 You're listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, visit nakedbiblepodcast.com and click on the support link in the upper right-hand corner. If you're new to the podcast and Dr. Heizer's approach to the Bible, click on New Start Here at NakedBiblePodcast.com. Welcome to the Naked Bible Podcast, Episode 181 Hebrews Chapter 3. I'm the layman, Trey Strickland, and he's the scholar, Dr. Michael Heizer. Mike, it feels so good to get back into the Bible. Yeah, really. That is why we have a podcast, you know, Naked Bible, so we might want to throw some Bible in there, yeah. Yeah, we kind of got away from it. Yeah, I agree. We didn't plan it, but some of these interviews are scheduled. So we had to get away from the Bible, but it's like coming home. Still important. Yeah, absolutely. So it feels good to get back into it. Yeah, well, we're doing Hebrews 3. Finally, back to the book of Hebrews. People didn't vote for interviews. They voted for the book of Hebrews, but judging from the reaction, I think people enjoyed the interviews and got a lot out of them. But here we go, you know, back into this New Testament book that's just got a lot of stuff in it. This is going to be no different. You know, I think this one, you know, will be a frequently listened to episode just because of the nature of some of the things we were going to discuss here. This whole, you know, quote, unquote, losing salvation thread that, you know, runs through Hebrews, or at least some people think it runs through Hebrews. We're going to get our first sort of exposure to that here in Hebrews 3. But I'm going to start off by reading the chapter, the whole thing. It's not too long. Then we'll, you know, we'll jump back in and hit a few things that really need some attention. So beginning in verse one, we read, But the builder of all things is God. Now, Moses was faithful in all God's house as a servant to testify to the things that were to be spoken later. But Christ is faithful over God's house as a son. And we are his house if indeed we hold fast our confidence and our boasting in our hope. 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 40 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. Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. 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. For we have come to share in Christ if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end. As it is said today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion. For who were those who heard and yet rebelled? Was it not all those who left Egypt led by Moses and with whom he was provoked for 40 years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose bodies fell in the desert? And to whom did he swear that they would not enter his rest, but to those who were disobedient? So we see that they were unable to enter because of unbelief. That's the end of the chapter and there are several instances in this chapter where the problem that the writer is talking about is unbelief, an unbelieving heart. We're going to return to that. That's going to be sort of a focus point as we go through this chapter. Really, we're going to spend most of our time on that because I think there's sort of a fundamental confusion with, again, this question that arises about salvation, can I lose salvation, that sort of thing. We tend to associate it with specific acts of sin, sins of commission or omission. And the focus in Hebrews here in chapter three, and it's not going to change, it's going to have this focus through the rest of the book, is not behavior, it's not perfection. Do you believe or not? Believe versus unbelief. But let's go back to Hebrews three, verse one. It starts off with the phrase, Holy Brothers, you who share in a heavenly calling. Now, he's speaking to believers. And by the way, and I don't want to sound childish here, but believers actually sort of means something. Believers means people who are believing. A believer is one who is believing. It's not someone who prayed a prayer 20 years ago and now believes something altogether different or nothing at all. So we're going to get into this belief versus unbelief thing. And the writer here is talking, again, to people he considers brothers in the faith who share in a heavenly calling. People who are believing. People who are believers, they're believing. I think we need to think of this heavenly calling as a destiny. That might be a good way sort of to start off the chapter. You're there for Holy Brothers, you who share in this common destiny that we have. This destiny of what's the destiny? Well, the destiny is, again, eternal life, the promise of eternal life. We just got done with Hebrews chapter 2 where there were people who were described as being part of the family of God through the incarnation, the atonement, the work of Christ. This is the destiny. This is the calling that the writer is veering off into now. He's just told us about the supremacy of Christ. He's going to remind us of that again, Jesus is superior to Moses here in chapter 3. He's been sort of strumming that thing for a long time, two chapters worth. He talked about how people, human beings, again, are going to be joined to the family of God. This is the destiny that awaits us. I think it's really helpful at this point to sort of bring up a little expression that we've used a lot here in the podcast, typically when it comes to the kingdom or when it comes to eschatology. And that is the already, but not yet. As we get into this chapter, this whole thing about the writer speaking to believers, and we're going to get into this whole question about, well, yeah, we're God's house. In verse 6, if we hold fast our confidence and our boasting and our hope, in other words, there are conditions now set to it. And people read that and they think, well, am I meeting the conditions? Am I performing well enough? Am I doing this? Is God still happy with me? Am I going to make it? All that sort of thing as though there's some striving to do to have eternal life. And that would be very contrary, again, to the gospel, to faith. We need to think of salvation. We need to think of, to use the writer of Hebrews terminology here in verse 1, we need to think of our heavenly calling, our heavenly destiny. As something already, but not yet. And the question is going to be, well, this is how God looks at us. You know, we believe and we, you know, he speaks about, you know, us as his children and that we're grafted in, you know, we're adopted, you know, we're sons of God, daughters of God, children of God. You know, we have all this language, but there is a condition that's attached