In this Bible study podcast, Andy Davis goes line by line through Hebrews 3:7-11. The author warns his readers to not harden their hearts, using the example of the Israelites in the wilderness who rejected God at the edge of the promised land and proceeded to harden their hearts for forty years.
The author warns his readers to not harden their hearts, using the example of the Israelites in the wilderness who rejected God at the edge of the promised land and proceeded to harden their hearts for forty years.
– PODCAST TRANSCRIPT –
Joel
Hi. Welcome to the Two Journeys podcast. This is episode 6 in Hebrews Bible Study Questions, where today we’re looking at Hebrews 3:7-11, and the title is Do Not Harden Your Hearts. I’m Joel Hartford and I’m here with Pastor Andy Davis. Andy, as we come to verses 7 through 11 of chapter 3, this is the second major warning in the book of Hebrews. I know this has been really powerful for you and your ministry. Can you give us a little overview of these verses?
Andy
Absolutely. The author to Hebrews is warning these Jewish people who had made a profession of faith in Christ to continue following Christ by the Holy Spirit and to not turn their backs on Christ. And he does that by citing Psalm 95, a very powerful passage that King David wrote about, I don’t know about 1000 BC, about 500 years after the Exodus. So David was looking back at the time of the Exodus, and the time when the Jews rebelled against God at the waters of Massah and Meribah. And he wrote Psalm 95. That was 1000 years before these 1st century Jewish believers in Christ. But interestingly, as he quotes Psalm 95, he introduces it with these words: “Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says, ‘Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.'”(Hebrews 3:7-8) And so I find this is very powerful for me in my understanding of the living and active word of God, which the Scripture is living and active. So I think of it this way, “Therefore, as the Holy Spirit is saying right now to you, Andy,” or I could say, “As the Holy Spirit is saying right now to you, Joel,” or any of our listeners. The Holy Spirit is speaking Scripture to us right now, and what he’s saying here is one of the most important lessons we can ever hear. “Today if you hear him speaking to you in Scripture, don’t harden your hearts.” So that’s what this says to me. It’s very powerful.
“The Holy Spirit is speaking Scripture to us right now, and what he’s saying here is one of the most important lessons we can ever hear. ‘Today if you hear him speaking to you in Scripture, don’t harden your hearts.'”
Joel
Well, I’m going to read Hebrews 3:7-11, “Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says, ‘Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion, on the day of testing in the wilderness, where your fathers put me to the test and saw my works for forty years. Therefore I was provoked with that generation and said, ‘They always go astray in their heart; they have not known my ways.’ As I swore in my wrath, ‘They shall not enter my rest.’'”
The first question I want to ask you is, last episode we talked about that the author says, “We are his house, if we hold our confidence and our boasting and our hope.”(Paraphrase of Hebrews 3:6 And then he says, “Therefore as the Holy Spirit says.” So what is the purpose of this warning passage in the author’s argument?
Andy
Well, I think the whole flow here of the book as we’ve been saying is it’s a warning epistle to some Jewish people who had made a profession of faith in Christ who were under pressure by their Jewish family members, unbelieving Jewish family members, they weren’t followers of Christ, or unbelieving leaders of the synagogue, rulers of the synagogue or other Jewish people in their community. They were under immense pressure from them to turn their backs on Jesus and to go back to Old Covenant Judaism. And the author of Hebrews is warning them not to do that.
Last time he talked about the superiority of Jesus to Moses. Here he’s going to reach for another hero of Jewish history, namely King David, who was talking about, in Psalm 95, about 500 years after the Exodus, talking about some events that occurred during the Exodus in which the Jewish people there showed unbelief and God’s reaction to them. So he’s really warning them about God’s wrath, his anger at the sinful heart of unbelief that turns away from the living God.
Joel
Okay, so I want to ask you a follow-up on the situation, not in David, but before, what David’s writing about in the wilderness wandering. What happened there, and why was God so upset with the people that he had actually brought out of Egypt from bondage and slavery?
Andy
Yeah, I think what we have to realize is, this is Exodus 16 and 17, in Exodus 16, God gave them manna. In Exodus 17, he gave them water out of a rock. But in both cases, the people grumbled angrily against Moses. As a matter of fact, in Exodus 16, they were thinking about the good old days back in Egypt when they sat by pots of meat and had plenty to eat, forgetting that their lives were made bitter with servitude, with slavery, with the lash of the taskmaster, forgot all that. And so in a similar way spiritually, we in Christ have been delivered from bondage to sin. And we shouldn’t think, “Oh, for the good old days back then when we had freedom from all these things, and had all that we wanted to eat, et cetera.” So it’s kind of a parallel, but it’s actual history.
