Hebrews Chapter Three, False And Genuine Faith

 

Hebrews 3:16 For who, having heard, rebelled? Indeed, was it not all who came out of Egypt, led by Moses? [17] Now with whom was He angry forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose corpses fell in the wilderness? [18] And to whom did He swear that they wound not enter His rest, but to those who did not obey? [19] So we see that they could not enter in because of unbelief.

 

Scripture presents the two-sided coin of salvation: Faith and obedience. Permit me to explain. Works DO NOT save anyone. Going backward in these verses, let us begin with verse 19. We learn that the Jews of Moses’ time did not enter into the Promised Land under Joshua because of unbelief.

But how was this unbelief characterized? Doubtless many of us know professors of the faith that dwell in a cloud of unbelief. Their lip service does not reach the heart, much less the hand. They say and do not do. If someone hears something and truly believed it; if we listen and are convinced that what was said is right, what is the result? Obedience. Verse 18 is the flipside of verse 19. The unbelief that barred Israel’s entry is portrayed as disobedience in verse 18. God swore to Himself that this ungrateful, rebellious, treacherous and headstrong generation would not enter into His rest because of disobedience.

 

But doesn’t obedience imply a work? Are faith and works congruent, then? Faith is the head: it is the light that leads the way. Say you are trapped in a cavern deep below ground, dark, quiet, and alone. You find two things: a flashlight and a map. The map details how to escape the cavern safely; the light can verify that what the map says is true. But what component is missing here? Action, or obedience. If the light reveals and the map convicts, then we must, to escape the cavern, walk. As we begin to walk we are demonstrating that we believe the map, led by the light that alone illumines our path. If we are to get where we need to be, the Bible is our map, faith is our light by which we see, and obedience reflects our confidence: not in ourselves, but in what we have been given to escape the confines of that dark cavern.

 

Verses 16 and 17 showcase a cause and effect relationship between God and His covenant people that we have already treated upon in Malachi. In Leviticus chapter 26 God outlines the blessing that comes from obedience, and the curse that emanates from unbelief, or walking contrary to God. We can only walk contrarily in the fullness of our understanding when we have been made privy of what God’s revealed will is, and then rebel and reject that will. “As for the word that you have spoken to us in the name of the Lord, we will not listen to you! But we will certainly do whatever has gone out of our own mouth,” Jeremiah 44:16, 17.

 

First, Israel rebels, verse 16. One can only rebel when authority becomes manifest. God asserted His authority over the tribes of Israel at Sinai when they entered into a covenant with Him. He had become Israel’s God. He revealed the Law, not only the Decalogue, but all of His 613 commands throughout Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. God was King over Israel. But not just this is necessary. The writer asks, “who, having heard, rebelled?” So not only does faith come by hearing, but so does its nemesis: rebellion. Faith submits to authority, recognizing it as good, both in its intention and execution. Rebellion resists, rejecting both intention and execution as inferior to one’s personal opinions concerning the government of their lives. Like Satan seduced Eve, Israel was seduced into thinking that God’s way was hard, unfair, dangerous, unnecessary, etc. God performed the miraculous again and again, but the people would have rather gone back to Egypt where only certain death awaited them. Why?

 

Have you ever prayed and been frustrated that God ignored you, or at least frustrated because you perceived it as being ignored? When we are wearied by God’s seeming silence, doubts can begin to creep in, and if we are honest the doubts manifest in aspersions regarding His goodness or faithfulness toward us. The rebel always thinks that we can do better than the present authority. We want to overthrow or turn away from authority because we are convinced that we could do a better job governing. In short when it comes to prayer and God, since He does not respond the way we believe He should, we become disillusioned. But God is infinitely wise and knows what we need, what we want, and what we should not have.

 

Case in point: Hezekiah, the king of Judah was told by Isaiah the prophet he would die of sickness, Isaiah 38:1. When Hezekiah prayed for an extension of his life, God granted it, fifteen years to be specific, Isaiah 38:5. We know that during those fifteen years Hezekiah begot Manasseh, who ruled at the age of 12 when his father passed away, 2 Chronicles 32:33, 33:1. Manasseh reigned 55 years and was a terribly wicked king that was a catalyst to the downfall of Judah, 2 Kings 21:10-15. Sometimes a prayer answered in a way we do not wish is a blessing that we have yet to realize. We just must trust in the Lord that He has our best at heart and will provide our necessities.

 

Verse 17 reveals the answer to Israel’s rebellion: God’s anger. His anger was one of a slighted King, whose law and courtesy had both been defied and trampled upon by a mob of citizens that did not want to be governed. The writer defines their rebellion as sin, “who sinned,” which we are told is lawlessness. “Whoever commits sin also commits lawlessness, and sin is lawlessness,” 1 John 3:4. Lawlessness, or an absence of law, is a rejection to abide by law and contempt for the giver of the law because it infringes upon what we perceive as personal freedoms. No one knows better what is good for me than I do! Sin is a transgression of the King’s revealed law.

 

Lawlessness is our effort to supplant the king’s revealed law with our own. This is aptly demonstrated by people who believe, “”I am a good person.” This is a highly judgmental and comparative statement. Good compared to whom, or to what? What is the internal standard such people hold up to demonstrate that they are “good”? The unspoken assertion here is that they believe, comparatively to others who must then be better or worse than they, that they have done enough good to outweigh the bad committed in life. Yet this flawed and juvenile standard runs counter to the Lord’s revealed word, “There is none righteous, no, not one…for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” Romans 3:10, 23.

 

Unwillingness to obey betrays the absence of faith. When a professing Christian hears that we should not commit fornication and then shrugs and goes on to make a lifestyle of it, I would liken this person to the Jews here described. Unbelief is betrayed by disobedience. One’s faith consists only in intellectual catechisms: God has spoken certain words and I have read them. I believe this word is God’s but I am not interested in conducting the reality of this word into my daily life because it is intrusive and inconvenient. Putting aside the verbal niceties we question and outright deny the efficacy of God’s truth and how it can cleanse and transform human lives. Israel’s nearly total apostasy led them to a premature death in the wilderness outside Canaan. Faith was the key that unlocked the Promised Land. But like the man in the dark cavern that doubts the map and what his flashlight illumines, he will, through mistrust, not take a single step on the path laid out for him unless it is one of his own governance. “Today, if you will hear His voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.”