(Hebrews) ch.3:7-4:11 — Zac Poonen

Channel: Sermon Index

We were looking at Hebrews in chapter three and verse seven, where we read these words, Wherefore, as the Holy Spirit says, Today, if you will hear His voice, harden not your hearts as in the provocation in the day of temptation in the wilderness.

When your fathers tempted me, proved me and saw my works forty years, wherefore I was grieved with that generation, and said, They do always err in their heart, they have not known my ways, so I swear in my wrath, they shall not enter into my rest.

One of the great topics of the book of Hebrews, particularly we see in chapter three and four, is this matter of entering into God's rest. Now this is a very important subject, and it's something that many Christians are quite ignorant of.

It is not God's will that we should remain in perpetual unrest. God's will is that we shall enter into His rest. And this passage indicates that in the Old Testament, the land of Canaan was a type of the life of rest that God has planned for His people.

But just like in the Old Testament, the people who were redeemed by the blood of the Lamb and who came out of Egypt, did not enter into the land of Canaan, did not enter into that life of rest. In just the same way, today there are people whose sins are forgiven, who do not enter into this life of rest.

And it is to those who do not press on to perfection that these words are written, Today if you hear His voice, harden not your heart. Now that is a verse that we often quote to the unbeliever. We tell the unbeliever, God is speaking to you, and when He speaks to you, don't harden your heart.

And we have reduced that statement as a mere warning to unbelievers to turn from their sin and to receive forgiveness. But to whom is this chapter written? In fact, the whole letter. In the first verse of chapter three, we read, it's addressed to holy brethren, our takers of the heavenly calling.

That is obviously referring to born-again believers, to them, He says. The Holy Spirit says to you, Today, if you will hear His voice, harden not your heart. So these words are addressed to believers.

And if you are a believer, this is God's word to you. The Holy Spirit says, Today, when you hear God's voice, do not harden your heart. Yes, a believer can harden his heart. A believer can neglect to hear God's voice and thus find that his heart is hardened.

Responding to God Today Rather Than Tomorrow

And when do we have to take heed? Today. Satan's great word is tomorrow. God's great word is today. We read in 2 Corinthians 6 and verse 2, Now is the accepted time, now is the day of salvation. Today is the day of salvation.

It is now that you can receive forgiveness of sin. It is now that you can receive the Holy Spirit into your heart. It is now that you can enter into a life of victory over sin. Salvation is now, today.

It is now that you can turn from sin and believe in the Lord Jesus. But Satan's great word is tomorrow. Remember what Jesus said in Matthew chapter 6, Take no anxious thought for tomorrow, for the morrow will take care of itself.

But live one day at a time, Jesus was saying, sufficient unto this day is the evil thereof. And it is God's will that we as believers should live one day at a time and not be anxious and concerned even about tomorrow.

Today is God's day. In the Old Testament, God revealed himself as I am that I am. That is in the present tense. Not I was, not I will be, but I am. God always lives in the present. And we, when we become children of God and we are to become more and more like God in our life, we are to live in the present.

Today, this is God's great word. Of course, the reason why Satan says tomorrow is so that we never enter into God's will. Remember when Paul preached to Felix, it says Felix trembled. God was convicting him through his spirit, but he said, well, I hear you some other time when it is more convenient.

Because Satan had whispered into his heart, tomorrow, tomorrow. And this is the word that he whispers to many, many people all over the world. Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. And as we know, tomorrow never comes.

But the Holy Spirit says, today, now. There is no hope tomorrow if you don't respond today when you hear his voice. Call upon the Lord when he is near. Seek him when he can be found. And if we can be found today and his voice is heard today, we must respond today.

Many, many people have missed God's best, because when God spoke to them, they said, well, I'll think about it later. And so we have to be very careful. God is merciful with us, and he was merciful with the Israelites in the wilderness for quite a long time.

They rebelled against him. They disobeyed him for a long time. But one day, we read, when they came to Kedeshbarnia, you read the history of that in Numbers, Chapter 13 and 14. One day, when they came to Kedeshbarnia, and they rebelled against God at that time, then God said, Now that is final.