And so the Jewish people forgot the 10 plagues that God had done, these supernatural plagues, using nature in some cases, that God showed his overwhelming power. And then even more at the Red Sea crossing when he split the sea and they walked across on dry ground. And then the sea came crashing back down on Pharaoh’s army, and the people celebrated, “The horse and rider he’s thrown into the sea.” Exodus 15:1. And then the next chapter, they’re grumbling against Moses that they’re going to die out there in the desert from lack of food. And then a short time later they’re grumbling that they’re going to die from lack of water. And they forgot God. And God did not take it kindly, “He swore on oath in his anger, ‘They will never enter my rest.’”(Paraphrase of Psalm 95:11) So this is a sinful heart of unbelief that they’re displaying here.
Joel
Okay, looking at Hebrews 3:7, he says, “Therefore the Holy Spirit says…” And then he picks up the quote with, “Today.” Now what’s the theological importance of one, just attributing this to the Holy Spirit…
Andy
Yes.
Joel
…And then also the present tense, “says.” Not “said,” not “has said”, in the past, although it was true. But, “He says today”?
Andy
Yeah, it’s very powerful. I mean this goes right to our belief in the inspiration and authority of Scripture. We believe that there are human authors. I’ve been mentioning that David wrote Psalm 95, and Moses wrote Exodus 16 and 17, the account of the rebellion concerning the manna and the water. So these human authors are important, but the real author of Scripture we believe is the Holy Spirit, God through the Holy Spirit. As 2 Peter 1 says concerning every prophecy, “You must understand that no prophecy ever had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”(Paraphrase of 2 Peter 1:20-21) And so the author of the Hebrews just kind of assumes that. He doesn’t develop it as a theology. He just says, “When you’re reading Psalm 95, it’s the Holy Spirit who’s speaking to you. And it’s not that he said it, he’s saying it to you right now.” So we get to the theology of today. And the theology of today that the author is going to unfold for us here and again in the next chapter is that today is all we really have. Today is when we have to hear him speak. We can’t hear God speak to us yesterday. Yesterday’s gone. We can’t do anything about it. It’s part of the heavenly record, what we did. We can’t hear God speak to us tomorrow. By the time tomorrow comes, it will be something new called today. All we ever have is today and today and today. So we can prepare for tomorrow by faithful obedience today. We can learn from the past by reading Scripture and hearing what the Jews did or the apostles did or others did in the past, or thinking about our own actions in the past. But today is all we have. And the key thing today: hear the Holy Spirit speak to us by the Scripture. So if you look at the punctuation, it says, “Therefore, as the Holy Spirit,” think of it this way, “is saying to you right now, ‘Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.'” That’s the first thing he wants to say to you. “Whatever I say to you by Scripture,” maybe you’re reading the 23rd Psalm, maybe you’re reading the book of Romans, maybe you’re reading the book of Revelation; maybe you’re reading Exodus, “whatever Scripture you’re reading, the Holy Spirit has something to say to you today.”
“We can’t hear God speak to us tomorrow. By the time tomorrow comes, it will be something new called today. All we ever have is today and today and today. So we can prepare for tomorrow by faithful obedience today.”
Joel
How should this inform how preachers preach and how congregants here preaching, knowing that there’s this warning to hear the Holy Spirit speaking today?
Andy
Absolutely. Every sermon should be an encounter with the living God in the same manner; that the Holy Spirit has something to say to you. And what’s amazing is he’s going to be saying different things to different people. The text of Scripture is going to be unchanging, the words are going to be unchanging, the doctrine’s unchanging, but the applications are as many as there are people listening to it. There are going to be specific applications of that timeless truth, that unchanging truth to every person listening. Or the people are going to be like the “seed that’s sown on the path that the birds came and ate up right away.” Their hearts are hard, they’re not listening, and the seed bounces on the pavement and it makes no impact.
And so every sermon should be an unfolding of the word of God, with a respectful reverence by the preacher saying, “These are the very words of God through the Holy Spirit.” And interestingly, the preacher can read them by the power of the Spirit, and craft the words of the sermon by the power of the Spirit, and then deliver the words of the sermon by the power of the Spirit, and then seek the power of the Spirit for the application of the words to his hearers. But at any rate, this is how we should listen to every sermon. “Today if you hear his voice,” the voice of the Holy Spirit speaking through Scripture, “do not harden your hearts.”
Joel
Okay, so if we hear his voice, “Do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.”(Hebrews 3:8) So I want to ask you about this phrase, “Harden your hearts.” What does that mean to “harden your heart?”
