Just A Thought
Topic: Hard Heart ((Hebrews 3:15, 4:7)
How is your heart? I am not asking about the physical condition of your heart, but the spiritual condition. Sometimes we describe the experience of becoming a Christian as inviting Jesus to come into the heart. The Bible speaks of a troubled heart, a broken heart and a hard heart. The Lord Jesus came to take care of troubled hearts and broken hearts. The bible here warns against the danger of the hardening of one’s heart.
To harden the heart means to dry up, to become hard, stiff or stubborn. This says to us, don’t harden your hearts as Israel did in the wilderness experience. There are many ways one can harden his heart.
- By willful rebellion (Hebrews 3:8-9).
- By careless drifting and spiritual ignorance (Hebrews 3:10).
- By overt unbelief (Hebrews 3:12).
- By yielding to the deceitfulness of sin (Hebrews 3:13).
The writer of Hebrews uses as his text, Psalm 95:7-11. Psalm 95 looks back at the past when God, through Moses, led Israel out of Egypt, that he might lead them into the land of Promise, the land of Canaan. However, the Israelites soon rebelled against God and provoked His anger. Ignorance is no excuse. God became angry with that generation and said, “They shall never enter into My rest.” They lived short of the promised land. Many of them even wanted to go back to Egypt. Because they hardened their hearts, that entire generation spent the next 40 years wandering and dying in the wilderness. Their forty years in the wilderness was a forty year long funeral possession.
The writer now applies this warning from the past to the first recipients and to us as well. Because of persecution many believers in the first century were tempted to go back to the old life. This has been a problem down through the ages. I could cite story after story of professing Christians who seemed to walk with God for a time, but then when the pressures came they turned back.
Hebrews 3:12-19
“Beware,” “See to it,” “Take heed,” take heed that none of you have an evil heart of unbelief. Don’t let what happened to Israel in the wilderness, happen to you.
The word "unbelief" is "apistias" which means "no faith." They did not have the faith to trust God for the future. The Israelites under Moses had a “heart” problem. Their hearts had become hardened because of rebellion.
Are you in danger of hardening your heart to the precious truth of the gospel of Christ? Have you grown cold in your Christian life? The only answer is Jesus. Only Jesus can take away that hard heart of stone, give you a new heart, and usher you into His rest; known as the sabbath rest.
See you Sunday!
Dr. Scott Kallem