You are no longer going to have a chance to enter into Canaan's land. This generation has rebelled against me ten times now. God gave them nine chances, but the tenth time, when they rebelled against him, you read that in Numbers, Chapter 14, then God said, Now you shall never enter into this promised land.

This generation must perish. And so God condemned them to another thirty-eight years, a total of forty years of wandering in the wilderness. And that is the example that is referred to here in Hebrews 3, verse 9.

When your fathers tempted me, proved me, and saw my works for forty years, one day God spoke to them and said, Enter into the promised land now. And when they said no at that point, when they wouldn't believe, when they looked at the giants and said it is impossible, then God said, All right, then you are going to wander in the wilderness.

And they all perished. And this is the condition of many believers today. And this is why we are given this warning, as the Holy Spirit says, Today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your heart. Because if you do, you may be like those people in the wilderness who hardened their heart and they did not enter into God's rest, as it says in verse 11.

The Warning Against an Evil Heart of Unbelief

And therefore it says in verse 12, Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you, that are believers, take heed, brethren. He doesn't say, Take heed, brethren, that these unbelievers who are around you don't get an evil heart of unbelief.

But He says, You, brethren, verse 1, you holy brethren, partakers of the heavenly calling, take heed, lest there be in any of you, not in the unbeliever, but in you, Hebrews 3, 12, very plain and very clear, an evil heart of unbelief in departing from the living God.

And as we look at that verse, we can ask ourselves this question, Can a man who has come to faith in the Lord Jesus, develop through a process of time, an evil heart of unbelief? According to that verse, yes.

For it says, Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you, an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God. Is it possible for one who is a holy brother, partaker of the heavenly calling, to depart from the living God?

Well, if we read that verse of scripture carefully, the plain and simple answer is yes. Even a child can understand it. And yet there are many believers living in a false security, living in sin, and thinking that God is just going to ignore it.

To such people that word comes. Today if you hear His voice, what is Canaan's land a picture of? It's a picture of a life of victory over all known sin, where the giants that defeated you in the past, now come crumbling down at your feet.

Take heed, brethren, that you don't perish in the wilderness. Take heed, be careful, that you enter into this land of rest. Take heed that there not be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief. Notice what it says.

Unbelief gives an evil heart. We could understand if that spoke of adultery or murder, but unbelief, no faith in God's promises, gives a person an evil heart. The great aim of this letter is to call us to faith, and so let's take heed to that exhortation that we do not fall away from God's grace.

We turn now to Hebrews and chapter 3 and verse 12. We looked at this verse last week. Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief in departing from the living God, but exhort one another daily while it is called today.

There you find that emphasis again. Today, this is the word of God, the word of the Holy Spirit to us. Today, lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin. And again that warning, lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin.

Now whom is he referring to? Whom is he speaking to? Is he talking about the unbeliever being hardened through the deceitfulness of sin? No. The unbeliever is already hardened. He is not going to be hardened.

He is already hardened. And so there's no question of his becoming hard. His heart is like a stone, and it is already hardened. But he's speaking to believers. He's speaking to people whose hearts God has made soft, in whose hearts God has done that work as it is prophesied in the book of Ezekiel, I'll take away their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh.

But to such people, the warning comes. Exhort one another daily while it is called today, lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin. We saw in verse 8, 7 and 8, where this quotation from Psalm 95, verses 7 to 11, the Holy Spirit says, today if you will hear his voice, harden not your heart, is given as an exhortation to these Christians.

Holy brethren, partakers of the heavenly calling, today if you hear his voice, harden not your heart. And it is the same thing referred to in verse 13, lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin.

Why is sin called a deceitful thing? Satan is called a deceiver. In Jeremiah 17, verse 9, we are told that the heart of man is deceitful above all things. Satan is a deceiver. The heart of man deceives him.

And here we are told that sin is a deceitful thing. The meaning is that a man can be hardened and not know that he is hardened because he is deceived. That is a great tragedy. If a man is sick and knows that he is sick, there is some hope for him, for he can take remedies that will lead him to recovery.

But think of a man who is sick and he does not know that he is sick. Above all men he is to be pitied, for he is sick and he does not know that he is sick. Like the Lord said about the people of Israel in the time of Hosea, through the prophet Hosea he says, among my people grey hairs are here and there upon them and they do not even know it.