Andy
Well, I think we’re going to talk a lot more about it in the next podcast, God willing. In Hebrews 3:12 and 13, it talks about the “Sinful heart of unbelief that turns away from the living God.”(Hebrews 3:12) And he talks about the danger of being “Hardened by sin’s deceitfulness”(Hebrews 3:13), so it goes into more detail there. And we’ll talk about that, but let me say something now. “Hardness of heart” means a lack of receptivity. You’re not yielded; you’re not soft and supple. I think to me, an exact synonym or similar expression would be stiff-necked. The Jews were “stiff-necked people with uncircumcised hearts and ears,” Moses would say sometimes about them. To be stiff-necked means you’re not yielded to the yoke of God’s kingly authority. You’re fighting him. You’re a hardened rebel. And so we all have that tendency, and that’s the nature of our rebellion. That’s the nature of our sin. We were hardened in our sins. And the nature of our salvation then, conversely, is to soften us, to make us like soft, upturned soil ready for the seed of God’s word to bear fruit. And so there’s a plowing of the heart and there there’s a making of furrows where the seed can go deep, and then there’s a softening of the soil by watering. You think about the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 3:6 said, “I planted the seed, and Apollos watered, but God made it grow.” And so the watering of the seed makes it soft, makes that hard shell of the seed dissolve. And then all of that genetic material and that soft nutrients and the root system comes out. It’s just a beautiful thing. I don’t understand biology. But anyway, the idea is there’s the softness that comes and a yieldedness and a receptivity. So we are hearing God speak. And we need to hear him speak, we’re feeding on it, we’re receptive to it. Or we’re hard, we’re saying, “No, I don’t need to hear that.” We fight it. We’re prideful and resistant and rebellious. So to “harden your heart” means to be stiff and rebellious against God’s kingly authority as it reaches out to us by means of his Word. So to have a hard heart means to be rebellious against the word of God.
Joel
Yeah, so he says, “Do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion,”(Hebrews 3:8) which you’ve already mentioned, the Israelites in the desert. And he says, “On the day of testing in the wilderness where your fathers put me to the test.”(Hebrews 3:9) So how did they put God to the test? It says they saw his works for forty years, but God was provoked with them.
Andy
Yeah. Well, this is going to be very, very important in the author of Hebrews’ argument. He’s going to say God put his glory on display through Moses in Egypt, did those plagues, the 10 plagues culminating in the terrible plague on the firstborn, the Passover. And then he showed his power and his outstretched arm at the Red Sea crossing. He did these incredible miracles. And then on the other side, when they’re hungry a little bit and they don’t really see how they’re going to eat, they begin murmuring and saying, “God led us out here to kill us.” And so what made God really angry was they had forgotten the history. They should have learned from what God did in the past. We need to be, as Christians, students of history, redemptive history. “What has God done in the past? And how can we today trust him to meet all of our needs today?”
But here’s the thing: it’s far greater. The stakes are far higher now because God’s done far more glorious things now than he ever did for the Jews in Egypt and at the Red Sea crossing. His actions in Jesus are greater than his actions through Moses, far greater. And so it’s far worse for us to question God now than it ever was for the Jews then. The author’s going to make that point, this is the worst thing you can ever do is to turn your back on Jesus, “After all that Jesus has achieved, all the miracles he did, his death, his resurrection, his ascension to the right hand of God, after all of that, you turn your back on him?” That’s terrifying and terrible. And so what he’s saying is to display that kind of rebellion in the face of all the mighty signs and wonders that God had done in Egypt and at the Red Sea crossing made God angry at them, how much more we who have seen God do far greater things in Jesus, we must not tempt him to anger by a sinful heart of unbelief.
Joel
So if I were to import that doctrine today, that if we know the works of God and have believed in them, but then act out of unbelief, we’re essentially testing him and provoking him to jealousy and anger.
Andy
Yes. Well, it’s just like the commandment, “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.”(Deuteronomy 6:16) We’re not allowed to do that. It’s one of the things Jesus said to the devil, all right? Effectively saying, “Is God among us or not?” It’s like God has to keep proving himself. God doesn’t have to keep proving himself. He’s the same God yesterday, today and forever. The same God who did the 10 plagues is my God. The same God who did the Red Sea crossing is my God. The same God who raised Lazarus from the dead in Jesus is my God. The same God who raised Jesus from the dead is my God. He doesn’t need to prove himself anymore. So what that means is if I have a child who’s seriously ill, maybe with leukemia, if I lose my job, if I myself have a serious illness, if I’m having marital difficulties, if I’m having any kind of affliction at all, I should not think, “Is God with me or not? Does God still love me or not?” We should not put the Lord to the test. He has done enough in Christ to show that he loves you, “He has already demonstrated his love for us in that, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”(Paraphrase of Romans 5:8) He doesn’t need to prove himself anymore. We don’t have to keep having him do miracles and meet our needs and bring in money and heal our kids and do all this in order to prove that he’s God. He’s done enough. And so a sinful heart of unbelief demands God to keep doing what we want him to do, really make God our servant and we the master. And that cannot be.
