Open your Bibles to Hebrews chapter 4. We are continuing our study in the book of Hebrews this morning, and we come to chapter 4. Now the first 13 verses in chapter 4 make up a section, or perhaps continue a section on from chapter 3, where the theme is God's rest, and God's people entering into that rest. But we're only going to deal with the first 10 verses of chapter 4 this morning and then we'll save the rest for next week if the Lord wills. So this week's sermon is titled, Enter His Rest, Part One. And we'll lay a lot of the foundation for that based on these first 10 verses. But I'd like to begin by reading all 13 verses. So follow along as I read Hebrews 4, starting in verse one. Therefore, While the promise of entering His rest still stands, let us fear, lest any of you should seem to have failed to reach it. For good news came to us just as to them, but the message they heard did not benefit them, because they were not united by faith with those who listened. For we who have believed enter that rest. As he has said, as I swore in my wrath, they shall not enter my rest. Although his works were finished from the foundation of the world. For he has somewhere spoken of the seventh day in this way. And God rested on the seventh day from all his works. And again, in this passage, he said, they shall not enter my rest. since therefore it remains for some to enter it, and those who formerly received the good news failed to enter because of disobedience, again he appoints a certain day. Today, saying through David, so long afterward, in the words already quoted, today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts. For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken of another day later on. So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God. For whoever has entered God's rest has also rested from his works, as God did from his. Let us therefore strive to enter that rest. so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience. For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. and no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account. Let me share with you how we're going to break down this text for this morning and for next week. And it's all just three headings. Two for this week, and one for next week. Although I expect we'll break that down next week a little further. The title is, Enter His Rest, parts one and two. And that phrase, enter his rest, or some variation of it, occurs six times in the text that we just read. The writer really wants to impress that upon us. Our need to enter God's rest. Our first heading is good news without benefit. That comes from verses one and two. And we see this illustrated for us in Israel in the wilderness. The second heading is what is God's rest? Because apparently there's more to it in this passage than just Israel entering into the promised land more than 3,000 years ago. The writer emphasizes the word today as he returns to Psalm 95, which he quoted earlier. Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts. And he's clear that we who believe today will enter God's rest. So what is it? What does the writer mean by rest as he applies it to us today? And this comes from verses three through 10. And then our third heading is going to be striving to enter his rest. And this is where we're really going to get into the application. What does it mean to strive to enter God's rest? And that's in verses 11 through 13. So we're going to save that mostly for next week. First, we need to have a clear understanding of what God's rest is, heading number two, and of the danger of hearing good news and even going beyond just hearing it, but not gaining the benefit of it. So we begin in verses one and two with good news without benefit. And that's what it says in verse two. For the good news came to us just as to them, but the message they heard did not benefit them. And this raises a couple of questions. First, what message did they hear? What was this good news for them? And then two, how did they hear it such that they did not benefit from it? Now last week, we talked quite a bit about what Israel heard and what they experienced as they left Egypt and crossed the wilderness heading for the promised land. And what they heard and what they experienced was extensive. They heard and experienced more than any other generation in all of the Old Testament. The first thing that they heard from God is this, in Exodus 3, verse 13. It says, God said to Moses, I am who I am. And he said, say this to the people of Israel. "'I Am' has sent me to you." And then dropping down to verse 17, "'And I promise that I will bring you "'up out of the affliction of Egypt "'to the land of the Canaanites.'" That was good news. By any measure, what they heard from God, the first time that He had spoken to them in 400 years, was good news. And then they saw how God delivered them from Egypt by sending ten miraculous plagues to judge Egypt and to demonstrate His superiority over the false gods of Egypt. And then Israel walked out of Egypt. So they heard good news, and at least in some fashion, they received the good news, and they experienced at least the first part of the good news. So this isn't a situation where they heard and then outright rejected or where they heard and ignored. They followed Moses out of Egypt at God's direction. There was a positive response to the good news followed by an experience of something of that good news. And then, once they were outside of Egypt, they camped next to the Red Sea. And at that point, Pharaoh had a change of heart. And he took his chariots, and his horsemen, and his army, and he came after the people of Israel. And that was alarming. To be stuck between the sea and this overwhelming military force that was now bearing down on them. But again, they heard from God. In Exodus 14, in verses 15 and 16, the Lord said to Moses, Why do you cry to me? Tell the people of Israel to go forward. Lift up your staff and stretch out your hand over the sea and divide it that the people of Israel may go through the sea on dry ground. Again, that was good news. And God parted the sea before them, and they walked across on dry ground. They responded. They received the word, the message, the good news, and they responded. And they experienced this next part of their deliverance. And God continued to guide them and to care for them in the wilderness. He led them by pillars of cloud and fire. He provided food for them in manna and in quail. He miraculously provided