Please note that this article is derived from a sermon series on Hebrews given in Bermondsey Gospel Hall, the audio of which can be found here.
Last week we began our journey Back to the Future. Like Marty McFly in the iconic 1985 film, we said that in Hebrews 3:7-4:10 the author travels back to the past and so impacts the present and influences the future. Last week we were in the past. In Hebrews 3:7-11 the author quotes the second half of Psalm 95, which describes what happened in the books of Exodus and Numbers. We retraced the steps of Israel’s journey in the wilderness as they travelled from Egypt to the Promised Land. There we seen that although the people heard God’s voice, they did not respond to it as they ought. Delivered from Egypt, brought safely through the Red Sea and guided to the foot of Mount Sinai, the nation of Israel seen the works of God like no other nation before them. And yet they had barely left the shadow of that great mountain, that place where they heard the voice of God, when they had already returned to their old ways. Grumbling and complaining about their physical needs. Murmuring and plotting against God’s faithful servant Moses. When offered the chance to go into the Promised Land, trusting God to overcome the enemies within it, they refused to enter. They disobeyed God’s command because they feared their enemies. Rather than make plans to enter, they start to prepare for a journey back to Egypt. They heard the voice of God, seen the works of his hands, and yet their response was one of rebellion. This rebellion meant that they forfeited God’s rest and remained under his wrath. They were destined to die in the wilderness, that generation would never enter into the land which they had refused to trust God for.
Last week we went back to the past, this week we return to the present. Last week was a Voice from the Past, this week is a Warning for the Present. In Back to the Future, Marty Mcfly’s journey to the past in the Doc’s DeLorean time machine ends up impacting his present. The author of Hebrews hopes our revisiting of Psalm 95 will have a similar effect. He wants us not only to remember the rebellion of Israel then, but react to it now. Paul takes the same approach in 1 Corinthians 10:6, when writing about Israel’s rebellion in the wilderness, he explains, ‘Now these things took place as examples for us, that we might not desire evil as they did.’ Next week we will of course complete our Back to the Future journey by seeing how the author not only wants to impact our present but influence our future, in 4:1-10 he continues to dwell on this quotation from Psalm 95 and draws from it A Promise for the Future.
However, here in 3:12-19 we are given a Warning for the Present. If you consider Hebrews 3:12-19 you will see an argument unfold. It starts with two exhortations: Take care of falling away (3:12) but exhort one another every day (3:13). The author then provides an explanation for these: for we must hold firm to the end (3:14). And in order to reinforce this explanation, he turns to an example: he requotes from Psalm 95 (3:15) and then asks three questions to draw out the lessons from it (3:16-18) before summarising the main lesson in his ending (3:19): they were unable to enter because of unbelief. Arising from this structure, I want us to grasp three key points: the Root of Rebellion (3:12), the Remedy for Rebellion (3:13) and the Result of Rebellion (3:14-19).
1. ROOT OF REBELLION - Your disobedience is derived from your disbelief
The global outbreak of a new strain of the coronavirus, COVID-19, has of course dominated our news programmes and newspapers since news broke around the New Year. This week, here in London, we had our first reported case and given the international nature of where we live, I think we all suspect that it will not be our last. Only time will tell as it can take up to 14 days (although more usually 5-6) for symptoms to develop once somebody has been infected. What appears to have made this new strain of coronavirus so difficult to contain, is that the WHO believes that it may be possible that during the period between somebody being infected and showing symptoms of infection, they are able to pass the virus on to others. Even before symptoms like a runny nose, sore throat, cough or fever develop, the virus can move from one individual to another. Furthermore, given that these symptoms are relatively common at this time of year, as the usual number of flus and colds circulate, it is feared that many might put off seeking medical help until they are seriously unwell. If these symptoms develop, we are being told that we mustn’t just assume that they are part of a regular flu, but consider the issue further. If we have been to China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korean, Singapore or Malaysia in the last 14 days, we must isolate ourselves and inform the NHS helpline. Given the danger, we must look beyond the symptoms and consider what the source might be.
