Don’t harden your Heart
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2024 · 4 August 2024
The Bible is full of warning signs meant by God to deter men from the inevitable wrath of God if men continue to sin. Because The Old Testament tells us that God has no pleasure in the death of the wicked. The New Testament tells us that God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. And in Hebrews 3:7-19, we have again God’s warnings to turn to Jesus.
There are many people who intellectually have responded to the gospel. They believe it, but they have never committed themselves to that faith. They’ve never accepted Jesus as Savior and Lord, repenting from their sins, and turning fully to Him. And to not accept Him as Savior brings upon a person a worse judgement than to really not know it in full and so not to accept it.
And to whom much is given much is required. And so verses 7 - 19 then are the Holy Spirit’s warning to the one who knows the gospel, who knows the truth, but because of the love of sin and the fear of persecution or whatever it may be, has not committed himself to the truth. God fears for these Jews because they’ve heard the gospel. They’ve heard it right from the apostles and the prophets.
You know what an apostate is? An apostate is an individual who knowing the truth willfully rejects it and falls back. Now to get this warning across, the Holy Spirit uses the Old Testament, because He knows He’s talking to Jews and He wants to talk to them out of their own context. So He just picks up on Moses and uses an illustration from Moses, which fits the thing perfectly.
In Hebrews, the writer is presenting that Jesus is better than everything else, and that Jesus is the mediator of a new and better covenant than the old. And if He is, He must be better than all the people who went with the old covenant. He’s got to be better than the old prophets. He’s even got to be better than the angels who mediated the old covenant. He’s got to be better than Moses.
And so one by one the writer of Hebrew shows Jesus as greater than all of these. And by the time we come to Hebrews 3, Jesus has been proven greater than prophets, greater than angels, and greater than Moses, who was the greatest of all. And so since He’s already talking about Moses, He wants to interject this powerful emphasis to those hanging on the brink of decision, the experience of Moses.
Now this falls into four parts. 1. The illustration is real. 2. The invitation, “Take heed.” 3. The instruction, “Exhort one another daily.” 4. And the issue: unbelief. Notice first the illustration. Sometimes it’s good to begin with an illustration, and then back it up with Scriptures. That’s what God does here. And the Holy Spirit chooses to begin by picking out something during the time of Moses.
But His quote comes from the time of David, because David is quoting about the time of Moses. So He goes back to Moses’ occasion when wandering in the wilderness as quoted by David and requotes it. And David chose this particular statement 1,000 years before, and now this time the Holy Spirit makes the same point. David in Psalm 95:7-11 says the thing that we’re going to read here.
Psalm 95 reflects on Israel’s disobedience and rejection of Moses in the Exodus wanderings. Israel in captivity was oppressed, they were beaten, and so God brought in plagues. And they finally ended with the death of the first born. Then God said, “Moses, gather them together to get out of here!” And Moses marched them out, and Pharaoh said, “I can’t take the plagues any longer.”
And they moved out and God said, “Moses, you’ve got a problem in the Red Sea. And you don’t have a boat.” So God said, “Moses, there’s only one thing you do; just ask the Red Sea to part.” And the Red Sea parted. And the children of Israel walked across on dry land, and Pharaoh thought, “That looks easy,” and marched his whole army in there, and the Red Sea closed on them.
So God was working miracles in Israel. And they got in the wilderness, and they immediately didn’t believe God. And that’s classic illustration of unbelief in the face of overwhelming evidence. God had revealed Himself. They knew the truth of His revelation. They saw the proof of it, and yet they did not believe. And so they as a result had to wander, and they wandered for 38 years.
Verses 7-10, “Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says: Today, if you hear His voice, 8 do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion, on the day of testing in the wilderness, 9 where your ancestors tested me, and saw my works 10 for forty years. Therefore I was provoked to anger with that generation and said, “They always go astray in their hearts, and they have not known My ways.”
Notice what it says in verse 7, “Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says.” Isn’t that an interesting statement? Because in Psalm 95, guess who’s talking? David. But when this account goes back to Psalm 95, it says, “Therefore” – not as David says, but “as the Holy Spirit says.” That is a classic illustration of what divine inspiration is. Inspiration is the Holy Spirit speaking through the mouth of God.
And what David said was not his own opinion. What David said was not his own choice of words. When David opened his mouth, the Holy Spirit of God spoke. That’s divine inspiration. When the Bible is written and you open its pages and you read a verse, those are not the words of choice of men, those are words of the Spirit of God who is the author of all the Scripture.
2 Peter 1:21 says, “For the prophesy came not at any time by the will of men, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit.” The Holy Spirit wrote every word of Scripture. That’s why we believe it is gross injustice, and it opens the flood gates to every kind of heresy possible when you deny the absolute verbal inspiration of all Scripture, both Old and New Testaments.
And notice it says, “If you hear His voice.” Hearing God is a matter of your own will. But there is that possibility of hardening the heart as Israel did. And so verse 8 says, “Do not harden your hearts as they did in the rebellion.” Hardening your heart is also a matter of personal choice. In 1 Timothy 4:2, Paul says that the conscience of a person can become seared as with a hot iron, like scar tissue.
That is what happens to somebody who hears the gospel repeatedly. The ‘today’ only lasts as long as your conscience is sensitive to the Spirit of God. Then today is over, it’s tomorrow and it’s too late. That’s what He’s saying. Today if you’ll enact your will to hear God’s voice, don’t harden your heart. And your heart gets harder every time you say no to Jesus Christ when you know the truth.