to this. And the condition has nothing to do with performance. The condition is, do you believe or not? You have to keep believing. And again, this isn't, this isn't a work. This isn't a striving. This isn't performance. This isn't merit in order for our already to transition to the ultimate consummation, our ultimate destiny. In order for our destiny to be fulfilled, that God looks at, hey, this is a done deal if you believe. It's a done deal if you believe. But do you catch that? You have to believe. That's all that God asks. And he does ask something. He asks for us to believe in the gospel and to keep believing it, to not throw our believing loyalty to another God or no God at all. So you, what I'm sort of telegraphing all this upfront as we're going to go through this chapter and look at some of the language. You can't lose your salvation as though it's something taken from you or that you sin away, that you commit some sin now and God just takes it away. God doesn't want you to have it anymore because he's angry. That is false doctrine. You can reject it. You can choose to not believe. You must believe. You are eternally secure if you believe. Okay. It is a done deal. God will do it. You will have eternal life if you believe the gospel. You are eternally secure if you believe. If you do not believe, you're not. This is why I answer these kinds of questions that way because frankly, that's where Scripture puts it. You must believe. None of this has anything to do with moral performance. You've heard me say it many times, that which cannot be gained through moral perfection. In other words, the gospel. You don't merit salvation. That which cannot be gained by moral perfection. Can therefore not be lost by moral imperfection. It has nothing to do with works, with merit. It has everything to do with belief. You must believe the gospel. And if you do, you are eternally secure. If you don't, well, then by definition, you're not a believer. If you don't believe, you're not a believer. That's how we need to think about these things. Getting back to this, he begins this thing about the heavenly calling and our heavenly destiny. Look at what awaits us. We just read in chapter 2. God's going to introduce us to the council. He's going to introduce the council to us. There's going to be this meeting in the congregation and the council. All this neat stuff. That's what awaits us. That is the heavenly calling, the heavenly destiny. And then he goes in, he gives us essentially a few reminders. He begins to contrast Moses and Jesus. Makes the explicit point for Jesus has been counted worthy of more glory than Moses. And it wasn't Moses, it was a bad guy. Moses was faithful in all God's house as a servant to testify to the things that were to be spoken later. But Christ is faithful over God's house as a son. Again, I've commented on it in each installment of the podcast when it comes to the book of Hebrews. I don't know how you can be comfortable with a Hebrew roots theology. Again, the extreme forms of that and the book of Hebrews. Because here we go again, he'll just throw that in. Christ is superior to Moses and he means it. I mean, this is scripture. I want to camp. We're not going to go into that again, because again, we've had a lot of that in Hebrews 1 and 2, the superiority of Christ. I want to focus, orient ourselves here beginning in verse 5, really 5 through 6a. And let me just read it again. Now, Moses was faithful in all God's house as a servant to testify to the things that were to be spoken later. But Christ is faithful over God's house as a son. I'm going to stop there. This is the second half of verse 6. We're going to spend a lot of time on. I kind of like the way Guthrie summarizes verse 5 and verse part of verse 6. He says, the word for servant here is not the usual term, do-loss, used elsewhere in the New Testament, but therapone, which occurs only here. So the word for servant here is a bit of a different term. It refers to a personal service freely rendered. It is a more tender word than do-loss and does not imply the latter's overtone of servility. Even so, the personal attendant cannot share the same status as the son. In Moses' case, the servant had an important task to perform. Think of Moses as the servant back to Guthrie here. In his case, he had an important task to perform. That was to bear testimony to what was to follow. In other words, what Moses represents in Jewish history is not in itself complete. It was pointing forward to a fuller revelation of God at a later time. In other words, it concerns things that were to be spoken later, which must point to the time of Christ. The mission of the servant, great though it was, prepares the way for the greater mission of the Son. The faithfulness of Christ is repeated to bring out its superiority over Moses by virtue of his sonship. As a son, that goes the main theme of the opening part of the epistle. The writer is therefore impressed by the thought that our high priest is none other than God's son. Again, I kind of like the way Guthrie deals with that. Again, it's not the denigration of Moses. The writer of the book of Hebrews here is not picking on Moses. He's not beating Moses over the head. He doesn't have a low view of Moses. He just has a higher view of Jesus. So again, in thinking about the old economy, the New Economy, Old Testament, New Testament, Moses, Jesus, Hebrew stuff, Jesus stuff, all that, we don't want to, you know, the whole thing about messianic congregations and whatnot. Again, those things aren't bad. What's bad is when we elevate the law, when we elevate Moses, we elevate the Old Testament in terms of its theological approach, we elevate that in such a way that we end up denying or denigrating Christ, the Son, because the reverse is actually true. The Son is the one that's superior to the other, not the other way around. You know, Moses, the Torah, the law is not superior to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It leads to that. Okay, it alerts people to the fact that, you know, hey, you have this need of what's going to happen on the cross, the atonement, the Gospel, so on and so forth. They have their respective places and they're both good. One isn't bad and the other good. One is just lesser and inferior to the other in these sorts of ways. I kind of like the way, you know, Guthrie put that because again, the whole point is not to pick on Moses, it's to elevate Jesus. Now, as far as the latter part of verse six, this is where we're going to spend most of our time because what he says, what the writer says in verse six is really going to affect everything else