4.What takes place if we keep on pressing forward in faith in the Lord?

We enter the rest of God.

The thought here seems to be that everyone who chooses to believe and obey God without murmuring and complaining will enter His rest, His inheritance. The Israelites were not permitted to enter Canaan at their first approach because they would not believe God, even though God had planned from the creation of the world that they should enter Canaan.

The Jews in the wilderness did not mix faith with the word they heard. Even in those days faith was required in order to please God.

We who believe do enter the promised rest. The important word is believe. Those who will not believe shall never enter the rest of God.

Entering the rest of God involves:

Coming to understand what God has stated to be true concerning us.

Believing that what God has stated shall come to pass.

Cooperating with the Holy Spirit in the step-by-step accomplishment of what God has declared to be a fact. We must read the Scriptures to find what God has stated to be true of our relationship with Him and what He is doing with us through Christ. We must set our mind and heart to believe that what God has stated He can and will do. We must demonstrate our faith in the faithfulness of God by obeying the Holy Spirit in every area of our life at all times.

The Israelites knew that God had called them from Egypt and had promised to bring the people into a land flowing with milk and honey. However, as soon as they became thirsty, or hungry, or discouraged they made little or no attempt to believe that what God had promised to them He was able and willing to do. They doubted the goodness, truth, and power of God. As a result they complained, they murmured, they wept in fear, they rebelled against Moses and Aaron.

We must exercise these three aspects of faith:

Faith based on the knowledge of what God has stated in the Scriptures.

Faith that God is all-powerful and trustworthy. God can and shall keep his part of the contract.

Faith that presses vigorously each day into the rule of the Holy Spirit over our deeds, words, and thoughts.

In verses three through nine the Holy Spirit gives us three concepts that have to do with being able to enter the rest of God:

God’s creation, all the way from the separating of the light from the darkness to the descent of the new Jerusalem, was completed in God’s mind before the events described in Genesis, Chapter One came into existence. The Jewish Sabbath day.

The land of promise.

Let us consider the three concepts one at a time. If we do not believe them and embrace them, applying faith to them, we will not enter the rest of God. We will not attain the fullness of the inheritance that God has prepared for each believer in Christ.

First, consider this statement: "the works were finished from the foundation of the world."

We understand from verse three that all the works of God were completed in God’s mind, in the spirit realm, before God said, "Let there be light." We who are imprisoned in the physical realm are bound by time. God beholds a matter as being accomplished long before (sometimes thousands of years before) we humans arrive at the time of its physical appearance and substance.

"The works were finished from the foundation of the world." The fact of the pre-working, the foreknowledge, the predestination, the sovereignty of God, is taught by statement and by example throughout the Scriptures.

From the calling of Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldees, to the establishing of the last saint in the new Jerusalem, the sovereignty of God is demonstrated clearly.

Does this mean that no matter what anyone does, those who are to be saved will be saved and those who are to be destroyed will be destroyed?

The Scriptures do not teach this. Every human being on the earth determines his or her eternal destiny by the way he behaves and the choices he makes. Grace, salvation, and the Kingdom of God, are not edicts. They are opportunities.

Part 2.....

Back to Study the Book of Hebrews

Back to Chapter Four.....