God had given them enough evidence to convince anybody. But they loved their sin, their selfishness, their own plans and their own ideas, and they would not commit to God. Verse 9, “Don’t do as your ancestors tested Me, tried Me, and saw My works 10 for forty years. Therefore I was provoked to anger and said, “They always go astray in their hearts, and they have not known My ways.”
The classic illustration is in Numbers 14. When the majority of spies brought back to Kadesh-Barnea, they went in there to spy out the land. And they all come back and said, “Oh, are we in trouble! Those guys are giants, and we are like grasshoppers.” And I call that the grasshopper complex. It is when you walk by sight, you end in defeat. “Oh, they’re too big and too strong!”
Because they brought back an evil report, God said, “Not one single one of you of male age equipped to be in the army of Israel will ever enter the Promised Land because of your unbelief. Only two of the spies brought back a good report: Joshua and Caleb. And out of that whole generation, the only two that entered the Promised Land were those two, because they believed God.
God answered Moses as he pleaded for God not to wipe out the whole nation because of their unbelief. God said, “All those men that have seen My signs which I did in Egypt and in the wilderness have not listened to my voice. They had enough evidence to believe that I could lead them into that land of milk and honey. But they wouldn’t believe Me, so they’re not going to see that land.”
In Deuteronomy 2:14, it says, they wandered for 38 years until that whole generation died out because of the depth of unbelief. And in Deuteronomy 9:7, the Holy Spirit said, “Remember and forget not how you provoked the Lord your God to wrath in this wilderness; from the day you departed Egypt until you came to this place, you have been rebellious against the Lord.”
Verse 10, continuing with Israel in Psalm 95, “Therefore I was provoked to anger with that generation and said, “They always go astray in their hearts, and they have not known My ways.” They kept it up. God was disgusted with them. God rejected them. And God repudiated them. Why? “Because they always go astray in their hearts, and they have not known My ways.”
Verses 11-12 says, “So I swore in my anger, “They will not enter my rest. 12 Watch out, brothers and sisters, so that there won’t be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God.” God says, “Don’t harden your hearts. Hear today and do today what God wants you to do, and don’t do what Israel did even after they had seen the proof of it for 40 years.”
They just didn’t have faith. These are people who habitually follow evil. Then the closing of the illustration in verse 11, “So I swore in my anger, “They will not enter my rest.” Now the word “rest” here refers in the illustration to Canaan, the land of milk and honey, the Promised Land. And the word rest implies resting from wandering. When God makes an oath with Himself, it’s a binding oath.
The Canaanites were so bad that they buried live babies in jars in the walls of every building they built. They were such a gross, immoral, and godless people that God wanted them wiped off the face of the earth in a judicial act whereby He was going to use Israel as His instrument of judgement. But instead of Israel wiping out the Canaanites, they intermarried with them.
And they were governed by many Gentile empires until the Roman era. Then the Jews were scattered over all the earth in 70 A.D. And now in our day God is gathering them again for the kingdom, and Israel’s final rest comes in that kingdom. When Jesus comes the second time, He will set up his kingdom and that will be true rest. Now on the basis of that illustration I want you to see the invitation.
Verse 12 says, “Watch out, brothers and sisters, so that there won’t be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God.” Look at your own heart. Do you know the truth of Jesus Christ? In love I say to you, don’t allow yourself to have an unbelieving heart, and you wind up departing from the living God. This is not a reference to Christians. Holy brethren are Jews.
You know what the greatest evil in the world is? Unbelief. Failure to believe God. Here are these non-Christians on the verge of faith. Maybe some of them professing to be Christians. They’d never admit to being actively aggressively against Christ, but they are. No matter how close you are to Jesus Christ, if you never come to Him, you have an evil heart of unbelief.
Here is the instruction. Verse 13 says, “But encourage each other daily, while it is still called today, so that none of you is hardened by sin’s deception.” The apostle Paul said in 2 Corinthians 5:20, “We plead on Christ’s behalf, “be reconciled to God.” Sin never makes it look like it ought to look. Always masks it, it lies, and mankind get hard on the inside and they don’t even realize it.
Verse 14 says, “For we have become participants in Christ if we hold firmly until the end the reality that we had at the start.” Christ says, “That’s not enough, because if you really believe it and you’ve committed your life to it, the evidence will be the fact that when it’s all over and the day ends you’ll still be there.” Continuance in the gospel. The true ones are staying around.
And thus the invitation is repeated in verse 15, “As it is said: Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.” You think the Holy Spirit wants you to get that message? He repeats it twice. “Don’t harden your heart.” Verse 16, “For who heard and rebelled? Wasn’t it all who came out of Egypt under Moses?” The whole group were. Two exceptions: Joshua and Caleb.
Verse 17 says, “With whom was God angry for forty years? Wasn’t it with those who sinned, whose bodies fell in the wilderness?” And God called them in Deuteronomy 32:20, “A very perverse children in whom there is no faithfulness.” God was angry with a whole generation of people, and He sentenced that whole generation so that they could not enter into His rest.
Verse 18, “And to whom did he swear that they would not enter his rest, if not to those who disobeyed?” And that leads us to the issue, which is the fourth point, verse 19, “So we see that they were unable to enter because of unbelief.” We’re saved by faith. You can put your faith in the God of the universe. He’s worth your faith. To be unbelieving brings upon you the destruction of God. Let us pray.