Author, theologian and Professor Craig Keener tells how his mother asked him if he believed in an after-life at the age of nine, and he replied no. She agreed with him and told him how most intellectuals did as well. So he felt affirmed in his atheism.
The problem was that such a worldview left him with no purpose or direction in life. But while reading Plato at the age of 13, he was spurred on to think more about immortality. And somewhere along the line he remembered praying, “If somebody is out there—a god or gods—then please show me.”
He was walking home from Latin class when he was 15 when he was cornered by a couple “Fundamentalists Baptists,” as he called them. “They asked me where I would go when I died, and they started telling me how I could be saved in light of the Bible. After going back and forth for a long time, I said, ‘Look, guys, I’ve been humoring you, but you’re telling me stuff from the Bible. I don’t believe the Bible. I’m an atheist. You’ve got to give me something other than the Bible.”
When it became clear they didn’t have anything to give them other than the Bible, then he pressed them with his big question. “If there’s a God, where did the dinosaur bones come from?”
He admits that he enjoyed making fun of Christians. And one of the evangelists gave him a great opportunity when he replied, “The devil put them there to deceive us. That’s when Keener said, “This is ridiculous. I’m leaving.” However, as he turned to walk off, one of them called out, “You’re hardening your heart against God, and every time you do that, it makes it harder for you to repent. Eventually, you’ll burn in hell forever.”
Though it was clear that these evangelists didn’t know about friendship evangelism, apologetics or paleontology, as Keener walked home he felt convicted by the Holy Spirit. As he walked by a Catholic Church with a cross on it on his way home, he wondered whether the Trinity was looking down on him. When he finally got to his bedroom, he began arguing back and forth with himself saying, This can’t be right, but what if it is? And then, he says, He sensed it. God’s very presence, right then, right there, in his room. So Keener said to God, “Those guys on the street corner said Jesus died for my sins and rose again, and that’s what saves me. If that’s what you’re saying, I’ll accept it. But I don’t understand how that works. So if you want to save me, you’re going to have to do it yourself.”
And all of a sudden, Keener felt something rushing through his body that he had never experienced before. He jumped up and said, what is that? But He knew what it was—it was God coming into His life. Two days later he went to church where a pastor led him in a prayer of repentance and faith. The same thing happened again, and the rest is history. He has written now 21 books, including what has been hailed as the greatest work on miracles ever written—a 1,272-page book that is so large it comes in two volumes.
Now I share that story for two reasons this morning because it talks about the work of the Holy Spirit and the great peril of hardening our hearts against his work in our lives. For that is the subject of the third chapter of Hebrews which we discuss this morning—the peril of hardening your heart at any state of your Christian life against the Holy Spirit.
The writer to the Hebrews warns believers that this can happen at any time in our Christian lives, not just when we initially hear the Gospel. And the ultimate potential is that we will fall away from Christ, proving that we were not saved in the first place—a proof that will result in eternal judgment.
Yes, it’s a sobering subject, but a sobering subject which can have a wonderful ending if we take the words of the Book of Hebrews seriously this morning.
Before we get into Hebrews 3, let me remind you that the letter to the Hebrews was written to first century Jewish/Hebrew Christians who were likely living in Judea, that is southern Israel, in the vicinity of Jerusalem, where a large scale persecution of Christians, the first persecution of Christians, had broken out with the martyrdom of Stephen in about 37 A.D. And the persecution had never let up. It’s now about 30 years later and the writer of the book has the concern that, and probably some evidence for, the prospect that some of these Jewish believers in Christ were falling away from Christ, or thinking about falling away from Christ because of the never-ending hardships they were enduring due to the long-term persecution they had experienced. They were very specifically thinking about returning to Judaism, merely observing the Old Testament Law and the Temple sacrifices and feasts as their persecutors, unsaved Jews were doing, hoping the that it wouldn’t ultimately make any difference with regard to their eternal destiny. And the writer to the Hebrews writes to them that it most assuredly would—it would make all the difference there is between heaven and hell.
Specifically in chapter 3 he tells us: “Don’t harden your heart—falling away will show you were never saved in the first place.”
The writer had begun his book by showing his readers how Jesus, being the Son of God, was superior to the angels who had mediated the Old Testament revelation of the Law. And now he turns to the subject of how Jesus, the Son of God, is far superior to the revered Jewish prophet, Moses, through whom the Law had been given to the Jews—the Law, which consisted of the first five books of what we call our Old Testament today.