Joel
Now he says that, “They always go astray in their hearts; they have not known my ways.”(Hebrews 3:10) And so you said it’s so important to study redemptive history, to study the ways of God that would keep our hearts from going astray.
Andy
Right. Yeah, I think that’s what the Scripture’s given to us. Everything written in the past was written to encourage us so through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope. I really could argue that the whole point of the book of Hebrews is to give us good hope in Christ, to be filled with joy in the future. You could make that argument. There’s other things going on in Hebrews, but we’re supposed to be filled with hope and assurance that the future’s bright, and so God’s going to do new things. He really is. He’s promised to do new things. He’s going to make everything new, just not yet, probably. So we’re going to continue in the present order, the cursed world, cursed in Adam. We’re going to struggle with the ground. It’s going to produce thorns and thistles for us, but God is going to be with us in all of that. And so the idea here is today, as we face challenges, as we face difficulties, we should not rebel against him and say, “Is God with us or not?” We should feel always God has done enough in Christ crucified and resurrected to make us joyful and filled with hope today.
Joel
Amen. So he says, “As I swore in my wrath, ‘They shall not enter my rest.’”(Hebrews 3:11) What did God actually do to that generation?
Andy
Well, that generation ended up really consummating their unbelief by refusing to cross the Jordan and go into the Promised Land. That was the final straw. They did a lot of other things. They made the golden idol, the golden calf at Mount Sinai after God had spoken to them and they heard the voice of Almighty God saying, “You shall not make any idols or worship any idol.”(Paraphrase of Exodus 20:4) They went ahead and made an idol while Moses was receiving the written form of the 10 Commandments they’d already heard with their ears. They did that. And then Moses led them to the brink of the Jordan to cross the Jordan and enter the Promised Land. But they would not believe. The 12 spies came back. Two of them were faithful, Joshua and Caleb, but 10 of them were not, and they led the entire nation in rebellion. So they all died. Very plainly, the Apostle Paul points to this in Corinthians about how their bodies were scattered all over the desert. And so they died, most of them, except Joshua and Caleb, and they could not enter the Promised Land. So what the author’s going to do later is going to make this very plain, that when he says, “So I declared on oath in my anger, ‘They shall never enter my rest,'”(Hebrews 3:11) what he’s saying is that that really is a picture of heaven. There is a journey. There’s a type of life, a superior type of life that leads to heaven. And it’s a life of faith. And faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. You live that life, you end up in heaven. But if you live a life of sinful unbelief that turns away from the living God, you’ll be condemned to hell. That’s what the author’s going to say. “I declared on oath in my anger, ‘They shall never enter my rest.'” Rest ends up being really heaven through Jesus.
Joel
That is powerful. So wrapping this up, how can we apply this to our lives right now? I know this is written to a 1st century church struggling with going back to Judaism. None of us are struggling with that now, but we want to really heed the Word today, like we talk so much about. How can we apply this?
Andy
Well, I think first and foremost, realize that our faith is a dynamic living thing. It doesn’t have any independent existence apart from God, apart from Jesus, apart from the Holy Spirit, apart from the Word. Our faith needs a good meal every day. And so we need to feed on God’s word. We need to feed on it as we feed on bread, “Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.”(Matthew 4:4) And as we read it, we need to hear God speaking to us through the Holy Spirit today, right now. He is saying something to me right now. He’s feeding. And the faith is in Christ. He’s feeding our faith in Jesus, our Savior, “The author and perfecter of our faith.”(Hebrews 12:2) The Holy Spirit is pointing toward Christ as Christ points to the Father. “No one comes to the Father except through me,”(John 14:6) Jesus said. So by feeding on the Word, we are strengthened in our faith and able to continue our pilgrimage, our journey, our race, the race that’s marked out before us, until at last we’re done with all the warfare, done with all the race, and we come into our heavenly glory. So today our task is feed on God’s word, don’t harden our hearts; obey what it says as though God were speaking directly to us, because He is.
