Do not harden your hearts
Introduction: The sin of sins
watching out is something that share traders and stock market investors do as naturally as they breathe, but over the last month or so, they have been paying attention to things with a care and focus that not even they could have imagined. Hawks wish they had eyesight as keen for signs of movement up and down. Theirs is an unblinking devotion to detail, a deliberate concentration of the mind, a wholehearted paying of attention that leaves mere financial mortals like me just shaking my head in awe and admiration at the discipline of it all.
the loving pastor who wrote the letter to the Hebrews puts before his readers, both his first century readers and we 21st century readers, this fierce, stirring challenge – give that same kind of attention, concentrate with the same intensity of focus, on the state of our hearts before the living God. As he puts it in 3.12, we are to see to it / to take care, to leave no stone unturned, no opportunity missed, no aspect overlooked, to make every effort as he says in 4.11, to this end – that none of us has a sinful, evil unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. He is a worried man – the persecution that his original readers were facing was ferocious but not yet fatal, and he knows hat his readers, possibly in Rome, were in danger of bailing out altogether on Jesus, or at least hitting the brakes a little on their devotion to Jesus, just talking it easy in their discipleship, to make it less likely that they will be caught in the crosshairs of the persecutors. And so he writes this letter to gee them up, to put fire in their bellies and steel in their backbones, to make sure that they don’t miss out on the important for the sake of the convenient.
and the extent of his pastoral skill is on display here, as he throws the spotlight not so much on sins, not even on sin, but on the sin of sins, the sin of a hard heart before God. It’s the sin of sins because if your heart is hard, then nothing else matters, nothing else can make a difference. But if your heart is soft, warm, tender, open, responsive, alive toward God, then in a sense it doesn’t matter what sin you have been trapped in, there’s always a way forward, because God is a God of grace.
the essence of hard heartedness is unbelief, and so our author starts where he has started each of the last sections, with the big picture of Jesus, who far from being hard hearted toward God, and unbelieving, was faithful to the one who appointed him, 3.1:
1. The faithful Son
1 Therefore, brothers and sisters, holy partners in a heavenly calling, consider that Jesus, the apostle and high priest of our confession, 2 was faithful to the one who appointed him, just as Moses also “was faithful in all God’s house.”
we finished last week by hearing a new title for Jesus, one that no other author uses, that of High Priest. Jesus, says the pastor to the Hebrews, is a merciful and faithful High Priest in the service of God – one who in a past action makes a sacrifice of atonement for the sins of the people, and in the present is able to help those who are being tested, precisely because he himself was tested by what he suffered. And chapters 3 to 5 unpack what he meant by that – chs 3 and 4 tease out what it means for Jesus to be the faithful high priest, and ch 5 what it means for Jesus to be a merciful high priest.
and being connected to Jesus so that he is your high priest means a remarkable privilege – we are holy partners in a heavenly calling. Holy or sanctified, clean and pure and undefiled and dirt free before God and therefore before others and before ourselves – think about the freedom that comes with that, all joined together in a heavenly calling. That phrase probably has a dual meaning – both the fact that the call is from heaven, a summons by the one who is the Lord of heaven and earth to live life the way he leads; and also a calling to heaven, to share the glory which God has prepared for his children, crowned with glory and honour and with all things subjected under our feet.
this is who you are when you are connected to Jesus, because he was faithful to the one who appointed him. In this, he is on a par with Moses. By now, we know why that matters – the refuge to which the readers were thinking of fleeing was Judaism, for whom Moses was not just a great leader of the past, but virtually on a par with God himself, one who spoke face to face with God, with whom God shared his heart. And quoting Num 12.7, the author says that Jesus was faithful just as Moses was also faithful in all God’s house; he too did all that God appointed him to do, although in his case, a long obedience in the same direction led directly to death, even death on a cross.
but the comparison stops there, and the contrast starts, because although are were equal in faithfulness, they are nowhere near equal in glory, v. 3:
3 Yet Jesus is worthy of more glory than Moses, just as the builder of a house has more honor than the house itself. 4 (For every house is built by someone, but the builder of all things is God.) 5 Now Moses was faithful in all God’s house as a servant, to testify to the things that would be spoken later. 6 Christ, however, was faithful over God’s house as a son,
the details are a little obscure, but the point is clear – Jesus is worthy of more glory than Moses, even if his path was the way of humiliation, in the same way that the builder of house is worthy of more honour than the house itself. Actually, this is open to a little dispute, at least in my experience. As the technical owner builder of a multi-award winning house recently displayed in a major New York art gallery and featured on Foreign Correspondent, I can tell you that the house has a whole lot more glory than me the builder, but then again, perhaps things were better in the good old days. The point is that Moses, who was faithful, was faithful according to his station – he was a servant in God’s house, that’s how the Old Testament refers to him (Exod 4.10, 14.31, Num 11.11); whereas Christ was faithful over God’s house, not as a mere servant, but as a Son who died and rose and is at the right hand of God.
