A Call To Self Examination

The Holy Spirit Speaks Today in Hebrews 3

Continuing our study this morning, we work through verse 6, we will continue from verse 7. Hebrews chapter 3, beginning at verse 7. Therefore, just as the Holy Spirit says, Today if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the provocation, in the day of testing in the wilderness, when your fathers tested me and saw my works for forty years.

Therefore I was angry with that generation and said, They always go astray in their hearts, they have not known my ways. As I swore in my anger, they will never enter into my rest. See to it, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart in falling away from the living God.

But encourage one another daily as long as it is called today, so that none of you might be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. For we have become partakers of Christ, if indeed we hold fast our original confidence firm to the end.

While it is said, Today if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the provocation. For who provoked him when they heard? Was it not all those who came out of Egypt with Moses? And with whom was he angry forty years?

Was it not those who sinned whose bodies fell in the wilderness? And whom did he swear that they would not enter into his rest, but those who were disobedient? So we see that they were not able to enter in because of unbelief.

Psalm 95 and the New Testament’s View of Scripture

Once again, we come to a text in Hebrews that draws extensively from the Old Testament. Verses 7 through 11 are a quotation from Psalm 95. Now, we're going to look at Psalm 95 in a moment, but I would like you to note, and maybe you've been taking some notes as you've been listening to this series.

It would be interesting at one point just to sort of step aside from the study and look at the number of different ways in which the writer to the Hebrews quotes the Old Testament. They don't quote the Old Testament the way we do.

We quote the Old Testament, we say, well, we can look in Hosea chapter 13 verse 7. Well, there was no Hosea chapter 13 verse 7 back then. You probably know chapter and verse divisions were actually added in the 16th century.

That's a very easy way to find stuff, very fast, very efficient, and really only became relevant when people all owned their own copies of the Scriptures and could turn to something like that. But there were not chapter and verse divisions in that sense in this time period.

And so it's interesting to look at how sometimes we'll just simply say, as someone has said in the Old Testament, as someone has said in the Scriptures. But notice the introduction here. Therefore, just as the Holy Spirit says, the Holy Spirit says.

And so you get a sense here just for a moment, and I don't want to spend too much time on it, but just a moment to be reminded of the view that the New Testament writers have of the Scriptures that they possessed.

They did not have the entire can of Scriptures we have. The New Testament is being written at this point in time. But they have the Old Testament, and it is the Bible of the people of God. And even though writing to the Hebrews, it seems to be Hebrews who are in the dispersion because it is the Greek Septuagint translation that the writer of the Hebrews quotes over and over again.

And when he does so, he can here just simply say, as the Holy Spirit says. And there is an insight into how these writers understood the nature of the Old Testament writings. Now, I know that for us, that's second nature.

We recognize that God has spoken in His Word. But there are so many today who would find this kind of a statement, well, somewhat unusual. Many today would not view the Scriptures the same way that the Scriptures writers viewed the Scriptures.

And that creates a real contradiction, I think, in many people who write and who speak on the subject of the Bible today who do not share the Bible's own view of itself. For the writer of the Hebrews, this is the Spirit speaking.

Psalm 95 as Moral Warning and Historical Context

Now, not only is that a reflection upon his understanding of the nature of Scripture, but you're going to find something as we look at Hebrews 3. And then if you read ahead a little bit, you realize we're going to run into this in Hebrews 4 as well.

And that is a specific word, today. The very first word of the quotation in verse 7 is, today, if you hear His voice. And He's going to be keying on that word today. And so it's interesting to me that He says, just as the Holy Spirit is saying.

He doesn't say, said. He uses the present tense, is saying. I couldn't help but think back to Jesus' own use in Matthew chapter 22 of a similar construction where in speaking to the Sadducees, He held them accountable for what God had spoken in Scripture back to Moses.

But He did so by saying, have you not read what God spoke to you? And so you had words written more than a thousand years before. And yet from Jesus' perspective, this is God speaking to you. And so here the writer takes words from Psalm 95, written many hundreds of years prior to the writing of Hebrews.

And he applies that in the present tense. This is the Holy Spirit continuing to speak. And He says, today. Today, if you hear His voice, not harden your hearts. And so it's both a point of the writer's own sermon.

