Request your free, three-month trial to Tabletalk magazine. You’ll receive the print issue monthly and gain immediate digital access to decades of archives. This trial is risk-free. No credit card required.
Try Tabletalk NowAlready receive Tabletalk magazine every month?
Verify your email address to gain unlimited access.
The week before vacation can be difficult. On top of your regular duties, there are often extra tasks to be accomplished that would have been due while you’re out.
I experienced this recently. I also had some unrelated but pressing work to do, and I was filling in teaching Sunday school. On top of all that, my whole family had been sick for weeks and not sleeping much, which meant that I was not sleeping much either.
As I sat down to plan my Sunday school lesson, I read the passage I was to teach on. It was Hebrews 3:
Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says,
“Today, if you hear his voice,
do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion,
on the day of testing in the wilderness,
where your fathers put me to the test
and saw my works for forty years.
Therefore I was provoked with that generation,
and said, ‘They always go astray in their heart;
they have not known my ways.’
As I swore in my wrath,
‘They shall not enter my rest.’ ” (vv. 7–11)
The author is quoting Psalm 95 and referencing an event recorded in Exodus 17. The Israelites grumbled about their lack of water, prompting God to command Moses to bring forth water out of a rock. This event typified the exodus generation’s unbelief that culminated in their being barred from the promised land.
In my sleep-deprived state, I was particularly struck by the phrase “they shall not enter my rest.” The writer to the Hebrews apparently was too, for he comes back to it in verse 18 and in 4:1, 3 (twice), 5, 8, 9, 10, and 11.
The “rest” in view was the promised land. The exodus generation had just come out of bondage and hard labor, but it forfeited its right to enter the promised land because of its unbelief. And yet the writer to the Hebrews indicates that even this rest ended up falling short (4:8).
How could it be otherwise? Rest in this world is often elusive. Our sleep is fitful, broken, shallow, or truncated. Vacations leave us more tired and yearning for the next break. Retirement sometimes turns out to be not all it’s cracked up to be.
Earthly rest often does not satisfy because it was not meant to. Instead, it points toward our true rest, our heavenly rest, when we are freed from earthly travails (4:9).
It is this rest that the writer to the Hebrews has in view. He seizes on the tragedy of the exodus generation to urge his hearers not to be like them—to listen, to believe, to strive forward in faith and obedience, to urge one another on in the Christian life.
In this way, we lean in to the promise of God to give us true rest in Christ, the rest that ultimately satisfies, that truly restores, for it is experienced in the presence of our glorious God.