Scripture Daily

Context No. 591 of 4322 · Hebrews

Context · Reflection

Hebrews 3:1-11: in context

1Therefore, holy brothers, partakers of a heavenly calling, consider the Apostle and High Priest of our confession: Jesus, 2who was faithful to him who appointed him, as also Moses was in all his house. 3For he has been counted worthy of more glory than Moses, because he who built the house has more honor than the house. 4For every house is built by someone; but he who built all things is God. 5Moses indeed was faithful in all his house as a servant, for a testimony of those things which were afterward to be spoken, 6but Christ is faithful as a Son over his house. We are his house, if we hold fast our confidence and the glorying of our hope firm to the end. 7Therefore, even as the Holy Spirit says, “Today if you will hear his voice, 8don’t harden your hearts as in the rebellion, in the day of the trial in the wilderness, 9where your fathers tested me and tried me, and saw my deeds for forty years. 10Therefore I was displeased with that generation, and said, ‘They always err in their heart, but they didn’t know my ways.’ 11As I swore in my wrath, ‘They will not enter into my rest.’”

Hebrews has been showing how Jesus is greater than everything that came before, greater even than Moses, Moses faithful as a servant in God's house, Christ faithful as a Son over it. And then, having lifted our eyes to Christ, the writer turns urgent and quotes the Holy Spirit: today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion, in the wilderness, where your fathers tested me and saw my works for forty years. He is pointing back to a generation that had every advantage, that heard God's voice directly and watched his miracles for four decades, and still hardened their hearts, so that God swore they would not enter his rest. They did not perish from lack of evidence. They perished from hardening.

Two words in that quotation carry enormous weight. One is harden. A heart does not usually go cold in a single dramatic act; it hardens gradually, one small refusal at a time, each time God's voice is heard and set aside, until a heart that once felt things keenly can hear the same call and feel nothing. The wilderness generation hardened by degrees over forty years. The other word is today. Against that slow calcifying, the Spirit sets an urgent now: today, while you can still hear his voice, while the heart is still soft enough to respond, do not put it off. The danger of deferral is that the capacity to respond does not wait for me; it quietly diminishes each time I decline.

That presses on a specific place in my life, because there is usually somewhere God has been speaking and I have been not-quite-responding, deferring, telling myself later. Hebrews warns that later is exactly how hearts harden, and that the window is today. Where have I been hearing God's voice on some matter and quietly hardening rather than obeying, and is today, while my heart can still feel the call, the day to soften and respond before that ability slips further away?

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