Meaning that they are losing their spiritual vitality and they do not even know it. Or, like we read in the book of Revelation, chapter 3, to the church in Laodicea, this is not to unbelievers, but to believers in the church in Laodicea, Jesus says, you say, verse 17, that I am rich and increased with goods and have need of nothing and you do not know.

That is the great tragedy. They do not know their real condition. You do not know that you are wretched, miserable, poor, blind and naked. Here were believers who were actually wretched, but they did not know it.

They were actually in a miserable condition, but they did not know it. They were actually poor, they thought they were rich. They were blind and they thought they saw. They were naked and they thought they were clothed.

Now that is possible for believers in the first century, in the days of the apostle John. How much more possible in our day, for a person and for a group of believers and for churches, not to know their wretched spiritual condition.

They can be miserable, wretched, poor, blind and naked and they do not even know it. We say, how is this possible? It is by the deception of Satan. It is by the deception of sin. When a man tries to deceive you, say, to pass on into your hand a counterfeit hundred rupee note, he would seek to give you something that looks exactly like the original hundred rupee note.

And the person who takes it does not even know that he is being deceived. If he knew it, he would not take it. And thus it is with the work of Satan and the work of sin in our hearts. It is utterly deceptive.

We can be hardened by sin and not even know that we are hardened. We can be poor and blind and naked and not know it, like the church in Laodicea. This is a very serious word that anyone who fears and trembles at God's word should fear and tremble at.

Because who is there to say that that condition is not true of you, dear friend? How do you know that you are not being deceived? If you are glorying in your doctrines, if you are glorying in the fact that once upon a time you accepted Jesus Christ as your Savior, but the plain fact is that today you are defeated by sin, your thought life is unclean, your home life is miserable, your children are growing up wayward and for the world, then you do not know that you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked.

You are glorying in the fact that you have got the right doctrines. You are being hardened through the deceitfulness of sin. Now there is only one solution for this. There is only one way by which we can escape this, and that is through God's word.

God's word is a lamp to our feet and a light unto our path. Or, as James says in James chapter one, God's word is like a mirror, James one, twenty-four and twenty-five. I have often thought that if James were writing in the twentieth century, he would have used a word like an x-ray.

God's word is like an x-ray that looks into your heart and shows you whether you are hardened or not. Like the x-ray shows you a lump inside your body that you cannot see otherwise and tells you that you have got a cancer there.

But you may say, well, I feel quite healthy. You may feel quite healthy, but the x-ray has shown you that there is a lump inside your body and that is cancerous. It must be surgically removed. And that is how God's word works in our lives as we expose ourselves to it, the voice of the Holy Spirit.

Today if you will hear His voice, that is the context and that is what comes again in verse fifteen. While it is said, today if you will hear His voice, harden not your hearts, God's provision to keep our hearts from being hardened is His voice.

And His voice comes to us through His word and not just through a mechanical reading of the word. So many people who say they have a quiet time in the morning, it is a mere mechanical reading of the word of God.

The voice of the Holy Spirit does not come through to their hearts from that word. And then, of course, they can be hardened. You can read your Bible in the quiet time in the morning and still be hardened if you do not long to hear the voice of the Spirit coming to you through that word.

And so we need to come to God's word with reverence, fear and humility and longing and a crying out for there are hidden treasures in God's word and these treasures are not on the surface. You do not find gold on the surface.

You have to dig so many thousands of feet into the ground before you get the gold. And so it is with the word of God as we dig into it and yearn for the Spirit of God to speak to us. He will speak to our hearts and thus we are protected from being hardened.

But we are also told that God's word can come to us through other believers. Verse 13, exhort one another daily, lest you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin. And so we need not only to hear God's word directly, but open ourselves to exhortation from other believers.

And it does not matter whether that other believer is younger to you in the Lord or older to you. That does not make any difference. If we are open to receive exhortation from one another, then we shall be protected from being hardened, not otherwise.

If you are a person who does not receive exhortation from others or one who gets offended when somebody tries to exhort you, then, dear friend, you are a certain candidate for hardening. Yes, the devil can harden your heart and deceive you into thinking you are spiritual.