Hebrews 3:1: “Therefore, holy brethren, partakers of a heavenly calling, consider Jesus, the Apostle and High Priest of our confession.”
He has just emphasized Christ’s death for our sins, all the benefits that accrue to us from that, including a merciful and compassionate High Priest who is willing and able to deal effectively with our sin problem. And he encourages his readers, and us, to take another hard look at Jesus. He admits here his prevailing opinion of their spiritual state. He regard them, until they prove otherwise, to be true believers, holy brethren—in other words, those who have been set apart for God’s purposes, part of the forever family of God, who have a call from God in heaven to their destiny in Heaven—as Craig Keener experienced. And he calls Jesus the Apostle and High Priest of our confession.
Now yes, apostle is an unusual designation for Jesus—this is the only time Jesus is Himself called an Apostle in the New Testament. We normally think of the Apostles as the 12 disciples whom Jesus sent to the world. But Jesus was also sent to the world, by the Father, as He Himself says in John 17, so He also qualifies as an Apostle, one who has been sent to us, to save us from our sins.
Then the writer turns to just how superior Jesus is to Moses, as great as Moses was. Now, you’ve got to understand here just how revered Moses was in this ancient Jewish community, and even among Orthodox Jews today. He is reverenced truly next to God, and the first five books form the center of Jewish worship and life. And so the writer is treading upon holy ground in the minds of his readers here. So he has nothing negative to say about Moses. He just simply says Jesus is in a whole other category above and beyond Moses. Even though Moses deserves to be honored as a great prophet, Jesus deserves to be worshiped as the Son of God.
And he, at first, in verse two acknowledges that both Jesus and Moses were faithful to the One who appointed them to the work they had to do for God. But he explicitly states that Jesus was worthy of more glory than Moses in verse three. And His argument goes like this: Moses was faithful as a servant in God’s house, or household, God’s family, the people of God of his time. But Jesus was faithful as a Son over God’s house, as the builder, heir and owner of that same house. So Jesus, as builder, owner and heir of that house certainly deserves more honor or glory than someone who is faithful, no matter how faithful he may be, as a mere servant within that house.
And then we come to the very important verse 6, which acknowledges that the house, or household, or family that he is talking about is our house—"whose house we are if we hold fast our confidence and the boast of our hope firm until the end.”
Now this verse forms the cornerstone of my understanding of the Book of Hebrews, along with verse 14 in this same chapter. It says that our being identified as part of the family of God, and therefore as among those who are and will be saved, is contingent on one thing—that we hold fast our confidence and the boast of our hope until the end.
What is our confidence? What is our boast? Our confidence and boast is in this—that Jesus, and Jesus alone, saves. That there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved, as Acts 4:12 tells us, and that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, and that no man comes to the Father except through Him, as Jesus Himself put it in John 14:6.
So if you lose that faith, that confidence, and fail to boast in Christ that he is salvation, then you also lose the boast that you’re part of the family of God. He’s not saying here that you lose your salvation. What He’s saying is that if you lose your faith, and abandon Christ, you demonstrate you were never saved in the first place.
And if that isn’t entirely clear in verse 6, it certainly is in verse 14. Look at it for a moment and consider it. It says, “For we have become partakers of Christ, if we hold fast the beginning of our assurance (our faith in Christ) until the end.” In other words, we were never partakers of Christ, we never we’re truly saved by His grace, if our faith does not endure to the end—I take it—the end of our lives.
Now this is a statement of the truth that the faith that saves is the faith that perseveres to the end of a person’s life. And they are not solitary statements in the New Testament. The truth is echoed by all the major speakers and writers of the New Testament, in one form or to one degree or another. For instance, Jesus said in Mark 13:13: “It is he who endures to the end who will be saved.”
The Apostle Paul’s statements to this effect are found in Colossians 1:22-23: “Yet He has now reconciled you in His body of flesh through death, in order to present you before Him holy and blameless and beyond reproach— 23 if indeed you continue in the faith firmly established and steadfast, and not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you have heard,” and in his definition of the Gospel in I Corinthians 15:1-8 when he writes in verse 2: “by which also you are saved, if you hold fast the word which I preached to you, unless you believed in vain.” The Apostle John’s confession of this truth comes in I John 2:19: “They went out from us, but they were not really of us; for if they had been of us, they would have remained with us; but they went out, so that [a]it would be evident that they all are not of us.” And Peter says something along the same lines in II Peter 1:10-11: “Therefore, brothers and sisters, be all the more diligent to make certain about His calling and choice of you; for as long as you practice these things, you will never stumble; 11 for in this way the entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ will be abundantly supplied to you.”
