A Study Of The Apostle Pauls Letter To The Hebrews

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AStudyOf TheApostlePauls LetterTo The
Hebrews
How can we neglect so greata salvation?
Hebrews 23
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Hebrews Christ Is Superior! Superior Person
(11413) Superior to Prophets
(11-3) Superior to Angels (14218) Superior
to Moses (31-19) but Well only study verses
7-19 today. Superior to Joshua (41-13) Superior
Priest (414728) Superior to Aaron
(414612) Superior to Melchizedek
(61375) Superior to Levi (76-28)
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Hebrews Christ Is Superior! Superior Pact to
Moses (811018) Superior Promises
(81-13) Superior Sanctuary (91-15) Superior
Sacrifice (916-28) Superior Results
(101-18) Superior Principle (Faith) to Moses
(10191325) Superior Things (1019-39) Superio
r Actions (111-40) Superior Relationship
(121-29) Superior Way of Life (131-25)
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In our study of 31-6, we examined Christs
Superiority to the Old Testa-ment Priesthood
beginning with Moses, noting that Jesus is
greater in His office (vv. 1-2) and greater in
His ministry (vv. 3-6) now (vv. 7-19) well see
that Paul wrote concerning Jesus being greater in
His reward. This passage also includes the second
of seven warnings 21-4 warned against neglect,
and now 37-19 warn against unbelief.
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Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says, Today, if
you will hear His voice, do not harden your
hearts as in the rebellion, in the day of trial
in the wilderness where your fathers test-ed Me,
proved Me, and saw My works forty years
Hebrews 37-9 ?
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Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says, Today, if
you will hear His voice, do not harden your
hearts as in the rebellion, in the day of trial
in the wilderness where your fathers test-ed Me,
proved Me, and saw My works forty years
As mentioned in our last study, Paul often used
parenthetical thoughts in his writ-ings, so we
must be sure to interpret passages with that in
mind what I mean is that therefore here connects
directly to verse 12, making it say, Since Jesus
is greater, and if you wish to remain in Gods
house, beware lest you apostatize.
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Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says, Today, if
you will hear His voice, do not harden your
hearts as in the rebellion, in the day of trial
in the wilderness where your fathers test-ed Me,
proved Me, and saw My works forty years
Notice that although verses 7-11 are tak-en from
a Psalm of David (Psa. 95, ironi-cally also
verses 7-9), Paul here attributed these words to
the Holy Spirit, then later to David (47).
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Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says, Today, if
you will hear His voice, do not harden your
hearts as in the rebellion, in the day of trial
in the wilderness where your fathers test-ed Me,
proved Me, and saw My works forty years
Although the pro-noun His in Psalm 95 refers back
to God, the pronoun His here refers back to Jesus
who, of course, is also God so we have God,
Jesus, and the Spirit all found in this passage.
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Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says, Today, if
you will hear His voice, do not harden your
hearts as in the rebellion, in the day of trial
in the wilderness where your fathers test-ed Me,
proved Me, and saw My works forty years
For this phrase the Hebrew of Psalm 95 has Oh
that youd hear His voice!, em-phasizing the
eter-nal significance of listening to God Paul
put it as a con-ditional statement, meaning that
they wouldnt be able to hear God if their hearts
were hard.
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Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says, Today, if
you will hear His voice, do not harden your
hearts as in the rebellion, in the day of trial
in the wilderness where your fathers test-ed Me,
proved Me, and saw My works forty years
The idea of harden-ing ones heart is very well
illustrated by the custom of animal branding
things such as need-les will pierce the cows
hide until its branded after that its nearly
impossible to do so. Likewise
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Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says, Today, if
you will hear His voice, do not harden your
hearts as in the rebellion, in the day of trial
in the wilderness where your fathers test-ed Me,
proved Me, and saw My works forty years
Since God created man with free will, he cant
penetrate the heart of a person who has chosen to
harden it against His will for him. To Timothy
Paul wrote of people whod have their
consci-ences seared with a hot iron (1 Tim. 42).
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Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says, Today, if
you will hear His voice, do not harden your
hearts as in the rebellion, in the day of trial
in the wilderness where your fathers test-ed Me,
proved Me, and saw My works forty years
This word comes from a term meaning to irritate,
exasper-ate, or aggravate i.e., by means of
their hardened hearts, those Jews stirred up
Gods wrath against them.
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Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says, Today, if
you will hear His voice, do not harden your
hearts as in the rebellion, in the day of trial
in the wilderness where your fathers test-ed Me,
proved Me, and saw My works forty years
This word actually has the definite ar-ticle
(the) before it in the Greek (literal-ly, the day
of the trial), meaning that Paul had a specific
ac-count in mind that account was when the Jews
complained to Moses concerning their lack of
water (Exo. 171-7).