Our only salvation is the word of God. Our only salvation is if we humble ourselves and remain open for other brothers to give us the word and exhort us and correct us, so that we are protected from being hardened through the deceitfulness of sin.

Mutual Responsibility to Exhort One Another

We come now to Hebrews chapter three, verse fourteen. This is following on from verse thirteen, where we are told that we are to exhort one another daily while it is called today, lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin.

Now we have a responsibility there, as I said last week, of receiving exhortation from others, so that we ourselves are not hardened. We need to receive that exhortation, otherwise we can be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin.

But the command here is addressed to us. Exhort one another. This is a mutual responsibility. We have to receive exhortation from others as well as give exhortation to others, for we are not only to keep ourselves from being hardened, but we are to protect our fellow believers from being hardened.

The first question that God asked man after he had sinned was, Adam, where are you? We read that in Genesis chapter three. And that is the first question that God asks us too. Where are you spiritually?

Where are you spiritually today? Are you being hardened? Are you being deceived? Are you wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked and not knowing it? Where are you? The second question that we find coming in Genesis chapter four is, where is your brother?

This is the question that God asks Cain. He asked Adam, where are you? And he asks Cain, where is your brother? And Cain says, am I my brother's keeper? The answer, of course, is yes, you are. You are not just to think of yourself.

You're not just to look after yourself. You are also your brother's keeper. And so, after having answered the first question, God addresses to us, where are you? We need to answer the second question, where is your brother?

The person with whom you are working, who is your brother in the Lord, the person with whom you fellowship in the assembly or church, your brother there, where is he spiritually? And of course, we can ask like Cain, am I my brother's keeper?

How can I be responsible for my brother? And we can be just as hardened as Cain, thinking only of ourselves, and we can be completely off track. And so, we have a mutual responsibility to one another, not only to be saved from this hardening process ourselves, but also to do our best to protect others from being hardened.

It is a responsibility that falls upon every true child of God. To seek, he doesn't have to be a preacher, but he needs to seek to exhort others as God gives him opportunity, so that these others do not get hardened through the deceitfulness of sin.

This process of hardening is taking place all over the world. This deceitfulness of sin is spreading all over the world. And we are called, as the children of God, as the salt of the earth, to stop this rot, this corruption that is spreading over the world.

That is the purpose of salt. We put salt on top of fish and other things to prevent it from going bad. And Jesus said, you are the salt of the earth. You are to keep the world from growing rotten and from getting corrupted.

But then we need to be like salt which has got its savor. We need to be those who have got a living connection with God, where the life of Jesus is flowing and overflowing through us like rivers of living water continuously.

And those rivers, as Jesus said, flow out from our innermost being. They don't flow in, they flow out. God does a work within us that it flows out from us to other people. And this is a fairly good test of the spirit-filled life.

Not how much you have experienced, not how much God has done in you, but how much is flowing out from you to others, bringing life to other people. Are you exhorting others? Are you encouraging others?

Are you giving the word to others? Not just from the pulpit. He doesn't say that we are to get up into the pulpit every day. We don't meet together in the fellowship of the church every day. No. Where do we meet every day?

For it says here, exhort one another daily, not once a week, not in the first day of the week, but daily. Where do we meet one another every day? In our homes, around our meal table, in our sitting rooms, when we talk together.

What do we talk about? Do we talk about the latest gossip or the latest scandal that you have heard, some juicy bit of news that you would like to pass on to others who have itching ears? Then, of course, you do not fulfill your responsibility.

You are leading them further into sin by all your gossip and scandal and all things like that. But we are to exhort one another when we come together. We are to give God's word to one another so that we don't get hardened.

And then it says in verse fourteen, for we are made partakers of Christ. And Jesus Christ did not ever get involved in gossip and scandal and things like that. He was not a gossip monger. When He got together with His disciples, He shared the word of God with them.

And we are told, we are made partakers of Christ. It is of Him that we are partakers, if we hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast unto the end. There is a big if, and many believers do not see it.

We read verse fourteen. It is very clear. We are made partakers of Christ if. Not we are made partakers of Christ full stop, but we are made partakers of Christ if we hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast unto the end.

Here is the promise, being made a partaker of Christ. Here is the condition, holding the beginning of our confidence steadfast unto the end. And no promise in the Bible can ever be fulfilled without its condition being fulfilled.