When the author returns from the past, this is exactly what he does as well. Having identified the symptoms of Israel’s rebellion, he seeks to identify the source. He traces the chain of consequences back to the cause so that he might caution us about it. ‘Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God.’ The author identifies the condition of the heart as the source and the cause of Israel’s rebellion. This is of course picking up and continuing the diagnosis of David in Psalm 95. David warned his hearers about their hearts, not their hands. ‘Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts…They always go astray in their heart.’ The central problem with the people of Israel wasn’t that their feet strayed, but their hearts strayed. This diagnosis of David, relating to specific sin of Israel, is supported by Jesus’ diagnosis of all sin: ‘For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness.’ (Mark 7:21–22) The source of sin, the root of our rebellion is located in our hearts.
What is it about our hearts? What is the problem with them? If a doctor tells us that we have a heart problem, we are unlikely to rest until he explains to us what that problem is. Knowing the location of an illness is not enough, we want a diagnosis that identifies the disease. The author is a diligent doctor in that regard, for he not only warns us of the location that is in danger, but the disease we must avoid. ‘Take care, brother, lest there be in you an evil, unbelieving heart…’ (3:12). Evil unbelief is undoubtedly the danger the author is seeking to warn us about. It is highlighted again at the end of our passage. In 3:16-18 the author tells us how those people rebelled (3:16), sinned (3:17) and were disobedient (3:18). And yet, when concluding with the reason why they were unable to enter into the rest of God, why they remained under his wrath, he doesn’t say it was their disobedience, their sin, or their rebellion. In 3:19 he says. ‘they were unable to enter because of unbelief’ (3:19). Unbelief is the disease that laid waste to Israel in the wilderness and threatens us all today.
The disease was not disobedience, that was just a symptom. It was the evil, unbelieving hearts of the Israelites that stopped them, those hearts that refused to trust the promises that God’s voice had spoken. Psalm 106:24 tells us, ‘they despised the pleasant land, having no faith in his promise. They murmured in their tents, and did not obey the voice of the LORD.’ Or Psalm 78:21-22, ‘his anger rose against Israel, because they did not believe in God and did not trust his saving power.’ At the heart of disobedience is disbelief of the heart. Behind their behaviour lay their beliefs. They failed to obey God, because they failed to trust him.
If you are not a Christian this morning, you have not yet confessed your need of him as a result of your sins and trusted in Christ for salvation, do you see that the message of the gospel is not about behaving. The gospel doesn’t just call you to try a live a better life, form better habits, do some good works, swear, drink or party less. The gospel is not a message about behaving, it is about belief. Behaviour isn’t your main problem. That is just a symptom of your disease. The diagnosis the Bible provides is that your disobedience is derived from your disbelief. The root of your rebellion, the core of your problem is not how you behave with your hands, but what you believe in your heart. You don’t deal with the disease if you improve your behaviour, you need address the belief of your heart. If beliefs of your heart change, the behaviour of your hands will follow. No wonder Solomon warns, ‘Keep your hearts with all vigilance, for from it flow the streams of life.’ (Proverbs 4:23) Or in the words of the author of Hebrews, ‘Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart…’ (3:12). Your disobedience is derived from your disbelief.
2. REMEDY FOR REBELLION – Together we defeat deceit with the truth
If that is the root, what is the remedy? If we have diagnosed our problem as an unbelieving heart, what treatment is available for us? This is obviously the current problem with COVID-19. Not only does it appear to take a long time to diagnosis, but once you are diagnosed there is little direct treatment available for you. Scientists around the world are racing to try and develop a treatment, but at the moment all that can be done is managing and trying to relieve the symptoms. However, that isn’t the case for the diagnosis our author has made. For he goes on to recommend the remedy for our rebellion in 3:13, ‘But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called "today," that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.’
The first thing to notice about this treatment is that it involves some group therapy. The author has already hinted at this in 3:12, ‘Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart…’. The care we are to take is not only in respect of our own hearts, but the hearts of each other. The author continues along this line in 3:13, ‘But exhort one another…that none of you…’. As a local church, an assembly of Christians who gather together in order to encourage and exhort one another, we ought to be this kind of community. We are to wage a daily war against sin not only in our own lives, but in the lives of our brothers and sisters around us. As members of this local body, we have both the privilege of receiving help from our brothers and sisters and the responsibility of providing help to them. We are commanded to come alongside each other daily. [Acts]
What then is this fight we must face together? What are we to do in each other’s lives? Well in short, we are to exactly what the author of Hebrews is doing in this letter. In concluding his letter, he writes, ‘I appeal to you, brothers, bear with my word of exhortation, for I have written to you briefly.’ (13:22) Here in 3:13, we are told to do as he is doing, to come alongside each other and give words of exhortation. These words of exhortation are the treatment that are to help prevent an unbelieving heart, or as the author describes the disease here, our hearts becoming hard due to the ‘deceitfulness of sin’.