He's going to be drawing from Psalm 95 and He's going to be doing so in two different ways. Here in chapter 3, He's going to be bringing a moral application. And then in chapter 4, He's going to put Psalm 95 into a historical context and say, see this today continues on.

It's a very interesting use of the Psalm. But it also reflects the fact that for the writer, this spiritual speaking, this activity of the Holy Spirit speaking found in Scripture remains relevant to our very day.

This is the Holy Spirit speaking. Why don't you keep your fingers in Hebrews 3 and let's go back and read Psalm 95 so that we have a context to work with. The 95th Psalm. O come, let us sing for joy to the Lord.

Let us shout joyfully to the rock of our salvation. Let us come before His presence with thanksgiving. Let us shout joyfully to Him with psalms. For the Lord is a great God and a great King above all gods, in whose hand are the depths of the earth.

The peaks of the mountains are His also. The sea is His, for it was He who made it. And His hands formed the dry land. Come, let us worship and bow down. Let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker. For He is our God and we are the people of His pasture and the sheep of His hand.

And there's the first part. There's the part that's speaking to the people of God. And it's worship and it's a recognition of God as the Creator. And then you have, we are His people, His pasture, the sheep of His hand.

And what has been the writer of the Hebrews saying up to this point? We are His people. We are His household. If we do what? If we hold fast the confident faith that we have. Then, in the middle of the verse, we have where he picks up in verse 7.

Today, if you would hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as at Meribah, as in the days of Massa in the wilderness. When your fathers tested me, they tried me. While they had seen my work for forty years, I loathed that generation and said there are people who err in their heart and they do not know my ways.

Therefore, I swore in my anger, truly, they shall not enter into my rest. And so, here you have, in the 95th Psalm, an interesting connection. The beginning, worship, recognition that God is the Lord, is the Creator of all things.

We are His people. So, today, if you hear His voice, don't harden your hearts. As in the day of provocation, there that was using the Hebrew words, locations of where Israel, under Moses, had tempted or tested God.

Where there had been the rebellion. They wanted to kill Moses and they wanted to go back to Egypt. And it's really happened more than once in their history. And so, as a result, you have this interesting situation where you have this people of God, the sheep of His pasture, but you still have this exhortation.

Today, if you hear His voice, if you're really entering into this worship, do not harden your hearts, because you see, historically, there had been those who had been delivered from the land of Egypt.

But the whole point of this particular section is, just coming out of Egypt wasn't enough. They did not do what? They did not enter into His rest. And here becomes the point. There can be those who have received what you might call a kind of deliverance.

Just as there were those in Israel who had seen the mighty acts of God. Can you imagine what it was like to walk through the Red Sea? To see the waters piled up? Can you imagine what it was like to see the pillar of fire?

The pillar of smoke? And it moves and it guides. And when Israel is safe on the other side of the sea, Pharaoh and his armies come charging across and they are drowned in the sea. You've seen this. You've seen so many supernatural things.

You've seen the mountain on fire and smoke. You've seen plagues. You've seen healings of plagues. You've seen people swallowed up by the earth. Korah and his rebellion. You've seen all this stuff. How many times have we heard atheists say, well, if God was just putting it in appearance, we'd believe.

It's not true. It simply isn't true. Here you had the offspring of Abraham who had seen such incredible things. And yet, how many of the people who saw those things actually entered into the promised land?

Two. The two spies that gave the proper report. Even Moses only sees it from afar. The rest, their bodies die in the wilderness. That generation dies off. They wander around until they die off. And it's the next generation that comes in.

And this is the point that is being made by the author here. He says, look, there can be those who have been delivered out of Egypt, out of that pagan land. Egypt becomes sort of a watchword for the world and that which is occultic and false.

And we know that the various plagues, for example, it's a very interesting study. To be able to demonstrate that the various plagues in the book of Exodus has specific Egyptian gods that they were aimed at in demonstrating these guys really did not exist.

They did not have the power that the Egyptians thought that they did. It was a place of false religion and religiosity. And the people were delivered out of that just like anyone in a Christian congregation.

Because you hear the truth on a regular basis, you hear moral teachings about what God's law says about how we are to live and behave. You're taught basic things like the necessity for honesty and integrity.

You hear the law of God being taught about sexual purity. You hear all these things and it functions as a buffer, as a curb. And in a sense, you are delivered from the world around you in a sense at that point.

