christ is greater than Moses, the loss incurred in rejecting Christ is greater than the loss in rejecting Moses. The rebels in Moses' day missed the promised blessing of entry into earthly Canaan, but rebellion against Christ forfeits the even greater blessings of eternal life. To turn away from "the living God" is a huge mistake, for as Hebrews later warns, "It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God" (Hebrews 10:31). The author of Hebrews does not think this is a remote possibility for his suffering little church, but a real and present peril. If we are wise, we will share the same regard for our souls.

Help Each Other

Having given solemn warning, the author now promotes encouragement: "But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called Today, so that none of you may be hardened by sin's deceitfulness" (Hebrews 3:13). Think how different it might have been for Israel if they had daily encouraged one another instead of falling to negativism and grumbling and quarreling. Isolation, and particularly isolation from the mutual encouragement of the body, is a dangerous thing. In isolation we are "prone to be impressed by the specious arguments which underline worldly wisdom." When you are alone and unaccountable, it is tempting to take the easy course instead of the right one.

We are to encourage each other daily, not just on the first day of the week. We need to humbly say to the drifting, "Today, brother, today, sister, listen to his voice, so that you may not be hardened by sin's deceitfulness, making tomorrow's repentance and faith more difficult."

Persevere

Says the author, "We have come to share in Christ if we hold firmly till the end the confidence we had at first" (Hebrews 3:14). Our translation — "the confidence we had at first" — is excellent, as are several others: "the beginning of our confidence" (KJV), "our original confidence" (NEB), "the trust with which we began" (Phillips). The Israelites had no lack of confidence just after the Exodus, but it faded quickly a few days into the wilderness.

New converts typically have few doubts. But years of living and learning often soften their confidence. I have heard Christians say, "I wish I didn't know so much, it would be easier to believe" as they indulge in an elite, self-congratulating agnosticism. To be sure, all Christians go through times of doubt as their faith grows. A faith that never doubts is perhaps not real, because real faith involves the fallible mind. But for Biblically literate "Christians," with some years of living under their belts, to mouth such consciously self-exculpating phrases for their unbelief is so much bunk! We had no doubts when we met Christ, and we should not have any now. Moreover, we must consciously strive to "hold firmly till the end the confidence we had at first."

I am a convinced Calvinist. I believe true Christians persevere — "the perseverance of the Saints." And I believe what the Scriptures say here: "We have come to share in Christ [perfect tense: our belief began in the past and continues] if we hold firmly till the end the confidence we had at first." If we do not persevere, we are lost, just as the Apostle John has so clearly explained: "They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us" (1 John 2:19).

Even a slight lessening of confidence is a warning. We must "hold firmly till the end the confidence we had at first." Perseverance is not a foregone conclusion. So the author of Hebrews next warns us, again repeating the words of Psalm 95:7-8, "'Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as you did in the rebellion'" (Hebrews 3:15). Brothers and sisters, if we hear his voice, we must do something now!

Six Questions

The writer closes this penetrating section of the text with six questions given in three pairs. The first question of each pair asks the question; the second question answers it. The questions are definitely phrased to raise soul-searching tensions among his hearers in the struggling church.

First set, verse 16: Question: "Who were they who heard and rebelled?" Answering question: "Were they not all those Moses led out of Egypt?" Point: Everyone who died in the desert had begun in the glorious Exodus and its great expectations.

Second set, verse 17: Question: "And with whom was he angry for forty years?" Answering question: "Was it not with those who sinned, whose bodies fell in the desert?" Point: The men who angered God for forty years were those who did not believe he could provide for them, though they had left Egypt with great hope. This is a warning that high hopes will not suffice — there must be belief.

Third set, verse 18: Question: "And to whom did God swear that they would never enter his rest?" Answering question: Was it not "to those who disobeyed?" Point: Here unbelief leads to action, as it always does.

The three sets of questions present the descent of hardness of heart: from hope — to disbelief — to disobedience. Thus, the writer concludes: "So we see that they were not able to enter, because of their unbelief" (Hebrews 3:19).

Have we experienced a spiritual exodus in Christ?

Do we claim Christ as our true passover — our lamb without blemish and without spot who gave his life for us?

Do we claim a baptism in Christ, the antitype of Israel's passage through the Red Sea (1 Cor. 10:1ff.)?

Do we claim to spiritually feed on him by faith, as Israel was fed by manna from Heaven and water from the rock (1 Cor. 10:3ff.)?

Do we claim to look for a heavenly rest, the ultimate spiritual counterpart of the Promised Land?

If so, we will persevere in faith and obedience — holding "firmly till the end the confidence we had at first."

For I do not want you to be ignorant of the fact, brothers, that our forefathers were all under the cloud and that they all passed through the sea. They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. They all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ. Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them; their bodies were scattered over the desert. Now these things occurred as examples, to keep us from setting our hearts on evil things as they did. (1 Cor. 10:1-6)

—Preaching the Word