water, transforming a bitter spring and making water flow out of a rock. And He protected them from their enemies when Amalek attacked them. And then they heard from God again. at Mount Sinai. This time he gave them the law and he reaffirmed his covenant with them, including his promise to give them the land that he had promised their father Abraham, and to drive out the inhabitants of the land before them. And do you know how they responded? In Exodus 24, verse seven, it says, then Moses took the book of the covenant and read it in the hearing of the people, and they said, all that the Lord has spoken, we will do, and we will be obedient. So once again, They received the good news and they committed to it. So the point is that this is not some situation where people hear good news and then just immediately reject it or ignore it. This is not like the parable of the sower that Jesus told more than a thousand years later, where the good news was given, represented by seed being sown, and then it was immediately snatched away by birds. This good news was received, and there was a positive response to it. And yet, the writer of Hebrews says, the message they heard did not benefit them. Now, you might say, but it did benefit them. In many ways, it benefited them. They weren't slaving away in Egypt anymore, making bricks. They were fed, they were given water, they were protected from their enemies. There absolutely was a benefit that they experienced. And yes, despite everything that they did, all of their grumbling and disobedience and rebellion, despite it all, God continued to show them mercy in many ways. But the specific benefit of this good news, of his covenant promise to Israel, they did not receive that benefit. They did not receive this inheritance. They, this generation, did not enter his rest. The principle that's illustrated in these first two verses of chapter four is that you can hear the good news. You can receive the good news. You can respond to it and act on it. You can experience elements of it and benefit from it in lesser, although still significant ways. and yet fail to receive the true benefit of it, the ultimate benefit, and in the end, the only benefit that truly matters. Once we come to chapter six of Hebrews, we're going to have to deal with a challenging passage where it talks about being enlightened, where it talks about tasting the heavenly gift and sharing in the Holy Spirit and tasting the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come. It's possible to experience all of that, the text in Hebrews 6 indicates, and still fall away. And not fall away as a sheep that strays and then the good shepherd goes and finds that sheep and brings you home, but falling away in such a way that you don't come back from. The things that we're studying this morning, and the things that have led us up to this point, and then the things that we're going to continue to study in chapters four and five, they all lay the groundwork for understanding this passage in chapter six. And so this, in part, is preparing us for when we get to that difficult passage. Now, that doesn't mean when we get there, it's going to be easy. It's still going to be a challenging passage. It's going to be hard to understand. But if you haven't read and studied the chapters that lead up to chapter six, it would be virtually impossible to rightly divide that passage. And I believe that a lot of the misunderstanding And frankly, bad theology that claims to be based on that passage in Hebrews 6 occurs because it's taken in isolation without the benefit of the teaching that leads up to it. So that's as much as I'm going to say about Hebrews chapter 6 this morning, because we're not there yet. But I want you to recognize that the things that we're studying now preparing us for the things to come, and that there are some difficult things coming that can only be understood in light of the whole of Hebrews. So, back to Hebrews 4. What was the problem? How could they, Israel, this generation of Israel, how could they receive the good news and experience it in some ways? How could they taste it and yet not benefit from it? The issue, according to verse two, was faith. That's what it says. They didn't really believe. They didn't trust. They didn't have faith. Now that was last week's message, or at least that was the conclusion of it. In Hebrews 3.19, so we see that they were unable to enter because of unbelief. And we see it here again. The reason that the good news did not benefit them was because they were not united by faith with those who listen. That's the difference. That's the difference between those who gain the benefit and those who do not benefit. That's what divides them. One has faith and one does not. Faith has always been the issue. Authentic salvation is always by God's grace through faith. So that was our first heading. It is possible to hear the good news and respond and experience and share and taste it and yet in the end, not benefit. But what exactly does rest mean? As the writer is using it here in Hebrews and applying it to us, what is God's rest? That's our second heading. What is God's rest? In our text this morning, the writer makes three different Old Testament allusions to rest. In other words, he calls our attention to three different ways that rest is used in the Old Testament. And he wants us to take these three different uses of rest, to consider them together, and based on them, to gain a composite understanding of what God's ultimate rest is. Each of these three things tells us something about how God views rest. And when we take them together, we get a fuller picture of His rest. The first of these three things is the one that we've been dealing with already this morning and really over the past two weeks. We see it again in verse three. In this verse, he quotes Psalm 95. As I swore in my wrath, they shall not enter my rest. And that points to Israel, to that generation of Israel entering, or in their case, not entering the promised land. And we've already dealt with that. So I'm not going to go into any more detail about that here. But the first Old Testament representation of rest that the writer gives us is Israel in the promised land. Israel in the promised land is an Old Testament picture of God's rest. The second representation of rest begins here at the end of verse three. It says, although his, that is God's, works were finished from the foundation of the world, and then it continues in verse four, For he has