in the chapter and involve everything else in the chapter. So let me just read the second part again. So here we've just heard, you know, chapter three, hey, he's referred to these people as holy brothers, you who share in the heavenly calling, you know, this heavenly destiny we have and the context for that is the first two chapters, reminding us again of the gospel superiority to the Torah, all this stuff. And then he says, and we are his house, we are God's house again because of Christ. Okay, we are his house. If indeed, we hold fast our confidence and our boasting in our hope. Now, there's a conditional statement here, there's the if word here, the conditional statements, this is this a little bit of Guthrie again, the conditional statements in this epistle are significant. Again, this is from Guthrie again, the writer wishes to make it clear that only those who are consistent with what they profess have any claim to be part of the house. Unquote. Now, conditional statements, you notice that what he said there, the conditional statements plural in this epistle are significant. This is not going to be the only one. We're going to see this kind of talk through the rest of the book of Hebrews, where the writer will be talking to believers, he'll be talking about believers, you know, people who, again, understand the gospel, have embraced it, they have chosen to follow Christ over against the Torah, you know, the Old Testament system, all that kind of stuff. We know who he's talking to. And then you will get these conditional statements. And where I want us to fix our minds again is that the conditions are going to be oriented not around behavior, not around performance, there is no merit. The conditions are always going to be fluttering around the issue of do you believe or not? Right now, do you believe? That is the thing that matters. That is the only condition that has to be met. Do you believe? So here we get our first one. Yep, we're our God's house. We sure are. If, again, if indeed we hold fast our confidence, our boasting and our hope. Now, if you've had a little Greek, you know, grammar, I planned a little sidebar here. There are different kinds of conditional statements in Greek, and we have one of those kinds here in the book of Hebrews. So a little grammar lapse here, again, for people who might, you know, either expect to hear this, or if they don't hear it, they're going to think, oh, Mike skipped that, you know, Greek grammar stuff, you know, no, I mean, we're well aware of it. You get if then statements in scripture a lot, and there are different ways to express if then statements in Greek, New Testament's written in Greek. And those different expressions sort of imply or suggest different things. Now the way that academics, the way that grammarians talk about this is they use terms like, Prothesis and Apothesis. So you can impress your friends again with some vocabulary. The Prothesis is the if statement. The Apothesis is the then statement. If then, Prothesis, Apothesis. So, you know, in our case here in Hebrews 3-6, the Prothesis is the if statement, which is if we hold fast our confidence, our boasting in hope, and then the Apothesis is the then, then, then. If we do that, then we are God's house, you know, we are part of God's house. Now notice what it doesn't say. Notice what the writer doesn't say. He doesn't say if we do XYZ work, then we are part of God's house. If we do XYZ, you know, wonderful thing, you know, if we have enough merit, if we, you know, are on the way to moral perfection, if we do XYZ work, then we are part of God's house. He doesn't say that. He also doesn't say if we avoid XYZ sin, then we are part of God's house. Works is nowhere in the picture here. Okay, what's in the picture here is if we hold fast our confidence and our boasting in our hope, if we keep being confident in our hope, if we do that, then yes, absolutely sure we are part of God's house. Now in Greek, this verse can be assigned to something called a third class condition. There's some variability with the classes and so somebody might argue for one, Dan Wallace talks about five of these, but he actually only has sections in his syntax book for four of them, so I don't know why he abandoned the fifth as far as a discussion. But there are more than just this one. This one is a third class condition that's typically where the grammar here is going to fall. And you identify one of those by, the Prothesis has the word, the Greek word, on which is present here and then it's followed by a subjunctive verb, that is a verb in the subjunctive move. Then that's what you also have here. The subjunctive in grammar is the mood of unreality. That is a writer would put a verb into the subjunctive mood to communicate the idea that the action I'm describing here is contingent on something. It's not yet realized. It's not yet actualized. It's just still out there. It hasn't happened yet. It's therefore not real yet. The mood of unreality is the subjunctive mood. To quote Wallace here, what we've got going on here in this particular situation, he talks about the third class condition and the subjunctive and whatnot. He says this, the third class condition often presents the condition as uncertain of fulfillment, but still likely. I'll just break in here. If you look at the verse, if indeed we hold fast our confidence, our boasting, again, it's not fulfilled yet. There's a contingency here, but the third class condition, it doesn't portray this as, boy, this is really probably not going to happen. It's actually the opposite. It gives it a positive flavor to it. It's still a likely thing. The people that the writer is writing to, again, they're Jewish believers. Jews, most likely in most of them, they have abandoned, again, the Mosaic system. They have chosen to believe that Jesus is the Messiah. They're under persecution. They're under duress. But the writer still, again, is communicating the idea that I'm confident that you're going to endure here. You're going to keep believing. Again, he's not saying I'm confident that you're going to keep doing works. I'm confident that you're going to pile up enough merit so that God looks at your life and says, oh, you were good enough. That is not what he's saying. He's not saying, I'm confident that you're going to avoid sinning and falling enough time so that God will still be happy. That is not what he's saying. He's saying, I'm confident that you're going to keep believing, that you're going to stay in the faith. You're not going to reject it. You're not going to go back to a different gospel. You're not going to abandon your