Highlights in Hebrews
(with Roger Kirby)
Part 11 - Hebrews 4:11
Seeking rest
“Let us, therefore, make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one will perish by following their example of disobedience.” Hebrews 4:11
‘Rest’ now there’s a thing! I hope you manage to get some even if you are a young Mum with several children, a farmer striving to get enough to eat out of a patch of not very good ground, or a busy executive in industry. Our writer never says very much about what he means here, thus indicating that the expects us all to know what ‘rest’ is. He has at least four different sorts of rest in mind:
1. ‘Rest’ is an essential and totally necessary part of the world we live in because even the Lord God rested ‘from all his work’ (Genesis 2:2). Rest is an essential part of creation.
2. Having set this example to all creation it became part of the law set out for all the people of God in Exodus 20: 8 - 11. Leviticus 16:29-31 even associates the day of rest with the cleansing of atonement. Unfortunately it became, and still is, one of the walls built around Israel to keep others, Gentiles, out. So that, instead of being a good thing it became a bit of a bad thing.
3. The Psalmist in Psalm 95:8-11 thinks of the Promised Land, towards which they journeyed through the desert, as a place of rest. There they would be able to settle down, stop travelling and putting up tents every night, build houses, cultivate the land and by generating a little more than they actually needed become richer and be able to have some leisure. Unfortunately that did not go well. They were not obedient in all they did as they travelled; they ‘hardened their hearts and ‘tried’ the Lord making him angry with them, thus delaying their arrival in the land by forty years (Psalm 95: 9, 10) thus serving as a warning to those for whom the psalmist was writing not to behave as they did.
4. The writer to the Hebrews uses all this background as a warning to his readers, including us, about how to behave. He does this by laying emphasis on the word ‘Today’ thus connecting the words of the psalm with the situation of his readers, like us. It is not completely clear what he now means by ‘rest’. He calls it a Sabbath rest but seems to mean something rather more than a weekly day off. One way of thinking of it is as entry into the Kingdom. In the Kingdom of God we will be able to rest; we shall no longer be struggling to gain acceptance by God because Jesus has secured that for us by his death on the Cross; when our days here are done we shall move, still within the Kingdom, into the glory where we shall surely have the real and final ‘rest’.
‘Rest’ number 4 takes us back to number 1 and the greater glory. ‘Rests’ numbers 2 and 3 are but stepping stones on the way. In a practical every day way these things are important. There is a realisation amongst those who know such things that there is a limit to how much work a person can do in a week. If someone is overworked in terms of hours, or demand on them, they become less effective than if they have a reasonable amount of rest. In our society that used to be accomplished by most people taking a Sunday/Sabbath rest. Shops were shut. Fields were not ploughed. By far the greater number of people in our society did not have any work to do on a Sunday.
All that has now changed. In our society the urge to get as many sales and therefore as great an income as possible means many people now have to work on a Sunday. Since the same number of people have the same amount of money to spend (allowing for the increase in population and general levels of affluence) it is hard to see who has benefited by this change. It just makes it harder for ordinary people to get an adequate amount of rest. As so often the Biblical, God-given way of doing things was, and is, better than that developed by ever greedy human beings. I hope you do not have to work beyond gaining a reasonable amount of rest, day by day and week by week.
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