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Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says, Today, if
you will hear His voice, do not harden your
hearts as in the rebellion, in the day of trial
in the wilderness where your fathers test-ed Me,
proved Me, and saw My works forty years
The Greek terms for these words are in-teresting
when put together they mean that those Jews put
God to the test to see what evil or good there
was in Him when they put Him to the test for the
purpose of ap-proving Him if He should pass their
tests. Talk about insult and unbelief!
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Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says, Today, if
you will hear His voice, do not harden your
hearts as in the rebellion, in the day of trial
in the wilderness where your fathers test-ed Me,
proved Me, and saw My works forty years
They seemed like children who test their parents
to see how far they can be pushed before
ex-ploding.
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Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says, Today, if
you will hear His voice, do not harden your
hearts as in the rebellion, in the day of trial
in the wilderness where your fathers test-ed Me,
proved Me, and saw My works forty years
This conjunction should probably be translated
and yet i.e., the idea seems to be that even tho
they continually put God to the test, He still
worked with them for 40 years!
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Therefore I was angry with that generation and
said, They always go astray in their heart, and
they have not known My ways. So I swore in My
wrath, They shall not enter My rest.
Hebrews 310-11 ? ? ?
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Therefore I was angry with that generation and
said, They always go astray in their heart, and
they have not known My ways. So I swore in My
wrath, They shall not enter My rest.
This word means to reject due to being disgusted
with.
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Therefore I was angry with that generation and
said, They always go astray in their heart, and
they have not known My ways. So I swore in My
wrath, They shall not enter My rest.
Notice that the Bible here (vv. 9-10) de-fines a
generation as forty years.
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Therefore I was angry with that generation and
said, They always go astray in their heart, and
they have not known My ways. So I swore in My
wrath, They shall not enter My rest.
This phrase means to wander so just as they
wandered in the wilderness, their hearts wandered
away from God. You think maybe thats one reason
God had them experience it?
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Therefore I was angry with that generation and
said, They always go astray in their heart, and
they have not known My ways. So I swore in My
wrath, They shall not enter My rest.
The original term for heart here is where we get
our word cardiac this word, however, is
obvi-ously not speaking of the literal blood
pump, but of what it represented to the Jews the
mind, the seat of the af-fections, the will,
the understanding, such as when we speak of
someones understanding heart.
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Therefore I was angry with that generation and
said, They always go astray in their heart, and
they have not known My ways. So I swore in My
wrath, They shall not enter My rest.
They had not known Gods ways because they had
practically forsaken Him while in captivity
then, to top it off, they turn-ed back to Egypt
in their hearts, Steph-en said to their
de-scendants in Acts 739 before they stoned him
to death.
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Therefore I was angry with that generation and
said, They always go astray in their heart, and
they have not known My ways. So I swore in My
wrath, They shall not enter My rest.
This word refers to a termination of nervous
activity and struggle for them it was the end of
their physical struggle from oppression and
wanderings in the wilderness, while for us its
the end of the spiritual struggle from attempts
to be free from sin.
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The rest of physical Canaan was their inheritance
(Deu. 129), while the rest of spiritual Canaan
is our inheritance, fitting perfectly into the
subject of Hebrews (915 118). See Christ, as
a second Moses, was leading His people on a
forty-year exodus out from under the law of sin
and death into the promised rest from sin and
death Abraham even looked beyond the physical
land to a better, heavenly one (118-16).
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The church was on an exodus to the promised land
Christ was liberating redeeming Gods new
covenant people, transferring them into a new
citythe new spiritual, heavenly Jerusalemwhich
would soon come (1314) and be the permanent home
of the redeemed. Before moving on to verse 12, I
want to point out that Paul gave three
ex-hortations based on 37-11 take heed
(312-19), fear (41-10), labor (411-13).
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Beware, brethren, lest there be in any of you an
evil heart of unbelief in departing from the
living God.
Hebrews 312 ?
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Beware, brethren, lest there be in any of you an
evil heart of unbelief in departing from the
living God.
This word, of course, implies danger, and the
idea behind its present tense is to be constant
in keep-ing a watchful eye open.
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Beware, brethren, lest there be in any of you an
evil heart of unbelief in departing from the
living God.
This word refers to a fear that an event may
occur, but it also carries with it the suspicion
that it will occur, especially since they were
turn- ing back one by one.
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Beware, brethren, lest there be in any of you an
evil heart of unbelief in departing from the
living God.