Joel
Well, that was episode 6 in Hebrews Bible Study Questions. Please join us next time and we’ll look at chapter 3:12-19, which is the warning against the deceitfulness of sin. Thank you for listening and God bless you all.
The author warns his readers to not harden their hearts, using the example of the Israelites in the wilderness who rejected God at the edge of the promised land and proceeded to harden their hearts for forty years.
– PODCAST TRANSCRIPT –
Joel
Hi. Welcome to the Two Journeys podcast. This is episode 6 in Hebrews Bible Study Questions, where today we’re looking at Hebrews 3:7-11, and the title is Do Not Harden Your Hearts. I’m Joel Hartford and I’m here with Pastor Andy Davis. Andy, as we come to verses 7 through 11 of chapter 3, this is the second major warning in the book of Hebrews. I know this has been really powerful for you and your ministry. Can you give us a little overview of these verses?
Andy
Absolutely. The author to Hebrews is warning these Jewish people who had made a profession of faith in Christ to continue following Christ by the Holy Spirit and to not turn their backs on Christ. And he does that by citing Psalm 95, a very powerful passage that King David wrote about, I don’t know about 1000 BC, about 500 years after the Exodus. So David was looking back at the time of the Exodus, and the time when the Jews rebelled against God at the waters of Massah and Meribah. And he wrote Psalm 95. That was 1000 years before these 1st century Jewish believers in Christ. But interestingly, as he quotes Psalm 95, he introduces it with these words: “Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says, ‘Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.'”(Hebrews 3:7-8) And so I find this is very powerful for me in my understanding of the living and active word of God, which the Scripture is living and active. So I think of it this way, “Therefore, as the Holy Spirit is saying right now to you, Andy,” or I could say, “As the Holy Spirit is saying right now to you, Joel,” or any of our listeners. The Holy Spirit is speaking Scripture to us right now, and what he’s saying here is one of the most important lessons we can ever hear. “Today if you hear him speaking to you in Scripture, don’t harden your hearts.” So that’s what this says to me. It’s very powerful.
“The Holy Spirit is speaking Scripture to us right now, and what he’s saying here is one of the most important lessons we can ever hear. ‘Today if you hear him speaking to you in Scripture, don’t harden your hearts.'”
Joel
Well, I’m going to read Hebrews 3:7-11, “Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says, ‘Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion, on the day of testing in the wilderness, where your fathers put me to the test and saw my works for forty years. Therefore I was provoked with that generation and said, ‘They always go astray in their heart; they have not known my ways.’ As I swore in my wrath, ‘They shall not enter my rest.’'”
The first question I want to ask you is, last episode we talked about that the author says, “We are his house, if we hold our confidence and our boasting and our hope.”(Paraphrase of Hebrews 3:6 And then he says, “Therefore as the Holy Spirit says.” So what is the purpose of this warning passage in the author’s argument?
Andy
Well, I think the whole flow here of the book as we’ve been saying is it’s a warning epistle to some Jewish people who had made a profession of faith in Christ who were under pressure by their Jewish family members, unbelieving Jewish family members, they weren’t followers of Christ, or unbelieving leaders of the synagogue, rulers of the synagogue or other Jewish people in their community. They were under immense pressure from them to turn their backs on Jesus and to go back to Old Covenant Judaism. And the author of Hebrews is warning them not to do that.
Last time he talked about the superiority of Jesus to Moses. Here he’s going to reach for another hero of Jewish history, namely King David, who was talking about, in Psalm 95, about 500 years after the Exodus, talking about some events that occurred during the Exodus in which the Jewish people there showed unbelief and God’s reaction to them. So he’s really warning them about God’s wrath, his anger at the sinful heart of unbelief that turns away from the living God.
Joel
Okay, so I want to ask you a follow-up on the situation, not in David, but before, what David’s writing about in the wilderness wandering. What happened there, and why was God so upset with the people that he had actually brought out of Egypt from bondage and slavery?
Andy
Yeah, I think what we have to realize is, this is Exodus 16 and 17, in Exodus 16, God gave them manna. In Exodus 17, he gave them water out of a rock. But in both cases, the people grumbled angrily against Moses. As a matter of fact, in Exodus 16, they were thinking about the good old days back in Egypt when they sat by pots of meat and had plenty to eat, forgetting that their lives were made bitter with servitude, with slavery, with the lash of the taskmaster, forgot all that. And so in a similar way spiritually, we in Christ have been delivered from bondage to sin. And we shouldn’t think, “Oh, for the good old days back then when we had freedom from all these things, and had all that we wanted to eat, et cetera.” So it’s kind of a parallel, but it’s actual history.
