The point of Hebrews 4:1-11 is that there is a rest for the faithful, if they remain faithful. Three words hold it together: fear, finish, and faith. Maintain a healthy fear of God, remember the work finished by God, and obey faithfully the commands of God. Put simply, we are called to reverentially rest in the promises of God.
“Therefore, a Sabbath rest remains for God’s people. For the person who has entered his rest has rested from his own works, just as God did from his. Let us, then, make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one will fall into the same pattern of disobedience.” (Hebrews 4:9-11, CSB)
Maintain a healthy fear of God
It is striking that a passage about rest opens with a warning. “Let us beware,” the writer says, that none of us falls short. Biblical rest is not laziness or a vacation from devotion. It is an active, reverent reliance on who God is, and that begins with the right kind of fear. There is an unhealthy fear, the terror of punishment that drove Adam to hide in the bushes, the dread that distrusts whether God will keep His promises. That is not where the Christian lives. In Christ we have received the spirit of adoption, not “a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear” (Romans 8:15). But there is a healthy fear, a sober, clear-eyed awe before a holy God. When Isaiah saw the Lord, the train of His robe filling the temple, he cried, “Woe is me.” Oswald Chambers said it well: when you fear God, you fear nothing else, but when you do not fear God, you fear everything else. A.W. Tozer added, outside the will of God there is nothing I want, and inside the will of God there is nothing I fear. This reverence is what fuels our perseverance. It guards us from the false comfort of a so-called carnal Christianity that claims faith but shows no love for God’s commands.
Remember the work finished by God
Rest was woven into the world from the beginning. In six days God formed and filled His creation, and on the seventh He rested, not because He was tired, but to set a pattern and point ahead. He reminded Israel of it in the fourth commandment (Exodus 20:11). Yet that weekly Sabbath was a shadow. Even Joshua’s rest in the land was not the final rest, for “if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken later about another day” (Hebrews 4:8). Paul tells us the festivals and Sabbaths “are a shadow of what was to come; the substance is Christ” (Colossians 2:17). Christ is the Lord of the Sabbath, and on the cross He cried, “It is finished.” This is why the church gathers on the Lord’s Day, the first day of the week, the day He rose. We rest from striving because He has already done the work. As R.C. Sproul put it, there is not a maverick molecule in the universe. The God who finished creation still upholds it, and the God who finished our salvation still holds us. We live in the already and the not yet: we have entered His rest by faith, and we still wait for its fullness when His kingdom is consummated.
Obey faithfully the commands of God
Here is the paradox of the passage. Resting from our works does not mean doing nothing. The writer says, “Let us make every effort to enter that rest.” Make every effort. Strive with all your being. The wilderness generation received the same good news we have received, “but the message they heard did not benefit them, since they were not united with those who heard it in faith” (Hebrews 4:2). Active faith saves; passive faith is dead. As James reminds us, even the demons believe, and they shudder, but their belief produces no obedience. Our works do not earn the rest. They flow from it. We do not work in order to enter His rest, we work because we have entered it, and because He has given His children the ability to obey. The first and greatest command is still to believe on the Son He sent. Continual, unrepentant disobedience is a heart that has found no rest, but the soul anchored on the finished work of Christ can stop the exhausting labor of self-reliance.
So stop trying to engineer peace out of your own performance. Maintain a healthy fear of God, remember the work He finished, and obey Him by faith. Reverentially rest in the promises of God, and you will find a rest for your soul, both a rest that is here and a rest that is still to come.
Grace and Peace,
Pastor Phil