and then comes the punch line, v. 6:
and we are his house if we hold firm the confidence and the pride that belong to hope.
we are the house of God, the place where God dwells in power and purity and blessing, we are the temple of the Holy Spirit, if … if we hold firm the confidence and the pride that belong to hope. Jesus is building a people belonging to God, a place among whom God is present, and the author says that if you stand firm against the pressure, if you don’t cave in, then all that is true of that house will be true of you.
• and what that means is that they are to be faithful, just as Jesus was faithful, and in particular, in contrast to their ancestors, who were unfaithful, v. 7:
2. The faithless ancestors
7 Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says, “Today, if you hear his voice, 8 do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion, as on the day of testing in the wilderness, 9 where your ancestors put me to the test, though they had seen my works 10 for forty years. Therefore I was angry with that generation, and I said, “They always go astray in their hearts, and they have not known my ways.’ 11 As in my anger I swore, “They will not enter my rest.’ “
the irony here is thick. The readers were being tempted to go back in faithlessness to Christ and join a people who themselves were faithless; to harden their hearts to God, and instead to join a people whose history is full of hard heartedness towards God. And so the author of our letter quotes the Holy Spirit – “Today if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts”. Hear him begging – do not harden your hearts.
Psalm 95, which is quoted here, is a call to worship for Israel, to sing to the Lord, make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation. But the Psalmist knows that a life of worship is not like falling off a log – there is a terrible alternative to worship, which is to harden the heart towards God, precisely as the people of the exodus generation did. For 40 years, they saw miracle after miracle – the 10 plagues including the final terrible killing of the firstborn of Egypt, though passing over the firstborn of Israel; the crossing over of the Red Sea and the destruction of the Egyptian army; the manna and quail from heaven, the water from the rock in the desert, for 40 years they saw the works of God. If ever someone says to you, ‘if only I could see a miracle I would believe’, the exodus generation of Israel shows that’s not true. They saw them for 40 years, and still they hardened their hearts, and did not know the ways of God, they would not go up to the promised land when the spies came back, they grumbled and complained that they were better off in Egypt, cursing God for bringing them out to the desert to die. And so God swore in his anger, ‘they shall not enter my rest’.
3. Us?
and so the author now for the first time directly addresses his readers, v. 12:
12 Take care, brothers and sisters, that none of you may have an evil, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God.
I have a friend whose marriage is slowly and destructively disintegrating. Where there used to be love and joy and hope, their is now only accusation, misery and hatred. And it’s all about the hardness of his heart. His heart is hard towards her. He interprets everything she says in the most negative light possible, while constantly protesting the purity of his own intentions. Every thing she does wrong is deliberate, every thing he does wrong is an understandable and forgivable accident. There is no space for listening, only accusing; no hope, only despair, no trust, only suspicion. When he speaks to her, he spits and bites and cuts and lashes.
that’s the way it is with a hard heart. And our author says to take care, to watch out, to see to it, that none of us have a hard unbelieving heart towards the living God. Have you ever seen this, a heart that is hard towards God? The word is actually sklerotic, where we get our phrase, multiple sklerosis, hard bits of brain that don’t function any more. A hard heart is a soul that’s not really working any more, that’s seized up and dis-functional. It’s when a person becomes convinced that God is not really for them; that the way of Christ is not really the way of life, but the way of long, slow, boring, death. It almost always begins with the thought that the words of the Holy Spirit in Holy Scripture are no longer to be trusted, to be received with the settled attitude that says, whatever Scripture says I’ll believe and do, even if it seems strange and dumb, and instead the hardening heart starts evaluating, organising and sorting which bits of the Bible are acceptable and which bits are beyond the pale. That’s why the opposite of a hard heart is a trusting heart, a hard heart is an unbelieving heart, whereas a soft heart is a believing heart, a confidence that the way of Christ is the way of life – even if it means dying a hideous death at the age of 30, unmarried, without children, executed on a Roman cross after having been betrayed by the very people you came to serve and abandoned by the people who said they loved you. Yes, Jesus was faithful over God’s household as a Son, his was a soft, trusting, obedient heart.
how do you get to having a hard heart towards God? After all, no one starts out being a Christian with the intention of becoming hard and disfunctional towards God. Notice what our pastor says – the single most colestoral laden spiritual danger for us is what he calls the deceitfulness of sin. It’s a brilliant insight – sin is obviously destructive – drunkenness destroys your self-control and you do and say stupid things; lying destroys trust and you start to tear away at the fabric of your friendships; immorality destroys relationships, as what is broken can be patched up but never really the same again – sin is obviously destructive.
But less obviously, sin is deceitful. It lies to you, it tricks you, and in particular sin tricks you into thinking that it is in its path that life is found. That unless you make the pattern of your life conform to the ways of sin, you will miss out – greed is good, because you have to purchase the latest and greatest of the toys, and you better look after number 1, because no one else will; a string of sexual conquests is the path to sexual fulfillment, whereas in fact it is the path to loneliness and self obsession; the only way to celebrate is get off your face, because anything less is boring; revenge is sweet, because it’s only the tough who get ahead and on and on. Sin is seductive like that, deceitful, it was from the very beginning, the devil is the father of lies, endlessly tugging at your heart and saying, ‘don’t miss out on the life that really is life – come with me’. This is why the one to whom we are to be faithful is called the living God – he is living because it is in him, in love and faithfuleness and obedience and to him and not in sin, that life is found – he is the God of life.
it’s a powerful play by sin – to harden our hearts by deceiving us into thinking that we’re missing out on life, so that we turn away from the living God. And so we are to take care, make every effort, take as much care of our souls as the traders do of their investments.
Conclusion: Exhort one another
The question is, how? How do we go about making sure, going to stock broker lengths to ensure that none of – not you, not me – have a hard unbelieving heart. Our author has 2 very practical instructions.
the first is v 13:
13 But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today,”
the first thing we need to do is to recognise what a powerful opportunity we have in each other’s lives. He says, exhort one another every day – probably because at that stage, they did in fact get together for church every day. But the frequency is not the important thing, the issue is the quality. It’s an interesting thing, the way that Christians can get together and talk about every other thing under the sun except being Christian, and how they are going and where they are feeling the tug of the deceitfulness of sin. I think it’s because we are scared – scared to admit weaknesses, scared to appear too spiritual, scared to come across as all pious and high minded. That too, I suspect, is part of the deceitfulness of sin, that talking about living as a Christian as though it were a normal thing to do is somehow a foolishness.
brothers and sisters, we need to hear this one. Out of 10, how would you say we go at exhorting each other? I suspect we are OK at encouraging each other, at catching up with each other, at staying in touch with each other, even with being hip and cool and humourous with each other – at least some of us. But how about exhorting each other. My guess is, we have a fair way to go in this – we find it hard to think ourselves into the position where we might be free to do such a thing. Which takes us back to the very first verse – partners in a heavenly calling. If you get the fact that we are partners together, genuinely belonging to each other so that I am in a real sense responsible for you and you for me, and the thing we are partnering in is something as serious and wonderful and valuable as the heavenly calling, then it makes all the sense in the world to exhort one another, to actually know each other and be open to each other and get messy in each others’ lives, to feel and take the right kind of responsibility for each other.
• What our pastor is describing here is a means of grace, a rhythm that will build growth into our lives, at CCIW we have called it joyous fellowship. One very practical concrete way to do this is to make sure you put yourself in a place where this has a decent chance of happening, which means a fellowship group. Sundays are just too quick to do very much of this kind of exhorting – we need the time and space of a weekly fellowship group to do life together, and be in a place where exhorting one another can actually take place.
and the second instruction is to never become presumptuous, v. 16:
16 Now who were they who heard and yet were rebellious? Was it not all those who left Egypt under the leadership of Moses? 17 But with whom was he angry forty years? Was it not those who sinned, whose bodies fell in the wilderness? 18 And to whom did he swear that they would not enter his rest, if not to those who were disobedient? 19 So we see that they were unable to enter because of unbelief.
would it be too much to suggest that the generation that left Egypt was the most spiritually privileged generation, perhaps apart from the Apostles? They saw a genuine, ridgy didge miracle every day and twice on Fridays, for 40 years – I’ve hardly been conscious for 40 years. Surely you could be faithful then? Surely you would be immune from the deceitfulness of sin? They heard the voice of God on the mountain? They were his chosen people, his treasured possession. Yes, and even they, when they sinned, fell in that desert wandering for 40 years in circles o a journey that actually only takes a couple of weeks. Don’t presume. Don’t think it could it never happen to you. Hear the pastor to the Hebrews – take care, watch out, give the attention of a hawk to yourself and to your holy partners in a heavenly calling, to make sure that none of us have an evil unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God, and goes slow, is a half way devoted child of God.
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