But you see, the writer of the Hebrews is saying, I know that in the congregation we have a mixed crowd. As I speak to the congregation, there are those who will truly enter into rest, but then there are others just as there were the majority.

There who saw the very works of God in the Exodus who were not truly rejected. They were not changed, they were not degenerate, their hearts were not changed. Very quickly, they could grumble against God.

Very quickly, they could reject His ways. Very quickly, they could build altars to false gods and engage in idolatry. How quickly it could happen. And this reflects something about their hearts. And is that not what the text says?

From Psalm 95 or Hebrews 3, Today if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts as in the provocation in the day of testing the wilderness, when your fathers tested me and saw my works for forty years.

They tested God. And God said, you're not going to enter into my rest. Notice it says, therefore, I was angry with that generation. The generation of people that He had saved. The Passover, they had seen it.

All the Exodus, they had seen it. But I was angry with that generation that they always go astray in their hearts. See, the natural man can see all sorts of the evidence of God's existence and experience many blessings at His hand.

I mean, the people of this nation. How many deliverances has this nation experienced at the hand of God? I mean, everybody knows about how close Hitler was to developing the bomb and he already had jet aircraft and he had rockets and he had technology that we are only trying to catch up with.

How many deliverances has this nation experienced? The blessings that the people of this nation have experienced. How many are thankful for them? How many look to God and say, thank you for what you've given to me?

They always go astray in their hearts. True religious faith is a matter of the heart. It changes the nature of the individual. Notice this says, they have not known my ways. They heard His ways. They saw His ways.

But they have not known His ways. See, if you do not want to desire to walk in the ways of God, if you do not desire to follow in obedience because that's what your heart wants to do, then you have not known His ways.

You may know them up here. You may have grown up in this church. You may have been properly catechized in Sunday school. You may have gone through the confession and you know all sorts of things about what the Bible says and what God's ways are.

But if you don't love those ways, if you don't walk in those ways, then you have not known His ways. And these people had heard God's law. They said, oh yes, we'll take this upon ourselves. Yeah, you bet.

We'll be God's people. But God says, they have not known my ways. They always go astray in their hearts. And so, as I swore in my anger, they will never enter into my rest. There can be those who are delivered from the outward corruption of the world through the hearing of the truth of God.

But that's not the same as the miracle of regeneration. That's not the same as having true, saving faith. How many times? If you're a new Christian, you haven't seen a whole lot. I can understand why this would be difficult, but brothers and sisters who are got a little gray going like I do, Brother Callahan, you're working on some gray just like me.

I didn't have as much back when I first met you. You know what happens when you develop this stuff, Brother Ricketts? You start seeing things. You start having enough experience as a Christian to go, yeah, I remember this person over here.

I remember that person over there. They made a good start, but then they went back to the world. They went back to the things. They loved the things of the world. Sadly, as you get older, your list of those people gets longer.

And you recognize, hopefully, more and more, it's only by the grace of God that I'm still holding fast, because I look at this one, I look at that one, and at the time, it would have looked like all was well.

So the writer makes the application. See to it, brethren. Look to this. Do not look away from this. See to it, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, and it's literally in apostasy to fall away from the living God.

And so the writer says to the gathered people, he's already started building his case. There's nothing to go back to. I know you're under pressure to go back to these things. But he says, see to it. Look.

Don't turn your eyes away. Look. Don't ignore the lessons of the people of God in the past. Look. It's so much easier to bury these texts. It's so much easier to skip over them. It's so much easier to explain them away, because you're going to make people feel uncomfortable.

And other people say, we should never preach a text like this, because don't you know, there are people in the church that are just overly sensitive. And yep, there are. I remember a gentleman that we talked to many years ago, and he just was constantly in self-examination.

And there could be no joy, and there could be no confidence. It was just always, well, I fail here, and I fail there. And you could never get him to look up from himself and look to Christ. There's an imbalance there.

So you can be imbalanced over here. That's true. It's where you're just always navel-gazing. You're just always looking inside, never trusting, no joy. But you see, that's a lot more rare than the other side, where these texts just don't exist.

Oh, I'm never going to look to myself. I'm never going to look to these examples. I'm never going to diligently consider Jesus the Apostle and High Priest of our confession, and as a result of that, think about how I am holding fast.