somewhere spoken of the seventh day in this way, and God rested on the seventh day from all his works. So God's rest after creation is something that the writer wants us to consider as we understand God's rest for us today. The third representation of rest from the Old Testament that the writer points us to is in verses nine and 10. So then, it says, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God. For whoever entered God's rest has also rested from his works as God did from his. Now this points us forward. It says there remains a Sabbath rest. But it's an allusion to the Old Testament Sabbath. And the Jewish Christians, who this was originally written to, certainly would have seen that. So the writer wants us to understand God's rest also in terms of the Sabbath. Now, what do all three of these things have in common? At least one thing that each of them has is that they are set in contrast to the consequences of sin. Let me show you what I mean here. Israel entering into the Promised Land and experiencing God's full blessing there is in direct contrast to enslavement in Egypt. Now, it's not that Israel was enslaved there for 400 years because of Israel's sin, but the bondage that they experienced in Egypt does represent bondage to sin. That's why God's deliverance of Israel from Egypt becomes a type for his deliverance of us from our bondage to sin and death. Second, God rested on the seventh day after he created the universe during the first six days. So creation was complete and it was good. So this was before the fall, before the curse, before toil, when all work was enjoyable, before pain and death. God's rest after creation corresponds to the world as God created it without the effects of the curse brought on by man's rebellion. Now, creation would continue on after that seventh day in this state until the fall, but God's rest on the seventh day points to a perfect Completed, curse-free creation. God rested because it was good. And the Sabbath. The Sabbath was created by God for man, for man to rest from his work. from the work that was made necessary by the curse. And then to have one day each week to worship God and to enjoy God without the distraction of that work. That was the purpose of the Sabbath, not to take a nap to rest up for the rest of the week, but to be released in a small way and for a short time from some of the elements of the curse in order to experience God more fully. So in this way, the Sabbath is a type or a foreshadow of the rest that we receive in Christ and that will be fully realized in eternity when the curse is no more and we are able to worship and enjoy God in fullness and in perfection, not just one day out of seven, but constantly. And these three representations of rest, Israel in the promised land, God's rest after creation, and the Sabbath, they're all connected. There's a thread that's woven between them all. Consider this. Keeping the Sabbath is one of the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments are recorded for us twice in Scripture. The first time that we find it is in Exodus chapter 20. And when it comes to the fourth commandment, starting in verse 8, it says, remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, or your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or your sojourner who is within your gates." And then, in verse 11, this commandment, the seventh day, is connected to God's rest after creation. It says, for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. So the Sabbath day and God's rest after creation are connected. And I think probably all of you recognized that. But the second time that we have the Ten Commandments is in Deuteronomy chapter 5. There, starting in verse 12, we again have the Sabbath command. And the language is pretty much the same. Observe the Sabbath day to keep it holy as the Lord your God commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath unto the Lord your God. But then, in verse 15, it gives a different justification for the Sabbath, a different reason behind it. It's different here than it is in Exodus. Here, it's not because God rested after creation. Here, it says, you shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore, the Lord your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day. Because you used to be enslaved in Egypt, and now you're headed for the promised land where you will enter rest. That is why you should keep the Sabbath, according to Deuteronomy. Now, of course, they're both true. But it's all tied together in the Old Testament just as it is in Hebrews. God gave the Sabbath one day a week to rest because He rested after creation before the fall. And God gave the Sabbath because he brought Israel out of their slavery, out of their toil in Egypt, and was bringing them to rest in the land that he had promised them. And these three aspects of rest, these three representations of rest, come together to point us to the ultimate rest that we can enter into in Christ. So what is God's rest? Well, in redemptive terms, It is messianic deliverance from the curse. The curse is toil and hardship and affliction. It's bondage and it's death. God's rest is the release from the curse. It's a return to the state of things after creation but before the fall. And it's even better than that because of the inheritance that we receive in Christ. It looks forward to the time when the effects of the curse will be totally defeated. No more toil, no more sickness, no more pain, no more death. And only the Messiah accomplishes that. Let me show you something else here. And I find this fascinating about rest. When was the Messiah first prophesied in Scripture? Genesis chapter 3, right? In verse 15, God says to the serpent, I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring. He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel. God said that an offspring of Eve will come into the world and defeat the devil. even as Adam and Eve received the curse because of their sin, they had this promise. They didn't have a lot of details, but they had the promise. They had this hope. Now look at Genesis 4, verse 1. It says, now Adam knew Eve, his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, I have gotten a man with the help of the Lord. Only the words with the help of aren't in the original Hebrew. In fact, if you have a New American Standard Bible, And a couple of other translations do this too. When they decide that they need to add words to the text for clarity, they put those words in italics so that the reader knows that they aren't a part of the original text. And that's the case here. The words with the help of aren't there in the original. The way the text actually reads in the original is this. Now, Adam knew Eve, his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, I have gotten a man. And then there's this little word that signifies a direct object, the Lord. I have gotten a man. who is, or I have gotten a man, namely the Lord. So Martin Luther and many others down through the years have understood Eve's statement to mean that she thought that this son was the fulfillment of Genesis 3.15. God had said that her offspring would bring deliverance from the curse. He would be the Messiah. So when she had an offspring, her first offspring, a son, she quite naturally understood that he was the Messiah. Now, if that is what she thought, then she was mistaken. Cain was obviously not the Messiah. but it would demonstrate that she understood the promise, that she had faith, that she had hope. Presumably, she gave birth to her first son a little more than nine months after the events of Genesis chapter three. Nine months of toil and hardship and affliction that they had never experienced before the fall. And then most recently, the pain of childbirth. But now, she hoped, there was deliverance. I think that's beautiful. It fits with the grammar of the text, and it shows, if this is what it really means, that Eve was already anticipating a savior. Now look, and this is what I really want you to see, look at Genesis chapter five, just one chapter later. In verse 28, so this is several generations later, Lamech, like Eve, was looking for the fulfillment to that promise, the promise of Genesis 3.15. It says, when Lamech had lived 182 years, he fathered a son and called his name Noah, saying, out of the ground that the Lord has cursed, This one, this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the painful toil of our hands. Lamech thought that Noah was the one, the one who would deliver from the curse, from the work and the painful toil that is the curse. In fact, Noah in Hebrew sounds like the Hebrew word for rest. That's why Lamech named him that. He called him rest because Lamech To Lamech, Noah represented God's rest. And in a much smaller way, God did use Noah to deliver a remnant, his family, from the consequences of sin. But Noah wasn't the rest that was still coming. Noah was not the fulfillment of Genesis 3.15. Noah was not the Messiah. But what I want us to see here is that they, these Old Testament saints, they seem to have understood the promise and associated it with God's rest. They understood God's rest to be the messianic deliverance from the curse. That is why it says back in Hebrews 4 in verse 8, for if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken of another day later on. Because although the land was a type of rest, and it was rest in a sense for Israel, it was not the fulfillment of God's rest. Not even as they understood God's rest. It was not the complete messianic deliverance from the curse. That is the day that God spoke of that was still to come. So when the writer here writes to first century Jewish Christians, it's quite natural for him to move seamlessly from this very Old Testament focus on rest and to point us to the rest that applies to us. Because the rest that remains for us is the rest that they longed for as well. The release from the curse that could only come through Messiah. And so we see that it's not that the writer of Hebrews takes Old Testament passages and repurposes them to make his point. He's not deconstructing the Old Testament and then reconstructing it into the gospel. It was always gospel. So he takes the teachings, the principles from the Old Testament that would have been very familiar to his Jewish readers. And he shows them, and he shows us how they point to Jesus, the Messiah, and to the rest that he brings as he delivers us from the curse. God's rest is the deliverance from the curse of sin and death, and it is accomplished by God the Son, the Messiah. That's as far as we're going to go in Hebrews this morning. Next week, if the Lord wills, we'll continue to explore what it means to strive to enter that rest. That's what it says to do in verse 11. Let us therefore strive to enter that rest so that no one may fall by the same sword of disobedience. We've seen this morning that that's possible. It's possible to hear good news and to respond to it, to even taste it and experience it in some way and yet not benefit from it. And apparently that's possible for us as well. So the writer says we must strive for it. And now, we're going to turn our attention more fully on the Messiah, the Son of God, the Lord Jesus, and on what He did in order to deliver us from the curse and accomplish this rest for us. He died for us. And by His death, He took away The curse. Galatians 3 verse 13 says that Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. He bore the entire penalty for sin, for your sin, for my sin, as He hung on the cross and He died. He delivered us from the curse and He asks us to remember. He asked us to remember often, and he gave us a way to do so. This table, the bread and the cup. He gave us the bread to represent his body, which he willingly sacrificed in our place. He was a perfect spotless lamb, the only sacrifice that could atone for our sin, and he was the only one who could provide it. So he did. He gave us the cup to represent his blood. Scripture says that blood must be shed in order that sin may be forgiven. That is the penalty for sin. Jesus shed his blood to pay for our sin. The cup reminds us of that. He gave his body and he shed his blood to defeat the curse Only He could do that. The Lord gave this remembrance to believers. The writer of Hebrews says, we who have believed enter into His rest. That's who this is for. If you have put your faith in Him to save you from your sin, if you have received the free gift of salvation by His grace through faith, If you believe, then this is for you. But partake in a worthy manner, consistent with Jesus' purpose in giving it to us. This is to remember Him, to remember His death. Don't make it into something else or cheapen it by partaking flippantly. Now, I'm going to pray, then Tim and I will distribute first the bread, and then once everyone who's participating has been served, I'll read a passage from Scripture, and then we'll partake together, and then we'll do the same with the cup. Let's pray.