This phrase appealed to them as individu-als
i.e., out of those of you who are left, take
heed, beware!
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Beware, brethren, lest there be in any of you an
evil heart of unbelief in departing from the
living God.
By connecting an evil heart with departing from
God, Paul ac-cused those who had already left as
being evil to the corethe heart.
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Beware, brethren, lest there be in any of you an
evil heart of unbelief in departing from the
living God.
This phrase means that disbelief is what causes
an evil heart a heart that has left God takes
the body with it. I employed the word disbelief
here because the original term actual-ly carries
with it the idea of a refusal to continue to
believe or trust.
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Beware, brethren, lest there be in any of you an
evil heart of unbelief in departing from the
living God.
There are two Greek terms for evil one (kakos)
which is evil in the abstract, and another
stronger one (poneros) which is evil in active
op-position to good the one Paul used here is
the stronger one, meaning that he suspected that
there were some among them who were about to act
on their evil hearts and follow previous ones who
had already left.
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Beware, brethren, lest there be in any of you an
evil heart of unbelief in departing from the
living God.
This word is the Greek term from which we get our
word apostasy, a word which means to step away
and stand aloof from.
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Beware, brethren, lest there be in any of you an
evil heart of unbelief in departing from the
living God.
This is the result of a heart of unbelief, and
its reminiscent of the Jews who said, Let us
select a leader and return to Egypt (Num. 144).
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Beware, brethren, lest there be in any of you an
evil heart of unbelief in departing from the
living God.
Paul likely used this adjective for God in order
to indicate that life is only in God , so if they
leave His household (v. 6), theyd be rejecting
the promised life the inheritance of that
household.
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But exhort one another daily while it is called
today, lest any of you be hardened through the
deceitfulness of sin.
Hebrews 313 ?
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But exhort one another daily while it is called
today, lest any of you be hardened through the
deceitfulness of sin.
This word means to entreat, beseech, or beg
i.e., they were to beg one another daily to not
go back-ward but forward. Notice how Christian
fellowship is associ-ated with keeping people
from aposta-tizing.
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Since they would very likely be killed by the
Romans or at the very least be taken captive into
foreign lands if they went back to Judaism, they
had the choice of being saved from all that along
with all Christians then and only then thats
the primary application of the word today here,
but theres the obvious principle that God has
always expected people to obey Him immedi-ately,
not when they feel like getting around to it,
especially since no one knows when his time is up.
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I like what Milligan wrote about this God never
says to anyone, Hearken to my voice and obey my
precepts tomorrow. His com-mand is, Do it now at
the very moment that you hear his voice and know
his will. And hence the order of the primitive
church was (1) to preach the Gospel to sinners
(2) to receive the confession of as became
penitent believers (3) to baptize them on the
same day, or even at the same hour of the night.
But now 100 years ago when Milligan wrote, how
very different the prac-tice of the church. It is
amazing how both saints and sinners now
procrastinate and trifle with the word and the
ordinances of God. (A Commentary on
the Epistle to the Hebrews, Robert Milligan, 37.)
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But exhort one another daily while it is called
today, lest any of you be hardened through the
deceitfulness of the sin.
Because the definite article (the) is be-fore the
word sin in the original, this phrase refers to
the deceit found in the thinking that the right
thing would be to apostatize from Christ and
return to Moses, the sort of thinking that
de-ceived some Gala-tians as well (16ff).
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But exhort one another daily while it is called
today, lest any of you be hardened through the
deceitfulness of sin.
Isnt it interesting how unbelief and hardness of
heart seem to go hand-in-hand in the Bible(cf.
Mark 1614, Acts 199, et. al.)?
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For we have be-come partakers of Christ if we
hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast to
the end, while it is said, Today, if you will
hear His voice, do not hard- en your hearts as in
the rebellion.
Hebrews 314-15 ? ? ?
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For we have be-come partakers of Christ if we
hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast to
the end, while it is said, Today, if you will
hear His voice, do not hard- en your hearts as in
the rebellion.
Notice how verse 14 parallels verse 6 the
primary difference is that in verse 6 they were
said to be- long to Christ, while here Christ is
said to belong to them, which leads to our next
thought ? ?
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For we have be-come partakers of Christ if we
hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast to
the end, while it is said, Today, if you will
hear His voice, do not hard- en your hearts as in
the rebellion.
This word here is the same as in 19, 214, and
31 where we noted that it refers to a voluntary
shar-ing in something with someone the idea here
is that they chose, of their own free will, to be
fellow-owners of the Christ (cf. Rom. 810 Col.