No, I'm not going to. No, test yourself. See where there's hate. No, no, no. No, we're just going to ignore that. We have to have both. There has to be a balance. If you don't have that exhortation, then you have those people who just simply say, oh, well, you know, I walked an aisle.

I signed a card. I shook the pastor's hand. I prayed the sinner's prayer. I've got my ticket punched. I'm on my way to heaven. I've never found any of that as the means of salvation in the Bible, have you?

That must be in forth hesitations. I can't find it anywhere. And they ignore these exhortations. See to it, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart and falling away from the living God.

I can't look into your hearts, my friends. I can't look into your hearts. Even if I lived with you all the time, I still couldn't look into your heart. Only the Spirit of God and you can do that. And so there is an exhortation to the gathered body.

See to it, brethren. What was addressed at the beginning of chapter 3? Holy brethren, partakers of a heavenly calling. See to it, brethren, lest there be in any of you, just as there was in those people that came marching out from Egypt, they had seen God's power.

They had been delivered by God's power. And I'll bet you anything, if they stood on the far side of the Red Sea and watched those Egyptians in their armor disappearing into the water, never to come up again, that if you had taken a poll of everybody standing there, they would have gone, I'm with Yahweh.

All right. He's my God. This is, whoa, man, I'm going to live my life for Him. Whatever He says, I'm going to do. This is great. And how many of those people? Their bodies in the wilderness. They never entered into His wrath.

That is the holy land, the promised land. And so the application is, we need to examine ourselves. Lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart. And you see, for us, we hear evil. And that's not even a word that you can use in our society anymore.

You can't describe anything as evil anymore. That's judgmental. How dare you be judgmental like that? I mean, remember last Sunday, what some of us saw as we were driving home, the expression of decadent evil up there on Indian School Road, outside the gay bar.

We saw it. That's evil. It's moral evil. It brings the judgment of God. But you see, we make a distinction between evil and unbelieving because, see, in our world, to be unbelieving is just to be, well, you know, I just don't have, I don't know, I don't have a positive belief one way or another.

I'm just sort of morally neutral on that subject. The Bible says unbelief is immoral. You are rejecting the testimony of your Creator. That is not a neutral moral act. It's evil. And there are those who sit in what are called Christian congregations today, and they have evil, unbelieving hearts.

And eventually, that manifests itself. Eventually, it comes out. Sometimes, it takes a long time. Sometimes, it doesn't take much time at all. And sometimes, they can be in congregations where there's so little exposure to the Word of God that it takes a long time before someone finally says something that triggers the inevitable explosion.

Hopefully, around here, given our commitment to preaching and teaching the whole counsel of God, well, hopefully, hopefully, that would happen pretty quickly. But the fact of the matter is, there are some folks that as soon as that last hymn is finished before the sermon, you put the hymn book down, and if we had an attachment attached to the head, the scope would go, for about the next 40 minutes.

And nothing's heard. Nothing's said. It can happen. The writer knew that in writing these congregations, he had to exhort them, brethren, see to it, look, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart and falling away from the living God.

We're supposed to help one another very quickly. But encourage one another daily as long as it is called today, so that none of you might be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. If we had become partakers of Christ, if indeed we hold fast our original confidence firm to the end, while it is said, today if you hear His voice, not harden your hearts in the provocation.

We are to encourage one another. We are to look to one another. And we are to say those things to one another that sort of exposes where our hearts really are. We're to have honest conversation about our spiritual state.

But encourage one another daily as long as it's called today. There's that word, today if you hear His voice. Now is the time to be dealing with these issues, not tomorrow. Don't put it off down the road.

As long as it's called today, encourage one another, because there's a danger in being hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. Sin can deceive you. It lies to you. It tells you your spiritual state is better than it is.

That it doesn't really matter that you're experiencing such constant apathy. It lies to you about how important it is to possess the things of the world rather than spiritual and eternal riches. Sin lies.

The enemy of your soul will lie to you. Deceitfulness of sin. And do not be deceived to think that you can be a partaker of Christ if you do not hold fast our original confidence firm to the end. Do not be deceived by the many heretics and false teachers that fill evangelical pulpits today that tell you, hey, as long as you shook the pastor's hand, it doesn't matter after that.