And so the Jewish people forgot the 10 plagues that God had done, these supernatural plagues, using nature in some cases, that God showed his overwhelming power. And then even more at the Red Sea crossing when he split the sea and they walked across on dry ground. And then the sea came crashing back down on Pharaoh’s army, and the people celebrated, “The horse and rider he’s thrown into the sea.” Exodus 15:1. And then the next chapter, they’re grumbling against Moses that they’re going to die out there in the desert from lack of food. And then a short time later they’re grumbling that they’re going to die from lack of water. And they forgot God. And God did not take it kindly, “He swore on oath in his anger, ‘They will never enter my rest.’”(Paraphrase of Psalm 95:11) So this is a sinful heart of unbelief that they’re displaying here.
Joel
Okay, looking at Hebrews 3:7, he says, “Therefore the Holy Spirit says…” And then he picks up the quote with, “Today.” Now what’s the theological importance of one, just attributing this to the Holy Spirit…
Andy
Yes.
Joel
…And then also the present tense, “says.” Not “said,” not “has said”, in the past, although it was true. But, “He says today”?
Andy
Yeah, it’s very powerful. I mean this goes right to our belief in the inspiration and authority of Scripture. We believe that there are human authors. I’ve been mentioning that David wrote Psalm 95, and Moses wrote Exodus 16 and 17, the account of the rebellion concerning the manna and the water. So these human authors are important, but the real author of Scripture we believe is the Holy Spirit, God through the Holy Spirit. As 2 Peter 1 says concerning every prophecy, “You must understand that no prophecy ever had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”(Paraphrase of 2 Peter 1:20-21) And so the author of the Hebrews just kind of assumes that. He doesn’t develop it as a theology. He just says, “When you’re reading Psalm 95, it’s the Holy Spirit who’s speaking to you. And it’s not that he said it, he’s saying it to you right now.” So we get to the theology of today. And the theology of today that the author is going to unfold for us here and again in the next chapter is that today is all we really have. Today is when we have to hear him speak. We can’t hear God speak to us yesterday. Yesterday’s gone. We can’t do anything about it. It’s part of the heavenly record, what we did. We can’t hear God speak to us tomorrow. By the time tomorrow comes, it will be something new called today. All we ever have is today and today and today. So we can prepare for tomorrow by faithful obedience today. We can learn from the past by reading Scripture and hearing what the Jews did or the apostles did or others did in the past, or thinking about our own actions in the past. But today is all we have. And the key thing today: hear the Holy Spirit speak to us by the Scripture. So if you look at the punctuation, it says, “Therefore, as the Holy Spirit,” think of it this way, “is saying to you right now, ‘Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.'” That’s the first thing he wants to say to you. “Whatever I say to you by Scripture,” maybe you’re reading the 23rd Psalm, maybe you’re reading the book of Romans, maybe you’re reading the book of Revelation; maybe you’re reading Exodus, “whatever Scripture you’re reading, the Holy Spirit has something to say to you today.”
“We can’t hear God speak to us tomorrow. By the time tomorrow comes, it will be something new called today. All we ever have is today and today and today. So we can prepare for tomorrow by faithful obedience today.”
Joel
How should this inform how preachers preach and how congregants here preaching, knowing that there’s this warning to hear the Holy Spirit speaking today?
Andy
Absolutely. Every sermon should be an encounter with the living God in the same manner; that the Holy Spirit has something to say to you. And what’s amazing is he’s going to be saying different things to different people. The text of Scripture is going to be unchanging, the words are going to be unchanging, the doctrine’s unchanging, but the applications are as many as there are people listening to it. There are going to be specific applications of that timeless truth, that unchanging truth to every person listening. Or the people are going to be like the “seed that’s sown on the path that the birds came and ate up right away.” Their hearts are hard, they’re not listening, and the seed bounces on the pavement and it makes no impact.
And so every sermon should be an unfolding of the word of God, with a respectful reverence by the preacher saying, “These are the very words of God through the Holy Spirit.” And interestingly, the preacher can read them by the power of the Spirit, and craft the words of the sermon by the power of the Spirit, and then deliver the words of the sermon by the power of the Spirit, and then seek the power of the Spirit for the application of the words to his hearers. But at any rate, this is how we should listen to every sermon. “Today if you hear his voice,” the voice of the Holy Spirit speaking through Scripture, “do not harden your hearts.”
Joel
Okay, so if we hear his voice, “Do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.”(Hebrews 3:8) So I want to ask you about this phrase, “Harden your hearts.” What does that mean to “harden your heart?”