The truths contained in this passage are illustrated so well in Genesis 3. If we return to the cause of our corruption, the fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, we see the source and seed of sin. Those words of the serpent, ‘Did God actually say’ (Genesis 3:1) invited Eve to doubt the command of God. However, doubt wasn’t enough. The serpent quickly doubled his attack by adding the deceitful promise, ‘You will not surely die’ (Genesis 3:4). The source and seed of sin in this world was not simply failing to believe what God said is true, but alongside that was a belief in what was not true. In that moment Eve both stopped trusting in the word of God and started trusting in the word of the serpent. It wasn’t just unbelief, but wrong belief. It was that deceitful promise from the most cunning of creatures that drew her away from God. She later confesses to God, ‘The serpent deceived me, and I ate’ (Genesis 3:13). Looking back at Genesis 3, Paul explains in 1 Timothy 2:14 that ‘the woman was deceived and became a transgressor…’. From the very beginning, sin has depended on deceit. As Jesus identifies him, Satan is ‘a liar and the father of lies’ (John 8:44). Disobedience is derived from disbelief, but it depends on deceit.
How then are we to defeat this deceit? How can we expect our exhortations to one another to assist us in this battle? Well for that we must not look to the temptation of Eve, but the temptation of Jesus. Three times Satan sought to trick and tempt Christ into trusting in his lies. Three times Christ parried his blows with quotations from the Old Testament. When faced with the father of lies, Jesus reached for ‘the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God’ (Ephesians 6:17). That sword of truth which the author of Hebrews will soon tell us is ‘sharper than any two-edged sword’ (4:12). If we are to triumph over temptation, we must take up the truth.
We not only need to take up the truth, but we need to trust in it. Think not about the failure of Israel in the wilderness, but to the faithfulness of Caleb and Joshua. Of the 12 spies that were sent into Canaan, they alone returned and pleaded with the people to obey God’s voice. They took up the truth and believed it. It was Joshua and Caleb who gave that exhortation, ‘do not fear the people of the land…the LORD is with us; do not fear them’ (Numbers 14:9). Joshua and Caleb had faith that God’s presence with the nation would protect and provide for them. That faith led them to be faithful. Just as disobedience is derived from disbelief, faithfulness flows from faith.
Christian – do you recognise that the greatest danger to you in your Christian life is unbelief. That this is the source and seed of all the sins that you struggle with. Behind the glamour of greed, the charm of carelessness, the magnetism of materialism, pull of pornography, the allure of affluence, the joy of jealousy, the temptation of theft, the attraction of adultery, the draw of deceit, the fun of foolishness: behind them all is one thing, unbelief. Just as a plant draws its nutrients and strength from deep down in its roots, it is from this root that our rebellion draws its power. Disobedience is derived from disbelief, but it depends on deceit. Together we must defeat deceit with the truth. When tempted to give ourselves to the pleasures of sin, we must trust God’s promise: ‘Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers’ (Psalm 1:1). When bent down under the burdens of your life, you must fight the temptation to bitterness with words like in Psalm 55:22, ‘Cast your burden on the LORD, and he will sustain you; he will never permit the righteous to be moved’? Trusting in truth is what will triumph over the deceitfulness of sin. In those times of temptation, we must turn away from the deceitful promises that sin makes us: it doesn’t really have any consequences, that its pleasures are greater than those of God. They come from Satan, who is a liar and the father of lies. We must turn to and take up the truth of God, the promises that are sure and steadfast. That is the Remedy for Rebellion – together we defeat deceit with the truth.
3. RESULT OF REBELLION – Your unbelief may lead you to fall away
Having diagnosed the disease, and talked about the treatment, we must conclude with the prognosis. What is the result of rebellion? What does the future look like for those who rebel? As I said last week, we will think more about this next week in Hebrews 4. However, we cannot pass 3:14 without commenting on its importance in the book of Hebrews.