You can go become a Buddhist, an atheist, an ax murderer. You're going to heaven. The writer of the Hebrews says, we have become partakers of Christ if indeed we hold fast our original confidence firm to the end.

That's not how we become partakers. Those who are truly partakers of Christ will hold fast our original confidence firm to the end. Why? Because as we saw this morning, true saving faith is the work of the Spirit of God.

The only way to understand these things is to see that this work of the Gospel is God's work to His glory. Once you abandon that, the Bible is a mess. It makes no sense. You can make it say whatever you want, but the centrality of God's purpose gives order to the entire text.

Unbelief, Apostasy, and the Call to Enter God’s Rest

So today, he even repeats the verse of Psalm 95, today if you hear his voice, not harden your hearts as in a provocation. For he asked, who provokes him when they heard? When they heard his voice, who provoked him?

Was it not all those who came out of Egypt with Moses? People who had been delivered? And with whom was he angry 40 years? Was it not those who sinned whose bodies fell in the wilderness? Who had heard from God?

God spoke from heaven. He gave His law. He performed miracles. And yet, they sinned and their bodies fell in the wilderness. And whom did he swear that they would not enter into His rest? But those who were disobedient.

Those who rejected His ways. And so what is the conclusion of this matter? So we see that they were not able to enter in because of unbelief. And so we're presented here with the reality that while we have been saved as Christians, there is the reality that we are being saved.

There is the now and the not yet. We saw this in the Apostle Paul. We have been adopted as children of God, yet we await the adoption. There is the promise and yet the fulfillment of the promise yet in the future.

And for those in the congregation, holy brothers, partakers of a holy calling. And yet, there is the danger of false faith. There is the danger of the unrepentant heart. There is the danger of the unbelieving heart.

And so we are to exhort one another. We are to encourage one another. To do what? To somehow work something up within ourselves? No. True saving faith is the work of God. It's the Spirit of God. We can rest in Christ to save us completely.

All those things are completely true. But there is the danger of self-deception. And I know in speaking with people who have become apostates, who have gone out from us, so it might be demonstrated they were not truly of us.

1 John 2 .19, an important text. Not always, but many times if you look back, you'll see evidence. You might have seen it at the time, and I know one of my great failings is I always try to believe the best about someone.

I want to try to accept what they have to say at face value. But later on, you look back and I've seen, for example, situations where there was a subtle lack of confidence in the Word of God. Maybe a lack of a desire to be obedient to what the Word of God says.

Troubling things. Troubling things. And so here the exhortation is, you want to enter into God's rest. It's not enough just to get out of Egypt. It's not enough to just have some moral guidelines provided by being outside of the direct influence of the world because you're in the congregation.

It's not enough. True saving faith is a matter of the heart. He was angry with that generation because they always go astray in their hearts. Does your heart desire to obey Christ and to glorify Him? They have not known My ways.

Do you know the ways of God? Not just here. That's important. But do you know them intimately because you desire to walk in them? Those are the questions that the writer of the Hebrews is asking. That is part of the exhortation he is giving.

Let us not fall into the error of unbelief. Let us examine ourselves and let us encourage one another daily as long as it is called today. Well, guess what? It's today. Every day you read this text, guess what day it is?

It's always today. The point is, this text is always to be relevant to us. If you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts. If when you hear the Word of God preached, you find yourself going, I don't think God would say that.

That's hardening your heart. But if when you see and hear the Word of God being preached, and you go, Oh Lord, help me to live in light of that. Help me to apply this to my life, to see how in all the decisions I have each day, in the way I speak to others, in the way I live, I want to live in such a way as I walk in Your ways.

That is the person who hears these words and is thankful for the exhortation that they provide. Let's pray together. Indeed, our Father, we do thank You for these words and the exhortation that we hear today.

That You continue to speak to us today. That we are not just looking back upon events from thousands of years ago, but You speak to us today. Your voice is still heard through Your Word and by Your Spirit today.

And oh Lord, we would pray that for all those in the sound of my voice, here this evening or later through media, Lord, that this would be today for every one of Your true believers. That they would be confirmed in their faith.

But Lord, if there be any who are playing at religion, but have not truly turned to Christ, may today be the day of their salvation as well. We pray in Christ's name.