So be warned! Don’t fall away from Jesus. Moses is not a sufficient substitute, nor is any other faith. You fall away from Jesus, you fall away from salvation in that you demonstrate you were never saved--you had never truly partaken of Christ, in the first place.
Now remember, it is likely that some of these folks had been professing faith in Christ for decades, maybe even 30 years. What follows in the rest of the chapter is a warning for these folks about the potential consequence of falling away, by hardening their hearts against the Holy Spirit, even at this rather late stage in their devotion to Christ. He tells them and us in verses 7-11 “Don’t dare harden your heart against the Holy Spirit, or you might not enter God’s heavenly rest.” Don’t dare harden your heart against the Holy Spirit, or you might not enter God’s heavenly rest.”
He does so by quoting Psalm 95, written the King David, in about 1000 B.C., 450 years after the events of the wilderness wandering of the Jews which it refers to.
Verse 7: Therefore, just as the Holy Spirit says,” (Notice the clear belief on the part of the writer that the real author of Psalm 95 is not just David, but God the Holy Spirit speaking through him)—“Therefore, just as the Holy Spirit says, “Today if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as when they provoked Me, as in the day of trial in the wilderness. Where your Fathers tried Me by testing Me and saw my works for forty years. There, I was angry with this generation, and said, ‘They always go astray in their heart, and they did not know my ways’; as I swore in my wrath, ‘They shall not enter my rest.’”
So this passage warrants a brief review of exactly what happened to the Jews in the wilderness. The story is told primarily in two books of Moses, Exodus and Numbers. The Jews under the spiritual leadership of Moses, were delivered from their hundreds of years of slavery under the Egyptians by 10 powerful plagues that came upon Egypt, but which the Jews were spared from, in order to persuade Pharaoh, King of Egypt, to let them go. When he finally let them go, he changed his mind and pursued them with his powerful army and chariots as the Jews were camped next to the Red Sea. God then delivered them by the most stupendous miracle of the Old Testament: He opened the Red Sea before them so they could walk through on dry ground, but then when the Egyptians pursued through the same opening, the walls of water on each side collapsed, destroying Pharaoh’s army.
After all these powerful acts, the Jews were then led to the Promised Land through a wilderness where there was often no food or water by a Pillar of Cloud by Day and a Pillar of Fire by night. Manna fell from heaven each night to feed these two million people in the wilderness.
But there was a problem. Though God had clearly shown His power and His ability to provide and deliver, the Jews were ingrates. Every time they encountered the lack of water, or some other difficulty in the wilderness, they grumbled and complained against Moses and against God, doubting that God was actually bringing them into the Promised Land. Rather than thank God and pray to Him in their troubles, they tested God by grumbling, complaining and potentially rebelling—yes, they thought about returning to Egypt. When the people grumbled, God was angered, but Moses, in contrast, prayed, and God provided. This sort of thing happened 10 different times—the people never repenting of their ungrateful attitudes, their grumblings, complaining and unbelief in God—until after a year God brought them to the very entrance to the Promised Land—the rest which God had promised them. At that point, Moses appointed 12 spies to explore the land and bring back a report. They brought back a report that it was indeed a land flowing with milk and honey, but 10 of them discouraged the people from attempting to take the land, claiming that giants lives in the land, and Israel would not be able to take it from them. Two of them, Joshua and Caleb, vehemently disagreed, claiming that with God’s help they could take the land. The people decided to go with the recommendation of the 10, rather than the two. And when God told them to go up and take the land, they rebelled against God’s command, and in unbelief, despite all that God had shown them, refused to go.
It was at that point, that God had had it. He swore in His wrath that they would never enter His rest. That rest, in the Old Testament, was the Promised Land. The goal in the Old Testament had never been eternal life for the Jews, it had been the inheritance of the Promised Land. The result was that all of those Jews who had been delivered from Egypt who were 20 years and older were then refused entrance to the Promised Land, and they spent the next 39 years wandering in the wilderness until all of them died.
An incredibly tragic story—a tragic story because, as the Holy Spirit reveals 450 years later through David in Psalm 95, when these Jews heard God’s voice, they hardened their heart and so provoked God’s wrath.