Andy
Well, I think we’re going to talk a lot more about it in the next podcast, God willing. In Hebrews 3:12 and 13, it talks about the “Sinful heart of unbelief that turns away from the living God.”(Hebrews 3:12) And he talks about the danger of being “Hardened by sin’s deceitfulness”(Hebrews 3:13), so it goes into more detail there. And we’ll talk about that, but let me say something now. “Hardness of heart” means a lack of receptivity. You’re not yielded; you’re not soft and supple. I think to me, an exact synonym or similar expression would be stiff-necked. The Jews were “stiff-necked people with uncircumcised hearts and ears,” Moses would say sometimes about them. To be stiff-necked means you’re not yielded to the yoke of God’s kingly authority. You’re fighting him. You’re a hardened rebel. And so we all have that tendency, and that’s the nature of our rebellion. That’s the nature of our sin. We were hardened in our sins. And the nature of our salvation then, conversely, is to soften us, to make us like soft, upturned soil ready for the seed of God’s word to bear fruit. And so there’s a plowing of the heart and there there’s a making of furrows where the seed can go deep, and then there’s a softening of the soil by watering. You think about the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 3:6 said, “I planted the seed, and Apollos watered, but God made it grow.” And so the watering of the seed makes it soft, makes that hard shell of the seed dissolve. And then all of that genetic material and that soft nutrients and the root system comes out. It’s just a beautiful thing. I don’t understand biology. But anyway, the idea is there’s the softness that comes and a yieldedness and a receptivity. So we are hearing God speak. And we need to hear him speak, we’re feeding on it, we’re receptive to it. Or we’re hard, we’re saying, “No, I don’t need to hear that.” We fight it. We’re prideful and resistant and rebellious. So to “harden your heart” means to be stiff and rebellious against God’s kingly authority as it reaches out to us by means of his Word. So to have a hard heart means to be rebellious against the word of God.
Joel
Yeah, so he says, “Do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion,”(Hebrews 3:8) which you’ve already mentioned, the Israelites in the desert. And he says, “On the day of testing in the wilderness where your fathers put me to the test.”(Hebrews 3:9) So how did they put God to the test? It says they saw his works for forty years, but God was provoked with them.
Andy
Yeah. Well, this is going to be very, very important in the author of Hebrews’ argument. He’s going to say God put his glory on display through Moses in Egypt, did those plagues, the 10 plagues culminating in the terrible plague on the firstborn, the Passover. And then he showed his power and his outstretched arm at the Red Sea crossing. He did these incredible miracles. And then on the other side, when they’re hungry a little bit and they don’t really see how they’re going to eat, they begin murmuring and saying, “God led us out here to kill us.” And so what made God really angry was they had forgotten the history. They should have learned from what God did in the past. We need to be, as Christians, students of history, redemptive history. “What has God done in the past? And how can we today trust him to meet all of our needs today?”
But here’s the thing: it’s far greater. The stakes are far higher now because God’s done far more glorious things now than he ever did for the Jews in Egypt and at the Red Sea crossing. His actions in Jesus are greater than his actions through Moses, far greater. And so it’s far worse for us to question God now than it ever was for the Jews then. The author’s going to make that point, this is the worst thing you can ever do is to turn your back on Jesus, “After all that Jesus has achieved, all the miracles he did, his death, his resurrection, his ascension to the right hand of God, after all of that, you turn your back on him?” That’s terrifying and terrible. And so what he’s saying is to display that kind of rebellion in the face of all the mighty signs and wonders that God had done in Egypt and at the Red Sea crossing made God angry at them, how much more we who have seen God do far greater things in Jesus, we must not tempt him to anger by a sinful heart of unbelief.
Joel
So if I were to import that doctrine today, that if we know the works of God and have believed in them, but then act out of unbelief, we’re essentially testing him and provoking him to jealousy and anger.
Andy
Yes. Well, it’s just like the commandment, “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.”(Deuteronomy 6:16) We’re not allowed to do that. It’s one of the things Jesus said to the devil, all right? Effectively saying, “Is God among us or not?” It’s like God has to keep proving himself. God doesn’t have to keep proving himself. He’s the same God yesterday, today and forever. The same God who did the 10 plagues is my God. The same God who did the Red Sea crossing is my God. The same God who raised Lazarus from the dead in Jesus is my God. The same God who raised Jesus from the dead is my God. He doesn’t need to prove himself anymore. So what that means is if I have a child who’s seriously ill, maybe with leukemia, if I lose my job, if I myself have a serious illness, if I’m having marital difficulties, if I’m having any kind of affliction at all, I should not think, “Is God with me or not? Does God still love me or not?” We should not put the Lord to the test. He has done enough in Christ to show that he loves you, “He has already demonstrated his love for us in that, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”(Paraphrase of Romans 5:8) He doesn’t need to prove himself anymore. We don’t have to keep having him do miracles and meet our needs and bring in money and heal our kids and do all this in order to prove that he’s God. He’s done enough. And so a sinful heart of unbelief demands God to keep doing what we want him to do, really make God our servant and we the master. And that cannot be.