This is the mistake that so many Christians make. They seek for a fulfillment of the promise in their life without the condition being met. Let me just give you one example. We are told in 1 John, chapter one, verse seven.

If we walk in the light as God is in the light, we have fellowship one with another. And the blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanses us from all sin. Now that is a tremendous promise. That we can have fellowship with God and the blood of Jesus cleanses us from all sin.

But it's not a promise without a condition. There is a very important condition and if that condition is not met, then the blood of Jesus does not cleanse anybody. And so our duty is not to see that we are cleansed.

That is God's duty. He is faithful and just to cleanse us, we are told in verse nine. That's His duty. Our duty is to walk in the light. It's His duty to fulfill the promise. It's our duty to fulfill the condition.

And what is the condition? The condition is to walk in the light. God is light. In Him there is no darkness at all. To walk in the light means to turn from all known sin, to have nothing of known sin in our life, to have nothing of darkness in our life.

Then the blood of Jesus will cleanse us from every sin that we may accidentally fall into. But if we are living in deliberate known sin, then there is no question of the blood of Jesus cleansing us. For the blood of Jesus cleanses only those who walk in the light.

In exactly the same way, we are told here in Hebrews 3 .14 that we are made partakers of Christ if, here is the condition, we are to hold the beginning of our confidence in Christ steadfast unto the end.

It's by faith all the way through to the end. By faith we are to hold on. We are not to get hardened. We are not to get deceived by sin. We are not to have, as it says in verse 12, an evil heart of unbelief in departing or falling away from the living God.

No, we are to hold fast by faith the beginning of our confidence. It's not enough to start the race well. There are many people who start a race very well, but the trouble is they don't finish it. And then, of course, we know in any athletic games there is no prize for those who start well.

No, not at all, if they fall by the wayside. The prize is for those who finish. And we are told in the New Testament that the Christian life is like a race. We are to run with patience and endurance and reach the finishing line.

We are not to give up. And so we are told to hold fast until the end. He who endures to the end will be saved, Jesus said in Matthew 24. That's what we see here in Hebrews 3 verse 6 as well. Christ is a son over his own house.

And whose house we are if, again there is that if, if we hold fast the confidence and the rejoicing of our hope firm until the end. And God help us to take these words to our heart. We come now to Hebrews 3 verse 15.

Unbelief, Presumption, and the Failure to Enter God’s Rest

Again that quotation from Psalm 95 verse 7 is repeated. While it is said today, if you will hear his voice, harden not your hearts as in the provocation. The emphasis in this whole section is on hearing his voice so that we don't get hardened.

That voice can come to us directly through the word or through our fellow believers. We must be humble enough to receive exhortation from one another. Then we can hear his voice and that protects us from being hardened.

And this was exactly the problem with the people in the wilderness. That when they heard God's voice, they did not respond. They heard it, but they hardened their hearts. They did not go in to possess what God had promised for them.

We are told in verse 16,. For some, when they had heard, did provoke. How be it not all that came out of Egypt by Moses? No, because there were two people, Joshua and Caleb, who did not provoke God to wrath.

They were wholehearted. They followed God wholeheartedly as God himself gave testimony concerning them. And so they entered into the land of Canaan. But just think of this, that out of 600 ,000 grown-up adults between the ages of 20 and 60, only two people entered the land of Canaan.

The rest, all the rest, 600 ,000 people except these two, perished in the wilderness because when they heard God's voice, they presumed upon God's grace. They presumed upon God's mercy. They said, Oh, God is a loving God and he will not treat us like that.

Like many believers do today. They live in sin, they live in disobedience to God's word, and their excuse, even if it is only subconsciously, is, Well, God is so good and loving and merciful and kind and he is not going to turn us away.

That is a big mistake. Everything in the Bible speaks against any person adopting that type of an attitude. There is absolutely no excuse for anyone to adopt that type of an attitude. And so when we hear his voice, we are not to harden our hearts.

Otherwise, we shall provoke God. And it says in verse 17, that God was grieved and angry with those people for 40 years. They rebelled against him. And because they sinned in disobedience, verse 17, their dead bodies fell in the wilderness.