Now clearly the writer is drawing a parallel between Israel’s response to God’s Word given through Moses in the Old Testament and the potential response of Christians to God’s Word as given through Christ, the greater prophet, in the New Testament. And remember this: all of the book of Hebrews is based on a from the lesser to the greater argument. If this is what happened to the Jews when they hardened their heart against God’s Word in the Old Testament—if they died physically, then what will happen to Christians, believers in Christ, if they harden their hearts against God’s Word as revealed by the Son of God Jesus in the New Testament?
To put it plainly, He’s saying, when someone who has believed in Christ then falls away from faith in Christ, it happens because he has hardened his heart against God. And when he hardens his heart against Christ, then there will be consequences like those Israel experienced in the Old Testament, only greater. Remember, Hebrews 2:2: “For if the word spoken through angels proved unalterable, and every transgression and disobedience received a just penalty, how will we escape if we neglect so great a salvation.”
So whereas, the rebellion that occurred in the wilderness resulted in the physical death of the Jews for their disobedience, the hardening and rebellion of believers in the New Testament will result in a similar, but a far more severe judgment in the New Testament—an exclusion from the New Testament eternal rest of God—heaven, and spiritual death.
Now remember what is said in verses 6 and 14. He’s not saying we lose our salvation. He’s saying we demonstrate we never had it in the first place.
And he quotes Psalm 95 to say that it all begins with a hardening of our heart. Before we leave this morning, we would do well to consider what a hardening of the heart is, especially with respect to God.
And if the Jews in the wilderness were an example, we can learn from them. When great faith should have been the result of all the deliverances and examples of God’s great power that brought them out of Egypt, what resulted was unbelief, and an entitled attitude. Rather than there being thanksgiving and faith, there was grumbling and unbelief. These Jews had apparently learned nothing about God’s love and faithfulness, or His power, or they would have responded differently. When they encountered a lack of something, they grumbled and complained as though God were at fault, and as though He could do nothing about what they lacked. Moses’ response, in contrast, was to pray. And God’s response was repeatedly, even daily, to provide everything they needed.
Now to be sure, the first time they grumbled and complained at Rephidim about the lack of water, it might have been on an impulse, a knee-jerk response. The problem was that there was no repentance. The knee-jerk reaction became a habit, and such a habit that it turned into a mark of their character. They had no problem saying no to God. In fact, they did it all the time without much consequence—they thought nothing of it. They literally hardened their heart against how God felt about it. Something I’m afraid that we all do all too often—blow off God’s Word without a second thought. And after 10 times it had become such a hardened pattern of life and attitude toward God, that they thought nothing of it when God was about to supply them with what He had promised all along, what they had hoped for, the Promised Land.
And so the question we need to ask ourselves this morning is this: Have we gotten into the habit of hardening our heart against God? When God speaks, and He does, through His word all the time, as He is right now, “Today if you hear his voice” are you in the habit of just saying, “Nah” to God and going along as though there will be no consequence. The lesson from the wilderness is this—you may get along for a while, but ultimately if saying no God becomes a settled pattern of your mind and your actions, you are risking become a rebel against God and eventually blowing off both Him and Jesus altogether.
And you do so at the risk of God’s eternal rest—heaven.
You do so at the risk of showing you were never really a believer or saved in the first place.
I have a beloved younger relative who once professed faith in Christ. However, the story from his parents is that he never liked it whenever anybody told him to do something he didn’t want to do. Eventually, this attitude was displayed not only toward his parents, but God. About 10 years ago he decided he no longer believed in Christ. A divorce followed. He tells his parents that if it’s true that if you were once saved, you’re always saved, he’s okay. And he continues in his unbelief and disobedience to this day, even being offended whenever anyone questions it.
Hebrews is not telling us that eternal security is not a truth. But it is telling us that someone who professed faith in Christ but has now fallen away was never saved in the first place. And that anyone in my young relative’s position better not count on heaven regardless of what He says or does now, because his loss of faith demonstrates he was never of the faith in the first place.
And it all begins with a hardening of the heart—a willingness to say no to God when He speaks.
Do you say no to God when He speaks to you? Is it a pattern when he perhaps calls you to serve, to witness, to worship, to give? Watch out! You could be flirting with a spiritual and eternal disaster—falling away from Christ altogether.
Whatever you do, don’t harden your heart—falling away from Christ proves you weren’t saved to begin with.
Let’s pray.