Joel
Now he says that, “They always go astray in their hearts; they have not known my ways.”(Hebrews 3:10) And so you said it’s so important to study redemptive history, to study the ways of God that would keep our hearts from going astray.
Andy
Right. Yeah, I think that’s what the Scripture’s given to us. Everything written in the past was written to encourage us so through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope. I really could argue that the whole point of the book of Hebrews is to give us good hope in Christ, to be filled with joy in the future. You could make that argument. There’s other things going on in Hebrews, but we’re supposed to be filled with hope and assurance that the future’s bright, and so God’s going to do new things. He really is. He’s promised to do new things. He’s going to make everything new, just not yet, probably. So we’re going to continue in the present order, the cursed world, cursed in Adam. We’re going to struggle with the ground. It’s going to produce thorns and thistles for us, but God is going to be with us in all of that. And so the idea here is today, as we face challenges, as we face difficulties, we should not rebel against him and say, “Is God with us or not?” We should feel always God has done enough in Christ crucified and resurrected to make us joyful and filled with hope today.
Joel
Amen. So he says, “As I swore in my wrath, ‘They shall not enter my rest.’”(Hebrews 3:11) What did God actually do to that generation?
Andy
Well, that generation ended up really consummating their unbelief by refusing to cross the Jordan and go into the Promised Land. That was the final straw. They did a lot of other things. They made the golden idol, the golden calf at Mount Sinai after God had spoken to them and they heard the voice of Almighty God saying, “You shall not make any idols or worship any idol.”(Paraphrase of Exodus 20:4) They went ahead and made an idol while Moses was receiving the written form of the 10 Commandments they’d already heard with their ears. They did that. And then Moses led them to the brink of the Jordan to cross the Jordan and enter the Promised Land. But they would not believe. The 12 spies came back. Two of them were faithful, Joshua and Caleb, but 10 of them were not, and they led the entire nation in rebellion. So they all died. Very plainly, the Apostle Paul points to this in Corinthians about how their bodies were scattered all over the desert. And so they died, most of them, except Joshua and Caleb, and they could not enter the Promised Land. So what the author’s going to do later is going to make this very plain, that when he says, “So I declared on oath in my anger, ‘They shall never enter my rest,'”(Hebrews 3:11) what he’s saying is that that really is a picture of heaven. There is a journey. There’s a type of life, a superior type of life that leads to heaven. And it’s a life of faith. And faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. You live that life, you end up in heaven. But if you live a life of sinful unbelief that turns away from the living God, you’ll be condemned to hell. That’s what the author’s going to say. “I declared on oath in my anger, ‘They shall never enter my rest.'” Rest ends up being really heaven through Jesus.
Joel
That is powerful. So wrapping this up, how can we apply this to our lives right now? I know this is written to a 1st century church struggling with going back to Judaism. None of us are struggling with that now, but we want to really heed the Word today, like we talk so much about. How can we apply this?
Andy
Well, I think first and foremost, realize that our faith is a dynamic living thing. It doesn’t have any independent existence apart from God, apart from Jesus, apart from the Holy Spirit, apart from the Word. Our faith needs a good meal every day. And so we need to feed on God’s word. We need to feed on it as we feed on bread, “Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.”(Matthew 4:4) And as we read it, we need to hear God speaking to us through the Holy Spirit today, right now. He is saying something to me right now. He’s feeding. And the faith is in Christ. He’s feeding our faith in Jesus, our Savior, “The author and perfecter of our faith.”(Hebrews 12:2) The Holy Spirit is pointing toward Christ as Christ points to the Father. “No one comes to the Father except through me,”(John 14:6) Jesus said. So by feeding on the Word, we are strengthened in our faith and able to continue our pilgrimage, our journey, our race, the race that’s marked out before us, until at last we’re done with all the warfare, done with all the race, and we come into our heavenly glory. So today our task is feed on God’s word, don’t harden our hearts; obey what it says as though God were speaking directly to us, because He is.
Joel
Well, that was episode 6 in Hebrews Bible Study Questions. Please join us next time and we’ll look at chapter 3:12-19, which is the warning against the deceitfulness of sin. Thank you for listening and God bless you all.
