Hard Hearts and Dog Tired
Hebrews 3:7-19
Several years ago local radio stations throughout California ran a request for a thief who had earlier that morning stolen a VW Bug to immediately contact the local police authorities. What the thief did not know was that the owner of the VW Bug had tainted some saltine crackers with rat poison in an attempt to get rid of the critters that were invading his home. The tainted saltines were on the front seat of the car, when the VW was stolen. The police bulletin wasn’t so much to capture the thief and return the stolen care, as it was to save the thief from eating the crackers and dying.
The warning in this morning’s passage is a little like that police bulletin. Sin separates us from God. Sin destroys our lives. Sin leads to death and eternal separation from our loving Savior. Jesus is our only hope of salvation. The gospel is the all-points bulletin sent to rescue us. But in order for us to be rescued, we must admit that we sinned. The thief stole the car. He needs to admit it, repent, and be saved.
But sin hardens the heart, and prevents the sinner from grasping the life-line of the gospel.
In today’s reading, the early church was filled, much like the modern church is, with individuals who heard the gospel, were curious by what they heard, but who failed to surrender their lives and their sin to Christ. This church consisted of true believers, and individuals who would be more religious that righteous. They heard the gospel, but the gospel had not transformed their lives. We would call them nominal Christians. Christians in name only - without true faith.
This is not a new thing in Christianity. There have always been those who truly believed, and those who just believed culturally. In ancient Israel, there were those who were Jew by birth. They had the blood of Jew and the culture of a Jew, but they did not follow the faith of Abraham.
It is those, the writer of Hebrews now addresses:
Read Hebrews 3: 7- 12
1. God calls us to believe and to enter His rest
a) Notice first of all that God chooses to communicate with us through the inspired scriptures. It is the Word of God brought to us by the Holy Spirit of God through the pen of men. Psalm 95 is quoted here. The events of the time of the wandering in the wilderness had an application for the people of Moses and for the readers of David some 1000 years later, and for the early church 1000 years after that and for us 2000 years later. It is an illustration thousands of years old, but the Holy Spirit speaks it today to us.
b) And what is the illustration? It is of the children of Israel who saw miracle after miracle and divine provision after divine provision, and yet they grumbled against God and refused to believe that He would care for them. They had walked out of Egypt free after 400 years of slavery. They had witnessed their children saved from the angel of death who had struck down the Egyptian children. They watched as God parted the sea so that they could escape Pharaoh. They received daily bread and fresh water from rocks. Their clothing never wore out. They had God’s servant Moses to lead them. He gave them God’s Word and God’s law. They saw his face aglow from the glory of the Lord. They had a cloud to shade them by day, and a pillar of fire to point the way at night. And yet, they still refused to believe. When the report was given that God had given the land of rest back to them, they refused to enter into that land of rest. They rejected God and His plan for their lives. And so they suffered death in the desert. They never reached Canaan.
c) Canaan is a symbol of God’s rest and a picture of Gods’ salvation.
d) Because they refused God, God stopped offering the place of salvation. If they wanted to return to Egypt, he would let them die in the wilderness.
e) Here we see that whole generation hardened their hearts before God. To harden the heart means to dry it out or dry it up. Their hearts dried up. They became brittle and hard.
f) The same sun that melts the wax hardens the clay. It depends on the condition of the materials heated by the sun. “God who is continually tested will never be accepted.” You cannot continue to choose to sin, to continue to doubt and expect that your heart will not eventually become so hard that there is no hope of repentance or change.
g) I Timothy 4 :1-2 “The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons. Such teachings come through hypocritical liars, whose consciences have been seared as with a hot iron.”
h) The Israelites refused time and time again to believe God. They rebelled against God. They exasperated him. Meribah means conflict or rebellion. They put God to the test time and time again. Massah means testing. How much proof did they need that God loved them and that God would save them? And yet there was no amount of proof that would ever be enough.
i) Jesus had said: “Even if they see someone rise from the dead, they still will not believe. Even if someone comes back to them from the dead and warns them, they will refuse to repent and turn back to God.” (Luke 16:31)
j) There is a strong warning here for today. It is possible to be in church every week, to hear the gospel time and time again, to be touched by the worship of the church, to hear God’s Word – and yet to remain unchanged, still living in your sin, unredeemed and lost.
k) Salvation is a free gift, open to all. But we must choose to believe the report of Christ. We must abandon the wilderness of sin and doubt and enter into the rest of Canaan.
l) Do not have a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from God.
m) The heart is the concern of God. What is the condition of your heart?
What hardens a heart?