faith. The issue is always, do you believe? It's none of this other stuff. Back to Wallace here. The third class condition encompasses a broad semantic range. There's A, a logical connection. If A, then B, in the present time, this is sometimes called the present general condition. Again, you don't have to remember any of this. This is just grammar talk for the grammar geeks in the audience. Wallace says there's a logical connection in the present time indicating nothing particular as to the fulfillment of the processes, of the if statement. It's just kind of a neutral statement. B, this could describe a mere hypothetical situation or one that probably will not be fulfilled. And C, it could also describe a more probable future occurrence, something that is confident, that is very likely to happen. The third class condition encompasses a broad range of potentialities in Koine Greek. It depicts what is likely to occur in the future. Or, again, what could possibly occur or what is only hypothetical could be any of these. In classical Greek Wallace says, the third class condition was usually restricted to the first usage, the more probable outcome. But with the subjunctives encroaching on the domain of the optative and Hellenistic area, Wallace goes off here, the structural categories expanded accordingly. What he means by that is the end of the quote. In New Testament Greek, the use of the subjunctive verb form, that mood, sort of starts to subsume some of the duties of the third class conditional statement. And so that when you combine this particular Greek particle with a subjunctive, that, again, sort of is kind of the new way to formulate the idea that we have something out here that, yes, we'll admit, is still contingent. It's not a realized condition yet. But most likely this is going to happen. This is going to occur. So it's actually an expression of confidence and not pessimism on the part of the writer. And for our purposes, that's what we need to take away. You know, here, the writer is saying, if indeed we hold fast our confidence and our boasting, you know, in our hope, if we keep hoping, you know, in our hope, we're confident in our hope. That is a statement of optimism, not of pessimism. Okay, so we need to keep that in mind. Now the word for confidence here, if we indeed hold fast our confidence, is significant. Sometimes in the New Testament, this gets translated as boldness. And if you did a concordant search on it, you're going to hit a lot of occasions where that is how a typical English translation would have chosen to render it. That's useful to know because again, it helps convey the idea of optimism and not pessimism, you know, holding fast our confidence. This is something we don't just sort of casually believe, you know, that, that, that, you know, sort of requires a casual commitment. No, this is something we sincerely believe and we're committed to, you know, in sort of a tenacious, bold way. And that's what the writer's trying to convey by using this term confidence. And that's what we need to do when we, when he says we need to hold fast our confidence. It means we need to believe boldly. We need to believe boldly. We need to, again, be not just, you know, confident, it's kind of a neutral term. This term, paracia, we need to believe boldly. We need to be daring. We need to believe something that is, is, is spectacular and outlandish, you know, but, but, you know, in other words, God has, has promised this to us. What's our promise that we would be members of the family of God, that we will have the eternal life. We need to believe that boldly. It needs to move us. It needs to affect, again, the way we think and behave. We need to believe boldly. Hope is also, again, kind of an interesting word. Guthrie, again, says the New Testament word for hope is much stronger than the normal English use in which it almost means no more than a pious wish that we may, that may have no real basis. In fact, the kind, that kind of hope would hardly provide a satisfactory basis for pride. No one's going to boast in a thing which is not certain to happen unless you're an idiot. That's Mike now interjecting here. Back to Guthrie, the writer is sufficiently convinced, he himself believes boldly. The writer is sufficiently convinced of the certainty of Christian hope to use a strong expression, and that's what he does here. He uses ta ka kema, exultant boasting to describe the Christian's attitude toward this particular hope. So again, when the writer says, if indeed we hold fast our confidence, if indeed we believe boldly, and if we boast in this hope, in other words, we exalt in it, we are moved by it. This is not just a pious wish, but it's something, you know, sincere doesn't capture it. It's something tenacious. It's an active, believing, confident, bold faith. If we really, I guess maybe the way we could say it, if you really, really believe, if you're really committed to this, where there's no other option, it doesn't mean you never have a question. It doesn't mean that you're never shaken by life. It just means at the end of the day, you believe that this, this faith, this promise of eternal life in Christ is the only one that matters. There are no others. You will not trade it for anything, even though you don't understand what's going on in life, even though you could be shaken, even though you could be troubled, even though you could be enduring persecution and hardship like these believers were, the ones he's writing to were. Despite all of that, you wouldn't trade this for anything. There is no other option. There's no superior option. This is where you're at. At the end of the day, this is what you believe. That's what he's trying to describe here, that kind of belief. Again, unfortunately, when we put this in a condition, a lot of people, again, are going to be reading this, and I remember at the time of my own Christian life, I'd read these conditional statements and be a little worried about them. I mean, I could articulate the gospel, I could sort of spit it back to people. I understood it intellectually, but it hadn't really gripped me. The reality that, you know what? Performance is thrown out the window, even if I could perform perfectly, which of course is impossible because I'm not God. We're even dealing with thoughts and motives and the intents of the heart. There's no way to do that, but even if I could get sort of near that in terms of my behavior, my track record. That is not the basis of salvation. Romans 5a, keep going back to the sermon, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. He's not checking in to see our progress and