112).
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For we have be-come partakers of Christ if we
hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast to
the end, while it is said, Today, if you will
hear His voice, do not hard- en your hearts as in
the rebellion.
As in verse 6, this word is translated from a
term which means more than just a termination of
somethingit refers to a consummation, ultimate
goal, or ful-fillment of some-thing that has been
in the works. I.e.
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It isnt merely a reference to ones death, but
how that everything in their history, including
what they were experiencing at this time, had a
purpose, a purpose which found its fulfillment in
AD 70 this is what Paul alluded to in 611-12
Show diligence to the full assurance of hope
until the end, imitate those who, through faith
and patience, inherit the promises made to
Abraham (613-20, cf. 1035ff).
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Peter, also writing to suffering Jewish
Christians, encouraged them in much the same way,
telling them to hold fast because soon they would
receive the end of their faiththe salvation of
their souls (1 Pet. 19)the fulfillment of the
promise to Abraham through the New Covenant (Gal.
315-29 421-31). So, again, what was the end
in mind here?
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It was the same end as spoken of by Jesus in
Matthew 243, 13, 34 when He told His disciples
that the old heaven and earth, the Old Covenant,
would be destroyed. Why? Because that would bring
an end to that which could not fulfill the
promise to Abraham of a sal-vation/rest, that
which Paul went on to discuss in Hebrews chapter
4. So ?
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For we have be-come partakers of Christ if we
hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast to
the end, while it is said, Today, if you will
hear His voice, do not hard- en your hearts as in
the rebellion.
They needed to hold on to the beginning of their
confidence that faith with which they started
their Christian lives since the term for confi-
dence is found in 11 1, and since the idea there
fits here, lets read it Faith is the substance
of things hoped for, the evi-dence of things not
seen. So ? ? ?
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For we have be-come partakers of Christ if we
hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast to
the end, while it is said, Today, if you will
hear His voice, do not hard- en your hearts as in
the rebellion.
They were urged by Paul to make the determination
to hold fast while they had the opportunity.
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For who, having heard, rebelled? Indeed was it
not all who came out of Egypt, led by Moses?
Hebrews 316 ?
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For who, having heard, rebelled? Indeed was it
not all who came out of Egypt, led by Moses?
In this verse Paul was pointing out that those
who re-belled way back then were, like the
Hebrews, just be-ginning their jour-ney so if
their fore-fathers could do it, so could they.
Fur-thermore ? ?
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For who, having heard, rebelled? Indeed was it
not all who came out of Egypt, led by Moses?
There were so many of them who pro-voked God that
it constituted nearly an entire generation of
people so if an entire generation could
apostatize, so could the few of them.
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Now with whom was He angry forty years? Was it
not with those who sinned, whose corpses fell in
the wilderness?
Hebrews 317 ?
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Now with whom was He angry forty years? Was it
not with those who sinned, whose corpses fell in
the wilderness?
This verse explains that the fate spoken of
pertained only to those who sinned. How did they
sin? They rebelled against what Yahweh said. Jude
5 says that the Lord, having saved the people out
of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those
who did not believe.
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And to whom did He swear that they would not
enter His rest, but to those who did not obey? So
we see that they could not enter in be-cause of
unbelief.
Hebrews 318-19 ? ? ?
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And to whom did He swear that they would not
enter His rest, but to those who did not obey? So
we see that they could not enter in be-cause of
unbelief.
Disobedience leads to unbelief and vice versa
its a vicious cycle that they were not to allow
them-selves to get caught up in. Also (with the
once saved, always saved folks in mind) notice
that believers can become unbe-lievers! Lets
conclude by reading 1st Cor. 10 1-12 ? ? ?
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Brethren, I do not want you to be una-ware that
all our fathers were under the cloud, all passed
through the sea, all were baptized into Moses in
the cloud and in the sea, all ate the same
spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual
drink. For they drank of that spiritual Rock that
followed them, and that Rock was Christ. But with
most of them God was not well pleased, for their
bodies were all scattered in the wilderness. Now
these things became our examples, to the intent
that we should not lust after evil things as they
also lusted.
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And do not become idolaters as were some of them.
As it is written, The peo-ple sat down to eat
and drink and rose up to play. Nor let us commit
sexual im- morality, as some of them did, and in
one day 23,000 fell nor let us tempt Christ as
some of them also tempted were destroyed by
serpents nor murmur as some of them also
murmured and were destroyed by the destroyer. Now
all these things happened to them as ex-amples,
and they were written for our admonition on whom
the ends of the ages have come. Therefore let him
who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall.