Clough Hebrews Lesson 23

Man’s Ultimate Destiny – Hebrews 4:3-4

Let’s turn to Hebrews 4. By way of review this section of Hebrews goes from 3:7 to 4:13 and the title of this whole entire portion is that we ought to respond to our faithful, ideal high priest, Jesus Christ. And comparison is made between Moses and Jesus via typological interpretation. And the point we have made in the section of 3 with the incident from Numbers and Psalm 95 is that unbelief under Moses’ leadership angered God, who had sent Moses, so much that He excluded the Jews from Canaan. And the analogy is that there was danger that these Jews under the leadership of Jesus Christ will similarly rebel and similarly anger God so they will be excluded.

Now there’s a similarity between these two incidents and there is a contest. So let’s make sure we understand this or we’ll lose the point. The similarity or that which is the same between the Old Testament incident and the New Testament incident is that unbelief excludes; in the case of the Old Testament it was exclusion from the land of Canaan; in the case of the New Testament it’s exclusion from the eternal state with Jesus Christ. And so the contrast is that in the Old Testament the exclusion was a temporary exclusion, or a temporal exclusion, it was an exclusion from the physical land of Canaan, but not necessarily from the eternal blessing of God. However, in the New Testament issue it is an eternal exclusion from God’s presence that is made the issue. Now why is this?

It suddenly dawned on me while I was trying to put this together to explain… somebody had asked whether they were believers or unbelievers in Numbers and it dawned on me the connection between this and the overall theme of Hebrews. When we started Hebrews remember the overall theme was the superiority of Christianity and if you’ll recall from Hebrews 1:2 you have “God who in many ways, many times, spoke by the prophets, has in these last days spoken unto us by His Son.” There’s the difference. Moses was a prophet; Jesus Christ is the Son. You could reject the word of a prophet and have temporal exclusion, not eternal exclusion. But you dare not reject the words of the Son because there is no higher authority behind Him, and so this whole theme is then related to the overall theme of Hebrews, the superiority or the finality of Hebrews and this is why we can say that Hebrews is the New Testament apologetic against all of these ecumenical faiths. For example, Baha’ism that’s hitting the campus, Maharajah and the rest of these things, Islam is another one, all of these faiths hold that Jesus Christ was not the final revelation but there is yet an additional revelation; Jesus Christ was not the final say and therefore you could, so to speak, safely reject Jesus and have another chance at another prophet and accept him.

But the argument of the epistle to the Hebrews is no go; you have to accept the words of Jesus Christ or you are eternally rejected from God. This is, after all, what the theme of John 3:18, John 3:36 is, that “He that believeth not on the Son shall never see life, the wrath of God abides on him.” So here is where this, what appeared to be a problem in Hebrews 3 and 4, turns out to be resolved by the overall theme of Hebrews, that if you have the supreme revelation, you have Moses here, who was, so to speak, a temporary authority. Moses was a temporary authority in the sense that he was the authority for his day but he would be superseded by other prophets: Samuel, Isaiah, Jeremiah and finally Jesus Christ. However, Jesus has no other prophet following Him. Jesus Christ is the last prophet, there are no more prophets after Jesus Christ. Even the two prophets of the Tribulation are simply resuscitated believers of the Old Testament.

So there are no prophets after Jesus. Jesus is the final prophet and therefore His words have no further court of appeal. And so the idea, again if you want to visualize it in terms of a road, the idea is you can make a wrong turn through negative volition, with Moses and you can get back, by God’s grace, on the track. You can make a wrong turn, perhaps, in rejecting the words of Samuel and by God’s grace you can get back on track. But when you come to Jesus Christ and you make a wrong turn there isn’t any way of getting back on the track. In other words, this is the horrible side of the finality of Jesus Christ; there’s the blessing side and then there’s the horrible side. The blessing side is that by accepting Jesus Christ, by believing what He says we have personal union with God, but the horrible thing about it is that if you reject Jesus Christ there is no further court of appeal. Those people who reject Christ have no other court of appeal; they must come through Jesus Christ, there is going to be no other prophet, no way to have a second crack at it.

Let’s turn to Hebrews 4:3 and see about this rest. I’ve given you the big idea, now let’s watch it develop in the text. “For we who have believed are entering into rest, as he said, As I have sworn in My wrath, if they shall enter into My rest; although the works were finished from the foundation of the world.” “For” in verse 3 is gar, gar explains back the problem of chapter 2 and verses 1-2 of chapter 4. Then the participle, “we who have believed,” is a masculine plural aorist participle and it’s an aorist participle, referring more to a point in time. The main verb is “entering” which is in the present tense. Aorist participle plus present tense equals a preceding action. So you have a preceding action indicated by an aorist participle, then you have the main action indicated by the present tense. So the believing occurs before the entering in verse 3. The believing ceases, it’s an aorist, meaning it starts and it stops. It indicates a point in time or a crisis point.

Now the comparison we just made is with Kadesh-Barnea, it was a crisis point when the Jews were about to go into the land of Canaan, they came to a place called Kadesh-Barnea. They had to choose at that point either to trust God’s promises and move into the land or to reject God’s promises and be expelled from the land. It was a crisis point. After the decision was made there could be no further second decision. The decision was over, the moment had passed and no longer did they have another chance to believe. After they rejected, that was it, and so the point of faith was a crisis point at Kadesh-Barnea.

Now the question is, what is the crisis point for these believers. These believers have lived approximately 38 years after Jesus Christ was crucified; they have two more years before 70 AD when God is going to judge the nation. Therefore, their crisis point is the present hour; are they or are they not going to stick with Jesus Christ as the final authority or are they going to go back to old Judaism. That’s the issue. Are they going to stick with the Messianic movement or revert back to Judaism of the age. Last time we dealt with the invitations in Matthew 10, Acts 2 and Acts 3. The nation has been told over and over and over again that they only have forty years to choose and after those forty years are up no more choice, the nation is rejected and goes into the fifth degree of discipline. So the crisis point of belief in verse 3 is this forty year period. And he says all right, those who now, when the pressure is on, stick with it, then those believers are going to enter into rest.

Now the next problem we have is the entering. For those of you with Greek you will notice it is in the present tense, and now we have an interpretation problem. If a verb is in the present tense in the Greek, usually in means the present tense. But the present tense can also be used futuristically. So we have to decide whether or not the present tense of verse 3 means the rest can now be entered into, immediately, by the addressees of chapter 4 or whether this is a yet future rest into which faithful believers will enter. Now that’s going to be very critical because the rest of Hebrews hangs on how we interpret this rest. Is it a present available rest or is it a future rest?

We have to go with the context. In Hebrews 4:11 he is arguing that the rest is not yet, it is future, “Let us labor, therefore, to enter into that rest,” obviously they haven’t entered it if they’ve got to labor to enter into it. Let’s look elsewhere in the epistle for some context. Hebrews 12:28, this is the viewpoint of the author and that’s what we want to capture so we can adequately interpret “rest.” “Wherefore, we receiving a kingdom which cannot be moved, let us have grace,” in other words, the kingdom is not yet, we are now in the process of receiving it but we haven’t yet received it. In Hebrews 13:14, clearly stated, “For we have no continuing city,” here, “but we seek one to come.” So the context is a future destiny. Now that future destiny is something that makes this whole thing an eternal decision; they’re going to have to go negative or positive, remember this is an epistle of exhortation, exhortation always destroys neutrality.

So the people have to choose this moment whether to go with Jesus Christ, whether to go back to Judaism. Those who go back to Judaism at this hour are declared by this epistle to be unsaved people, people who can’t stick it out under pressure and they have abandoned Jesus Christ and so therefore because they have abandoned Christ under pressure that is proof they were never regenerate in the first place. A parallel reference to show this point very dramatically is Hebrews 10:38, “Now the just shall live by faith;” the author says, “but if any man draw back,” now he’s talking about drawing back into old Judaism, “if any man draw back, my soul shall have no pleasure in them.” Then he hastens to add verse 39, assuring the fact that he’s reasonably sure that most of the people who read this epistle are believers because he says, “But we are not of them who draw back unto perdition, but of them who believe to the saving of the soul.” So the issue there is whether these people are going to reveal their unbelief by going on negative volition toward their Messiah or whether they’re going to show their positive volition by sticking with Him under pressure.

Now this places trials and tribulations in the Christian, I’m sure to some of you, in a new light because this doesn’t seem to allow any room for failure. Well, the author of Hebrews does allow for failure but his point is at this juncture of history, two years before the destruction of the temple true Jews, that is Jews who have personally been born again, who have trusted in Jesus Christ, will certainly hang in there with Jesus. And those who are just onlookers, bystanders, who kind of enjoy the fruits of Christianity but they don’t want to surrender their volition to God through Christ, then they’ve had it. So the rest described in verse 3 is an eternal rest.

Now a new thing is taught about this and this is very interesting, “although the works were finished from the foundation of the world.” Now “the foundation of the world” is the creation. And this tells you something most interesting and those of you who have had a little Greek can appreciate a fine point of the text, notice where it says “although the works were finished from the foundation of the world,” what preposition is used there? apo; apo and pro are both used in the New Testament in this kind of a phrase, “foundation of the world.” pro is used over in Peter where it says Jesus Christ was crucified pro creation, before creation. Now when pro is used with that expression it’s talking about God’s eternal plan and emphasizes the plan in God’s mind. God had it in His mind that His Son was crucified before, pro, the foundation of the world. Now after the foundation of the world, or “from the foundation of the world,” this is something altogether different. This is not talking about the plan. Now this is what is the intriguing doctrinal point. Follow this now; if he meant God’s plan he would have said pro, the works were finished, that is in God’s mind, before creation. But that isn’t what is taught in verse 3 at the end. First, what are the works? The works are those things necessary to set up the eternal rest. Now by putting the word apo there, “from the foundation of the world,” you have an interesting doctrine taught.

Here’s creation; creation itself has within itself the necessary elements for the eternal state. In other words, on the sixth day, when God rested from all His works, He had already built into the creation every contingence He would need forever. Now let’s see how that works out, I’ll give you some specific examples but let’s remember, why is he emphasizing this. Suppose he had put pro in there, the Greek preposition pro; that would have emphasized, well God has it in His mind to give us an eternal rest, and that would have put it off into the distance, so to speak, into the mind of God. But by putting apo he is saying that the eternal rest is now potentially right here in the material creation.

Now let’s see how this works out, I’ll give you four examples of how apo is used in this sense, how the creation has within itself the potential for every future act of God. The first case in point where the original sinless unfallen creation had the built-in potential for a future action was the mortality of man. Did man have to die? No. Could man die? Yes. Adam and Eve had within their bodies at the end of the sixth twenty-four hour period the potential to die. In other words, their death was potential in the original creation, apo. God said that “in the day that you eat thereof, you will die.” All right, now this means, if it was pro, it would mean that God would then have to intervene into history and destroy us, but by putting apo it would mean that God had already set up the whole nature so that when there was negative volition it would decay; He could curse it without constantly changing it.

Let’s get a second illustration of how this works. The mechanism of the flood, turn to 2 Peter 3; at the end of the sixth day the creation was made with the potential already built in for the flood. That’s why in 2 Peter 3:5-6 the Apostle Peter says, “For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water,” now that verse is saying that the original creation was so structured that if God wanted to let the flood happen He could, without wholly changing nature. Nature had the potential for the flood built within it. And so God just sort of, so to speak, had to trip it and let it go. So that’s the second example.

A third example, found in verse 7 of this passage is the final judgment and the collapse at the end of the millennium when the entire nature is transformed again by fire. Notice it says in 2 Peter 3:7, “But the heavens and the earth which aer now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.” In other words, the material physical universe in which we live has within it the potential for a fiery dissolution. All God has to do, trip the mechanism and whoosh, it’s goes. So again the potential is built in from the point of creation. You might look upon it this way; God has built fail-safe systems into the creation so that if sin occurs it can be dealt with. And this is just automatic mechanism, God doesn’t have to say oops, I’ve got to redesign nature now because sin’s there. He doesn’t have to redesign nature; the original design has within itself all the potential that is needed for all the events of history.

A fourth illustration of the fact that nature has within itself, after the sixth day, the potential for all things is the incarnation of Jesus Christ. People always accuse Christianity of running down the body. And certain Christians get into this, the habit of asceticism in which the soul is more important than the physical body. Now that is false and anti-Scriptural because God thinks so much of our bodies, their shape and their composition, that He made the human body with a potential for the incarnation. Has it ever struck you why it is when God chose to incarnate Himself He incarnated Himself into a human being and not an animal. He incarnated Himself in man and didn’t become an angel, that He incarnated Himself on this planet and didn’t become a Martian. Has it ever struck you a reason why? Because only the human body is built to stand the presence of God. The human body and it’s design is the highest point of creation. Now next time you hear some ascetic run down the human body, you remember that. It was the human body that God thought so much of that He incarnated Himself in it.

And then finally another example of how the original creation had within itself the potential for all future acts is resurrection. In resurrection you have a situation where there is a transformation, now watch this, resurrection is a transformation but it is not a totally new creation. It is a transformation from this; why do we know this. Look at Jesus Christ. In His resurrection body it wasn’t a wholly different person, He had the marks in His hands, didn’t He. His body bore the marks of His historic experience. And if we are to infer from Scripture, this means not that we all… for example, crippled people, or deformed people are going to be deformed for eternity, it doesn’t necessarily imply that, but it is saying that you will recognize in the resurrection body marks of your historical experience. In other words, the resurrection body won’t be a totally different person; the resurrection body is in continuity with your present one. There’s going to be transformation of the present one but it is in continuity with it. Men aren’t going to turn into women and women aren’t going to turn into men, there will still be a sex difference in the resurrection, although there will not be the second divine institution. So you have transformation then. Resurrection—transformation of the original creation.

Now we come back to Hebrews for this verse and we get back to why it was apo; apo, the built-in rest. God, since the sixth day, let’s go back in time, notice in Hebrews 4:4, “For He spoke in a certain place of the seventh day in this way, and God did rest the seventh day from all His works,” in other words, he’s going back to Genesis, he quotes it, and unlike many modern evangelicals the author of Hebrews believes in Genesis before Genesis 12, and he believes it literally, and he’s talking about the fact that since the end of those six days, the seventh day, since that day God has been resting. Now why does God rest? You rest when the job is done. And God’s job was done at the end of the sixth day, therefore the job being done, God rests.

What is God doing in His rest? He’s waiting for man to finish his job. And what is man’s job given him at the original creation before the fall? What is it? Subdue nature, bring all things under dominion as king of creation. So man’s job was to subdue and reign over nature, and by nature we include angels. Man’s job was to dominate the material and immaterial aspects of nature and that is still his job. God, because of the fall, has not removed the call to do this. He has made it harder but the call still remains; that’s where a lot of fundamentalists are wrong, they apply the Word of God to their devotional life and then when somebody starts talking about the Word of God and politics and the Word of God and economics and the Word of God and something else, oh, you’re getting off the subject. In other words, what they’re saying is that the Word of God has nothing to say about finances, has nothing to say about politics, has nothing to say about anything except your feelings in your heart. Well, if that’s the Word of God has to say about it, it isn’t the Word of God. God has created you and He has created me to dominate every area of our environment and that includes finances, that includes politics, that includes education and that includes every sphere.

The reason why the communists, incidentally, have done what they have done, they have just simply taken Christianity and stolen some concepts from our side of the fence. Karl Marx got his whole concept of history from a man by the name of Hegel and Hegel got his from Daniel. Hegel had four kingdoms and it was built on Daniel. Karl Marx studied Hegel and Karl Marx brought the whole concept of progressive history over from Christianity. The communists would be embarrassed to admit that but that’s where they got the concept from. And they have been far more diligent in applying their dogma to every sphere of society than we have. Remember the film, the communist control education; why don’t we control it? But we let the public schools do it and we think the Lubbock school system is so great and so on, because it’s neutral.

Somebody was telling me the other day they’d been into the head of the public school’s office, he’s got a letter in there from a Unitarian congregation. Do you know what the congregation is threatening to do to Lubbock public schools? Any time a Christian activity is held any facility of the Lubbock independent school system the Unitarian congregation of this city will file suit immediately. I feel like send a letter down saying any time humanism is advocated in the public school we’ll file suit. That’s the kind of forces, and as usual the fundies are sitting around on their hands waiting for Jesus to come or something, instead of applying the Word and carrying out our responsibility. Suppose Jesus did come, do you know what He’d want to know? What are you doing with the Word that I told you to apply? Well, I was waiting for you? What are you waiting for Me for, I gave you a clear word, the great commission isn’t just evangelism, read it again, “teaching them all things that I have commanded,” and the “all things” includes all areas of the laws of God, not just “believe on Jesus Christ.” Now “believe on Christ” is the center of the gospel but that’s just the beginning.

So man’s job, subdue and reign over nature. Now since the fall, nature rebels. So you have parts of nature, the angels, they are in rebellion, the ground is in rebellion, and that’s hard but that doesn’t disqualify man from his original calling. So therefore, question: when does man get his rest? He is not going to get his rest until he finishes the originally given job. God does not run the universe like a labor union. Here you complete your work before you get paid and in the universe the way it is run, man will not rest until his job is complete. Now how does man do the job after the fall? It’s impossible for man to do his job after the fall, so he has to rely on grace. And by grace man completes the job and in each dispensation there are various aspects that man has to complete. But the point is, you don’t get into the rest until you finish your job, like God finished His job on the sixth day and entered into His rest.

Now let’s take another look at this rest. Six days, then rest. God has been resting ever since creation. God has been waiting for man to finish so man could join God in a Sabbath rest for all eternity. Now this is the Christian whole philosophy of existence and reality, that there is a rest for man, there is an eternal rest. There will be some day when the job is done and this, the author of Hebrews is saying, this should inspire you to finish the job. If you know for sure that the job isn’t going go on and on and on and on and on and on and on, there is coming a time when it will be finished and you can put down the tools and sit and enjoy the results of what you’ve done.

Now suppose God answered our prayers that we often pray in our frustration, and say okay, I feel sorry for you so we’ll just end history here. The job wouldn’t be done, and when man sat down to rest what would we have to look at? An unfinished building. It’d be like Nimrod at the tower of Babel, bricks all over the place, scaffolding still in place, half built object. Would you like to look at that for all eternity? No. So God knows what we need for all eternity, we need a completed job so that we can enjoy Him for all eternity.

All right, so that’s why in verse 4 he goes back to creation. And our time is finished for tonight and next time we’ll take it up at verse 5 and finish the doctrine of the rest.