perfection. It's not even on the table. While we were yet sinners, while we were contemptible sinners, while we could have cared less about much less perfection, but doing anything that God would have approved of. While we were in that circumstance, Christ died for us. That is the gospel. That is what needs to be believed. You can go back to the example of Abraham. You believe before he was circumcised. This is why Romans does this. This is why the New Testament does this so frequently. To convince you, to convince me, to convince all of us, that the gospel has nothing to do with merit and human performance, it is all about believing in what Christ has done. That's it. That is it. We need to take that, and that needs to be our filter. That needs to be our orienting point for what Hebrews says here and Hebrews says elsewhere. Frankly, the writer of Hebrews makes it clear because he starts talking about believing versus not believing. Again, it's actually pretty clear. The confidence that we have here, that the writer wants us to have, again, is about this promise of eternal life. What is this confidence? What's the writer talking about? It's the promise of eternal life. It's the promise of access to the presence of God, membership in the family of God. It's not that really hard to discern if we just read the whole passage instead of just pulling this one verse out and worrying about it. The writer uses this term elsewhere in Hebrews 4, he says, let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. What's the confidence about? Access to God. This thing about being part of the family of God, eternal life, the promise of eternal life. Hebrews 10, 19, therefore, brothers, since we have confidence, and this is the same term here that's back here in Hebrews 3, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, again, access to God, Hebrews 10, 35, it shows up again, therefore, do not throw away your confidence, which has a great reward. Well, throw away our confidence. What is he talking about? Don't throw away your belief. Don't throw away your faith. And hold fast your confidence, exalt in the hope that is set before you. Believe it, and performance doesn't factor into this at all. But I realize, again, I'm harping on this because I realize that for a lot of Christians, they'll read things like this, other things in the book of Hebrews, and that is immediately where the mind goes, immediately where our mind goes, how am I measuring up? How am I performing? And again, if you gave somebody a pop quiz on what's the gospel, they could write it out. They could give you the answer. But what's going through their mind and their heart is how do I measure up? And honestly, you have to look at what's being said and stop filling in stuff that isn't being said. This is not about performance. This is about belief, belief. The threat, think of it the alternative way. The threat to holding, to having eternal life. The threat to sort of failing the contingency, the if statement. What's going to overturn the if statement? If we hold fast our confidence and our boasting in hope, then we're God's house. What would undermine that? What would destroy it? What would get in the way? What would defeat it? What's the enemy? The threat to that isn't a specific sin of commission or omission. There's no sin mentioned here. The threat is unbelief. It's not believing that undermines confidence. Not believing is what undermines confidence. And again, I understand how we can feel conflicted when we read this stuff. But the writer doesn't insert any specific sin in there. We impose that stuff on the passage and then we worry about our performance. We worry about how we're doing. That is not biblical thinking about salvation. It's not biblical thinking about this passage. That which cannot be gained by moral perfection cannot be lost by moral imperfection. Merit is not what's required for eternal life. Belief is confidence in the promise of God. We are confident that if we believe God will do what he has promised, he will give us eternal life. We will meet the counsel. We will be in the family of God. Not because of anything we have done, but because of his son. His son is the one who built the house. We are God's house. We are the body of Christ. We are united to him. This has nothing to do with how am I doing? It has nothing to do with that. Everything is about, are you believing or not? Do you believe or not? Now, the rest of the passage actually bears this out. Let's take a look at it. Again, in light of all that set up, and again, I'm harping on this deliberately. So I think people need to hear it. They need to hear it more than once, and Lord willing, again, those who are really struggling here will let this sink in. Do not impose your worries about your performance on the passage. The writer doesn't. That's not what's in there. Don't put it in there. Don't change the message. You go to verse 7. Therefore, again, in light of all this, therefore, as the Holy Spirit says today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion. Now, you notice there, their hard hearts is connected to this rebellion thing. Well, you know, what's he talking about? You know, what's the rebellion thing? Well, we'll get to that. Do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion on the day of testing in the wilderness, where your father's put me to the test and saw my works for 40 years. Therefore, I was provoked with that generation and said, they always go astray in their hearts, in their hearts. They always go astray in their hearts. They have not known my ways. As I swore in my wrath, they shall not enter my rest. Now, that line, that thing about not entering into my rest, helps us define what the day of testing is, it's singular, the day of testing. There's something specific going on here. When did God say this kind of thing in the Old Testament? And by the way, what is my rest? Well, I would suggest to you that God's rest is where he lives. It's where he is. It's his home. And in the Old Testament context, that was the Promised Land, the place where he planned to dwell, to be, you know, he wanted Israel to be his people, he would be their God. OK, this is why rest in Hebrews 4 and some things we're going to hit later in Hebrews is going to be associated with the presence, the dwelling, the place where God is. This goes back to the Old Testament. My rest, they will not enter my rest. It's another way of saying they're not going to live where I live. They're not going to go into the land. It helps us orient this language. You know, the context of this Old Testament passage, this Old Testament thing that's being referred to is actually when the spies return to Kadesh, Barnea, this is Numbers 13. This is the failure when Moses sends the spies into the land. They see the Anakim and they fail to believe. They didn't violate any point of the law. They had the law. They got that back in Exodus 20. Back to Sinai. Read Numbers 13 and then Numbers 14. We're going to talk about Numbers 14 here in a moment. This is the moment where God says, they're not going into the land. They are not entering into my rest. Their flaw, their crime, the thing that kept them out was not a violation of law. It was they didn't believe God. They didn't believe. You know, they just didn't believe. They turned away. Let's go back to Egypt. OK, they turned away. This is the crucial moment in the Old Testament. If you go to Numbers 14, I'll just read a couple verses. I'm not going to read the whole chapter. But in Numbers 14, again, this is right on the heels. Numbers 13 is when the spies come back and they say, oh, this place is great. But we got a problem. Deanna Keem are in the land and there's no way we're pulling this off. Caleb and Joshua, of course, say, what are you talking about? You don't remember the Red Sea. You know, we can do this. You know, God's on our side and and 10 of the spies say, uh, that ain't going to happen. They didn't believe it. So God gets angry. He gets angry in Numbers 14. It leads to a rebellion, you know, that the people raise a loud cry at the beginning of Numbers 14. You know, when they hear the spies say, we can't do it. The people start grumbling against Moses. The whole congregation said to them, would that we had died in the land of Egypt or would that we had died in this wilderness? Why is the Lord bringing us into this land to fall by the sword? Our wives and our little ones will become a prey. Would it not be better for us to go back to Egypt? And they said to one another, let us choose a leader and go back to Egypt. You know, this is the straw that breaks the proverbial camel's back. And God gets angry. And he says in verse 11, the Lord said to Moses, how long will this people despise me? And how long will they not believe in me? In spite of all the signs that I have done among them, I will strike them with the pestilence and disinherit them. And I will make of you, Moses, a nation greater and mightier than they. And then Moses intercedes. You know, Moses said to the Lord, then the Egyptians will hear of it. For you brought up this people in your might from among them, and they will tell the inhabitants of this land. They have heard that you, O Lord, are in the midst of this people. For you, O Lord, are seen face to face. And so he's afraid of God. God's reputation is going to be tarnished. They're going to say in verse 16, the Lord wasn't able to bring this people to the land. Now, please, verse 17, let the power of the Lord be great as your promise, saying the Lord is slow to anger and abiding instead fast love, forgiving iniquity and transgression, so on and so forth. You please pardon them. You know, Moses has this famous prayer. And then we hit verse 20. Then the Lord said, I have pardoned according to your word. In other words, I'm not going to annihilate them. I have pardoned according to your word. But truly, as I live and as all the earth shall be filled with the glory of the Lord, none of the men who have seen my glory and my signs that I did in Egypt and in the wilderness, and yet have put me to the test these 10 times and have not obeyed my voice, none of them shall see the land that I swore to give to their fathers. And none of those who despised me shall see it. But my servant Caleb, because he has a different spirit and has followed me fully, I will bring into the land into which he went and his descendants shall possess it. This is the moment where God decides enough, their rebellion, this wish to go back to Egypt, this turning away from God, this turning against Moses, part of the Numbers 14 that I didn't read, they're ready to stone Moses in air. You know what it was, stones. This rebellion was rooted, propelled by unbelief. It was not a transgression of the law. It was unbelief. And this is what the writer of Hebrews is drawing on in Hebrews three. He, I mean, he's writing to the Hebrews, okay? They know this story. They know what he's talking about and they know what he's not talking about, okay? So let's go back to Hebrews three, verse 11, as I swore in my wrath, they shall not enter my rest. Verse 12, take care, brothers. Okay, this is the writer addressing his audience now. Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God, leaving you to turn around and go a different direction. You abandon your believing loyalty. You abandon your faith. It's not a violation of the law. It's not a sin of commission or omission, okay? Did I pray enough today? Okay, am I in church often enough? Do I read enough of my Bible? Do I do enough of this? Do I avoid this sin often enough? You know, that is not what's in view. The issue is don't have an unbelieving heart. And I hope it's clear. The unbelief here is defined as, do I believe in God's promise to give me eternal life through Christ or not? It's not that you don't believe enough to get a particular prayer answered. God's gonna judge me. He doesn't like me now because I prayed for that job and I prayed 10 times and I should have prayed 15. I should have fasted. I, I, I, I should have done this, this, this. Okay, again, I understand where some believers are at here because, you know, I went through this too. You have got to stop substituting faith in the gospel in what happened on the cross with your performance. It's an easy trap to fall into. It's not I, I, I, I, am I doing this? Am I avoiding that enough? Okay, that is not the gospel. And this is the concern of the writer of Hebrews. He doesn't want them to abandon their confidence, confidence in what? Their performance? No, confidence that God, God will do what he said he would do. If you believe, you will be part of my family. If you believe, you will have eternal life. You either believe that or you don't. Okay, and again, the temptation, sort of the unconscious, subconscious temptation is how we can take that idea and turn it, twist it, pervert it into something about our performance. Okay, you need to be aware of that propensity and you need to combat it with the example that he gives right here. Again, what is the issue? Why did God say you will not enter into my rest? Cause they just didn't believe him. They just didn't believe that God was gonna do what he said he would do. What did God say he would do? He said, I will fight for you and you will conquer these people. You will go into the land. It is yours. They just didn't believe it. Yeah, no violation of the law was about their belief. So he says here, again, back to verse 13, but exhort one another. Let's go back to verse 12. Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart leading you to fall away from the living God, leaving you to just to turn to unbelief, 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, for we have come to share in Christ indeed if we hold our original confidence firm to the end. As it is said today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion. In other words, don't fall into unbelief. What's the deceitfulness of sin? What is this hardening of the hearts as in the day of the rebellion? He just defined it for you. You go back to Numbers 14, they don't believe. That is the focus. That's what he's talking about. Verse 16, for who were those who heard and yet rebelled? What did they hear back in Numbers? They heard God promise that it was their land and he was gonna fight for them, go in and take it. Who are those who heard that and yet rebelled? They didn't believe and they turned on, let's go back to Egypt. They turned on Moses and Aaron. It wasn't not all those who left Egypt led by Moses. Those were the people who did this. Verse 17, and with whom was he provoked for 40 years? Was it not with those who sinned because bodies fell in the wilderness? And to whom did he swear that they would not enter into his rest but to those who were disobedient? Well, what is this sin? What is this disobedience? What is he talking about? Verse 19, so we see that they were unable to enter because of unbelief. There it is, point blank. Hebrews 319, so we see that they were unable to enter because of unbelief. When they made the decision to reject their faith, then they started doing things like, hey, let's stone Moses and Aaron. This is rooted in unbelief. The issue is unbelief. They were not allowed to enter because of unbelief. The writer really can't be any clearer than this. He doesn't say, so we see that they were unable to enter because they didn't observe the Sabbath, because they didn't pray often enough, because they were immoral. He doesn't say any of that. The issue is unbelief. Now the point here, again, is that this whole discussion about the conditionality of realizing eternal life is not about works. It's about belief versus unbelief. And I'll say it again. I said it toward the beginning of the episode. If you believe you are eternally secure, why? Because it's God, God promised. He is the guarantor of what he says he will deliver. If you believe you are eternally secure. In other words, you can be confident. You're trusting God, okay? That's a good thing to trust. It's a good thing to sort of put your eggs in that basket. If you believe you are eternally secure, if you don't, you're not because if you don't, by definition you are an unbeliever. So could we please, again, here's my plea. Could we please stop basing our salvation on performance? Christians, Christians who claim to understand and embrace the gospel, and we might have it really good in our head. Christians who claim to understand and embrace the gospel, would you please stop basing your security on your performance? Why would the security of your eternal life be performance-based when getting the promise given to you in the beginning had nothing to do with performance? Wow, we were yet sinners. Christ died for us. Where's the transition to performance? You know where it is? It's in your head. It's in your head, it's in your heart, it's in your emotions, those sorts of things. Okay, we need to stop basing our security on performance. The question is really simple. Do you believe? If the answer to that question is yes, then you have eternal security. You have eternal life. Because that is the only thing that God wants to hear. It's the only thing that matters. So what about doubt? Questions, having questions is not on belief. Wondering what God is doing isn't on belief. It's not throwing your believing loyalty away altogether, believing nothing or believing in some other God, some other message, some other means of salvation. Having questions isn't that. Okay, that's a separate thing. That's a separate decision that's made. Having questions is not on belief. Wondering what the world God's up to. Why are you doing this, Lord? That's not on belief. Wondering why God did or didn't do something isn't on belief. Refusing to believe God's promise of eternal life through Christ, refusing to believe that that is true, that is on belief. Rejecting the gospel in favor of some other gospel, that is on belief. Choosing to believe nothing at all is on belief. And the contrast should be clear. What if I or someone does that? Another question always comes up, well, what if a year from now or 10 days or six months or whatever, what if I just bag it? I'm gonna say, I don't believe this stuff anymore. Can I come back to faith? There are some who would go to Hebrews 6 and say, no, you're done. It's a done deal. You're gonna burn in hell. Look, that is not what Hebrews 6 says. It's not what it's about. It's not what it means. And there's a simple way to assess that, to assess the consistency of that. The question is actually answerable from the Old Testament. And that three quarters of our Bible that we tend to forget about, okay? What if I or somebody else betrays our faith? We go and worship another God or nothing at all. We fall into unbelief. We choose unbelief. What happens then? Well, the question is answerable from the Old Testament. What did God do to his people who turned away from his covenantal promise to worship other gods? What did he do in the Old Testament? He said, well, they judged him. You know, that's the exiled. Well, yeah, he did judge them. But what did he do before that? For decades in some cases. What did he do before that? He used the prophets to call them back to faith. Now God wouldn't send the prophets to say, repent and return to me if it wasn't possible. Of course you can believe. You can turn from unbelief to belief. Of course you can. There's no cosmic rule that says you can't. The Old Testament is very clear. You had people who were worshipers of Yahweh who turned away. And God looked at them and said, come back. Now he knows the human heart. He knew their hearts. And we just went through Ezekiel and there were passages in there where God says, look, I know it's not gonna happen. They've, you know, God knows when, you know, this person or that person has crossed the point of no return, you know, people harden their hearts, you