And he swear concerning them, verse 18, they should not enter into his rest because they did not believe him and they did not obey him. And so we are told in verse 19 that they could not enter in because of their unbelief.

It was due to unbelief that they did not enter into the land of Canaan. Now when Moses had spoken to these very same people that they were to slay a lamb and put the blood of the lamb outside their doorposts when they were in Egypt, then they believed.

They were among the people who had believed for the shedding of the blood of the lamb and putting it outside their door. There were others in Egypt who did not believe it and who did not put the blood outside their doorposts and they perished.

Yes, they remained in Egypt and their firstborn children died. But these were people who had believed at that point. They had believed and put the blood of the slain lamb outside their doorposts. But after they came out of Egypt, then they did not believe to enter into the land of Canaan.

There were two parts of God's redemption for those Israelites. He said, I will take you out of Egypt. That is the negative part. I'll take you out of your former state. And there was a positive part to that redemption.

I will bring you into the land of Canaan. That was God's promise to those people in Exodus chapter 3. I will take you out of this land, Egypt, and I will bring you into another land. And these people who came out of Egypt, whom we read of in the book of Numbers, they experienced the first part of that promise.

They had been brought out of Egypt. But they did not experience the second part. They did not enter into Canaan. There are two parts to our salvation. Not just that God will deliver us from the penalty of sin.

Forgiveness of sins is just one aspect of our redemption and salvation. The other aspect of our salvation is that we shall be freed from the power of sin. That we shall walk in godliness and holiness.

Walk as Jesus walked. Walk in the footsteps of Jesus. In obedience to the word of God and free from all sin. This is typified in the Old Testament by the land of Canaan. And it is into this land of Canaan that they did not enter.

Redemption, Baptism, and the Holy Spirit

The children of Israel had many other things. They were redeemed by the blood of the Lamb. They had been baptized into Moses in the Red Sea. They had been baptized in the cloud. But despite these three, they still came short of Canaan.

And the warning given to New Testament believers is, you may be redeemed by the blood of the Lamb of God. Yes, the blood of Jesus has brought you to the place of forgiveness. You may have been baptized into Christ in the waters of baptism.

Symbolized in the Old Testament by their going through the Red Sea. You may have been baptized in the Holy Spirit. Symbolized by the baptism into the cloud that there was in the Old Testament. That we read off in 1 Corinthians 10 verse 2.

Here was the threefold experience that the Israelites went through. Redemption by the blood of the Lamb. Baptism in the Red Sea unto Moses. And baptism in the cloud that brought the presence of the Lord into their midst.

And this is the threefold initiatory experience of the New Testament Christian. His sins are forgiven. And he is baptized in water. And he receives the Holy Spirit. But despite this threefold initiatory experience, he can still perish in the wilderness.

That is the message of this chapter. It's exactly the same message that you find in 1 Corinthians chapter 10. Given to the Corinthians. To the Corinthians, Paul writes these words in 1 Corinthians 10 verse 1.

Moreover, brethren, again he's writing to believers. To the believers in the church in Corinth, I would not that you should be ignorant how that all our fathers were under the cloud, all passed through the sea, were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea.

That double baptism. And did all eat the same spiritual meat and did all drink the same spiritual drink. For they drank of that spiritual rock that followed them, and that rock was Christ. But with many of them, God was not well pleased, for they were overthrown in the wilderness.

Now, these things were examples for us that we should not lust after evil things as they also lusted. That is the whole point. The church in Corinth, the believers in Corinth, had been redeemed by the blood of the Lamb.

They had been baptized in water. They had been baptized in the Holy Spirit. And to them, Paul says, Brethren, I don't want you to be ignorant how the same thing symbolically was true of the Israelites in the Old Testament.

They were redeemed by the blood of the Lamb. They were baptized in the Red Sea. They were baptized in the cloud, just like you. But yet God was not pleased with them, because they did not enter into the life of victory.

They were overthrown in the wilderness, because they did not respond to the promise of God to lead them into the land of Canaan. And these things are written for an example for us, we are told in verse six, because these Corinthian Christians, despite their having come through these experiences, they were fighting with one another, they were quarreling, they had jealousy, they were carnal, and Paul feared lest they also be overthrown in the wilderness.