- Choosing sin over God. This does not mean that as believers we are free from sin. Sin continually knocks on the door of everyman. We sin by choice and we sin by avoidance. But when someone continually rejects the working of the Holy Spirit, closes their heart to any conviction or desire for change, then that person may have hardened their heart. A person who continually chooses sin over Christ should ask themselves: “Am I truly repentant? Have I truly been saved?” Your heart will tell you. If you are grieved over sin in your life, and if you long to change to be set free from it, then you do not have a hard heart. A hard heart doesn’t care about sin. It doesn’t want to change. It feels no remorse or grief.
- Doubting God also hardens a heart. Again this does not mean that we never have doubt. Thomas doubted. The father whose son had been ill since birth doubted and begged for Jesus to help him believe more. Again, I am not talking about the occasional doubts we all encounter, but instead the persistent refusal to believe in God. The person who has experienced God’s blessing time and time again and still refuses to accept God, is in danger of losing their soul.
So what is the proof of salvation?
- The confirmation of the Holy Spirit. (You know that you know)
- The desire to change, to be free from sins grip.
- The desire to believe and follow after God with your whole heart.
- *The continuation to the end. That is why the writer says in verse 14: “We have come to share in Christ if we hold firmly till the end the confidence we had at the first.” That is why John would write in John 8:31 “If you hold to my teachings you are really my disciples” and in I John 2:19 “They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us.”
Application:
Search your heart! Is it right before God? Or has your heart grown cold and hard? If you can harden your heart, you can also soften it. You can repent and turn from your sin and doubt. You can confess your desire to change and grow.
2. Sin and doubt harden the heart and anger God
Look at 3:12 -19
God was angry with that generation that He had so blessed. The word angry literally could be translated ‘loathed”. He was burdened down with them. He was exhausted with their continual complaining and failure to believe. He was indignant over their treatment of Moses and Joshua and Caleb who had given the good report as spies of the land.
They had wandered away from God and His plan for their lives, and so he declared they would always be wandering and never come to the place of salvation or rest.
What does this teach us about God?
- God detests unbelief. Without faith it is impossible to please God. We can say: “I’m not so bad. I pay my taxes. I treat people right. I don’t do anything worthy of death.” But God says if you reject my Son, you reject me. You are in sin, and the wages of your sin is death. You deserve to be eternally separated from me and from my forgiveness.
- The writer here addresses brethren. Not believers in the sense he has spoken of earlier in the chapter when he spoke with HOLY brethren. Here he is addressing racial brothers, fellow Jews by blood.
- Don’t reject the message of Christ. Don’t refuse to believe in Jesus for your salvation. There is no other way.
- In verse 13 he urges them to encourage one another to repent and to be saved. The word “encourage’ is the Greek word: “Paracleo” which is the same word for Holy Spirit. Jesus promised that when he left, he would send another comforter, a Holy Spirit who would instruct and teach us about God. We are to be the agent of the Holy Spirit in each other’s lives. We are to urge and instruct and challenge non-believers to escape the judgment and come into faith in Christ. If they don’t there is no other escape!
I think as Christians we don’t like to think about the righteous anger of God. Previous generations knew that it was a terrible thing to fall into the hands of an angry God. God hates sin. God loathes those who reject His Son. There is not hope for those who hear the gospel and refuse to believe. To whom much has been given, much will be required. Every person who hears the gospel and rejects it is twice as guilty as those who have never heard.
We must take seriously these warnings in scripture. The souls of people are at stake. We must understand that the Gospel is great News, but those who reject it face a horrible existence apart from the forgiving God. And when we see a brother or sister in Christ start to drift from the Lord, when a person who grew up in the church walks away – it isn’t just a sad thing. It is a terrible thing. We should try and win them back. We should pray and beseech God for them day and night.
Do we take these words seriously enough?
Or have our hearts become callous and cool as well?
3. The day of salvation can be lost
I am not saying that you can lose your salvation. There are enough scriptures that remind us that if we are truly saved, no one and nothing can ever snatch us from the hand of God.
But the question is: Who are saved? Is a person saved just because their parents believe and they come to church each week? Is a person saved, just because they faithfully come to church? Is a person saved who has heard the gospel and came forward during an altar call many years ago, but they have not changed one bit since that day and they continue to doubt and continue to sin as if Jesus did not save them?
Are you truly saved? How do you know? And if you are not positive, TODAY is the day to settle that account, because tomorrow may never come. The day of salvation can be lost.
DL Moody used to preach and end his sermons by challenging people to go home and think about the claims of the gospel and make a decision at home. They one night the Chicago fire occurred and many people were killed. After that he never gave people the option to go home and think about it. They could die on the way, and the moment of salvation would have passed. You must decide TODAY. Right now.
Do you believe? Have you forsaken your sin and clung to the cross? Have you repented and called upon the Lord alone to save you? This is the day. Don’t wait another minute.
Prayer of salvation.
Do you hold an urgency in your heart for the lost around us? Lost family members? Lost co-workers and friends? Does your heart need to be changed by the Holy Spirit today?