know, in that way they're just not gonna, God knows that. That is not in our job description. We're not omniscient. Of course God knows when that happens to some people because he's omniscient, okay? He can't not know that. The point is that God extended the offer, okay? For people to come back. And it is a misreading of the prophets to suggest that nobody ever did. The door is always left open in every prophet, no matter how hard he rails against the people of God. And they do quite a bit of railing, but there are people who are spared. Okay, there are people, again, who hear the message of the prophets. They go off into exile and they know why they're there. They know why they're there. Again, they own what they and their countrymen have done, but they're gonna believe, they're gonna trust God because you know, that's all they have. Of course you can come back to faith. In the Old Testament, it's the analogy to this. People know that, people understand that, you know, who are, again, the audience of the writer of Hebrews. God knows every heart. He knows where everybody's at. We don't. But the point, again, that we're trying to hammer away at here is, yes, you can choose to believe. God leaves it up to you. It's the only thing that's required. It's the only contingency. It has nothing to do with morality. It has nothing to do with that. Do you believe or not? And again, Hebrews 3 is where we sort of start our, it's our beginning point into this discussion. We're gonna see other passages like this. And again, I just wanna try to fix in our minds that what the writer is trying to target in these passages is what his fear is. His fear is not that somebody's gonna break a Torah law. His fear is not that, oh, you're not gonna pray as much as you could have this week. You're not gonna memorize as many Bible verses as you could this week. You're gonna get mad at somebody this week. You're gonna show that you're flawed in some way this week. That is not what he's worried about. What he's worried about, what the writer is worried about is that people will turn to unbelief. That is the question. So again, I'll end the episode saying it again. If you believe you are eternally secure because God is good for that. If you believe you are eternally secure, if you don't, you're not. We don't sin away salvation. We either believe or we reject it. And the decision is ours. All right, Mike, again, it feels good to get back into the Bible. I agree with you. That's probably gonna be one of the more listened ones as that's, I guess, salvation is the topic, right? It's a hard lesson to learn because when you become a believer and you wanna be serious about your faith, you do evaluate yourself. It's just a human thing to do. You wanna feel like you're making God happy. You wanna feel like you're holding up the end of the bar, all these sort of cliche kinds of things. We wanna feel that we're worth God's investment in his time that we deserve. You see, when we start thinking that way, we see how our thoughts drift into performance. It becomes about our contribution. It becomes about us in some way. It's a very hard thing to sort of see. You see what you're doing. And then again, it's hard to see it. And then remember, before I could have brought anything to the discussion at all, Christ died for me. He didn't care about it. If he didn't care about it then, why would he care about it? It's just very hard to see that because we were sensitive, we wanna do the right thing as believers, but it's so easy to have that turn into some sort of performance trap. I get it. I understand it has been part of my Christian experience as well. I remember going through that, but hopefully we can prevent ourselves from imposing our own worries, our own desire to feel a certain way onto the text. Hopefully we can avoid doing that. And how would you respond to somebody that has turned away from their faith, I guess, and gets in a car wreck and dies in between that period before maybe they would have come back? I mean, that's just bad luck. Yeah, I mean, ultimately we don't know where the person was at, even in the immediacy of it, but if that person again had faith and forsook it, and they tell us that, so that's what we have to go on. Again, we don't know the innermost thoughts of that person's mind, but God can decide in his knowledge because he's omniscient. He may have known that that's where that person's at, and this is where it ends for them. We don't know that. We don't know sort of the behind the veil machinations or thinking or what's going on either in that person's heart or with God himself. We just can't know that. So we shouldn't beat ourselves up about that. We can hope again that maybe in the last moments of life, they had a thought about their faith or they were even thinking about it in the two or three seconds before they got hit by the car. We just don't know. We can hope that, but that's about all we can do. If they died in a state where they are rejecting, willfully rejecting the gospel, then the result of that is they're not gonna have eternal life. But we ultimately don't know that. We ultimately don't know. Well, let's just- I've known people in that situation, in that circumstance. It's like, I sure hope this is the way they left this world thinking about the gospel that I know that they understood, that they knew and heard and had once said they believe it. I hope that, but I just don't know. All right, Mike. Well, next week, back into Hebrews four, what are we gonna learn in Hebrews four? Hebrews four is a little bit more of this kind of thing because we go back to the, they shall not enter my rest language. So we're gonna get a little bit more of this language, but it's also gonna transition to Jesus and his role as high priest. So we're gonna, again, start moving into that whole section of the book of Hebrews. So a little bit of, not necessarily repetition, but a little bit more nuance of this or maybe some other illustrations of it, and then transitioning into some of the heavier theological, Christological stuff that Hebrews is sort of known for. Okay, Mike, looking forward to it. And again, if you haven't gone and left us a review on iTunes or wherever you consume our podcast, please go read us, leave us a review. Let us know how we're doing. I get in that Facebook group, have some great conversations. And Mike, I just wanna thank everybody for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. God bless. Thanks for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, visit www.nakedbibleblog.com. To learn more about Dr. Heizer's other websites and blogs, go to www.brmsh.com.