We have said that 3:12-19 is a warning for the present. And it is. The book of Hebrews is famous for its warning passages, which appear throughout. We have not yet reached what appear to be the weightiest and most worrying warnings in Hebrews 6 and 10. However, the author here includes one for us. In 3:12 he warns that your unbelief may lead you to fall away, that is the result of rebellion. ‘Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God.’ That ‘fall away from’ is the basis in Greek for our word apostacy, which literally means to abandon or renounce a confession. That is what happened to the Israelites in the wilderness. The faith they claimed to have by taking up the blood of the Passover and passing through the depths of the Red Sea, they renounced, they fell away from, through their unbelief in the wilderness. The writer warns us that we are in danger of the same. If we claim to be Christians, we must take care that we do not fall away through unbelief, that disobedience, disbelief and deceit does not draw us away from the God we claim to trust.
This is a weighty warning, a clear call for us all to take care. To do what Paul calls us to do in 2 Corinthians 13:5, ‘Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith.’ The danger is emphasised by the author in 3:16 when he highlights the identify of those who rebelled in the wilderness, ‘Was is not all those who left Egypt led by Moses?’ Think of all the works of God they seen with their eyes, the voice of God they heard from Mount Sinai with their ears. Their feet stepped on dry ground in the midst of the Red Sea! Their hands had picked up the manna in the wilderness. And yet their hearts were hardened by unbelief in the end. No matter what experiences we have had in the past, this is a danger that none of us can just dismiss. I doubt you need to think back to Israel in the wilderness for it to become real to you – if you have been a Christian for any length of time you will remember brothers and sisters who you once learnt much from, who seemed to be strong and steady in the faith, and yet they wavered and wandered and today you hear they have fallen away.
But in the midst of this warning, in this book of warnings, the author in 3:14 lays down an anchor that helps us carefully navigate through some complex waters to come. Against the result of rebellion in 3:12, falling away, we see another path opened up before, of holding firm. 3:14 is really a restatement of what the author said in 3:6. We spent an entire week on that verse looking at the great truths of Christian perseverance and preservation. If you have any questions about these truths, you may find answers in that sermon. Once again we find these two truths weaved together within our text. We are cautioned to take care lest we fall away. And at the same time are assured that those who are truly Christians, sharers in Christ, will hold firm until the end. ‘For we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end.’ Turn the sentence around and you can see the point clearer. If we hold firm to the end, we have come to share in Christ. If we hold firm in the future, we share in Christ now. Faithfulness in the future is evidence of our present existence. Jesus says the same in John 8:31, ‘If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples…’ and Paul likewise in Colossians 1:21-23, ‘you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind…he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death…if indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard’. Faithfulness in the future is evidence of our present existence.
As David Gooding concludes, ‘The mark of true faith is that is endures to the end.’ Along with the caution of falling away in 3:12 comes the comfort in 3:14 that if God has worked within us, if we have been reconciled by Christ’s death, if we are truly his disciples, if we are sharing in Christ, we will hold firm to the end. We shall see in Hebrews 4 that this does not remove the need to fear or fight. We need to persevere. Yet we can take courage that even as we persevere, God is preserving us. For Christians, he fuels our faith as we hold firm.
CONCLUSION
If you are not a Christian this morning. Then there is no doubt what the result of your rebellion will be. Death under the wrath of God awaits you, like the Israelites in the wilderness. With COVID-19, your best hope is to remain uninfected. However, this disease the author has been talking about here is hereditary. The corruption of sin has been passed down from parents to child ever since Adam and Eve. You can see the symptoms in your own life can you not, your rebellion against God. And yet as we have seen you need to look deeper than your disobedience to find the source of the disease. It is derived from disbelief in your heart. A failure to trust God’s saving power. The treatment for this disease is simple – trust God for salvation. He sent his Son to die on the cross for your sins, so that you could be healed. So that he could remove your hardened heart of stone and give you a new heart. Don’t settle for trying to change your behaviour, that’s just trying to cover up the symptoms. Seek the treatment that gets to the source of your problem, the root of your rebellion. Today if you hear his voice, do not harden your heart. For ‘if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.’ (Romans 10:9)
ALEXANDER ARRELL