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HEARING MUST BE UNITED TO BELIEVING
Hebrews 3:16-19
“And who was it who rebelled against God, even though they heard His voice? Wasn’t it the people Moses led out of Egypt? And who made God angry for forty years? Wasn’t it the people who sinned, whose corpses lay in the wilderness? And to whom was God speaking when He took an oath that they would never enter His rest? Wasn’t it the people who disobeyed Him? So, we see that because of their unbelief they were not able to enter His rest.”
I have heard people say, “If I heard the voice of God. I would not rebel; I’d believe.” Others have said, “If I saw a miracle, I’d believe.” We really do not have a grip on the capacity for unbelief that is resident in the human heart and mind. The children of Israel saw God decimate the false gods of Egypt in the plagues He sent through Moses. The Lord God who had called Abraham made sure that Abraham’s children saw that the gods and religious culture surrounding them for 400 years were not gods at all, did not reflect the truth.
Israel saw that the plagues that fell on Egypt did not fall on them. They saw the destruction of their enemy slave drivers who pursued them into parted waters only to have the waters fall back in over the Egyptians and drown them all. All this, and yet at the first difficult moment when they came upon bitter water in the wilderness, they immediately turned on God and Moses in abject unbelief as if they had never seen any demonstration of God’s love and provision for them in their exodus.
In the wilderness, God gave them food every day, food they did not have to work for. He gave them a visible sign of His presence in a cloud that covered them by day protecting them from the blistering Sun. He gave them the daily sign of His Presence at night when He covered them with an umbrella-like pillar of fire to keep them from dying of exposure at night.
They heard the very voice of God at Mount Sinai, His power and majesty revealed to such an extent that they trembled in fear. God was revealing to them that He was not like the eyeless, voiceless, lifeless idols of Egypt. He was and is the Lord of all. He alone is God and He alone was worthy of worship and obedience. He had shown them that His ways alone made for Life and peace.
When the Eternal Son of God was speaking, the One Incarnate from the Virgin Mary, Jesus Christ, people heard God speaking again clearly and with authority. People said, “This man speaks with authority!” When God speaks, things happen. He spoke and what was not became what was. Jesus spoke and the blind could see, the lame could walk, the deaf could hear, the leper was cleansed, the sick were healed, the dead were raised to live again. The very Word of God made flesh spoke and revealed the coming of the rule of, the Kingdom of God. He was undoing the effects of sin, driving back in defeat the powers of darkness. Jesus’ death on the cross overwhelmed of all the satanic forces and utterly defeated them. Sin’s penalty was paid in full. Jesus’ Resurrection showed that what He had done by dying the death-of-deaths had made a way for all who would believe to be restored to God, transformed, delivered from the kingdom of darkness to become new creations, citizens of thew Kingdom of God, sons and daughters, joint heirs with Christ Jesus.
The warning from God, because He does not want us to be deceived, is that hearing God’s voice is no guaranteed protection against rebellion. Sin tells us we either do not need God or that we need something more than God for life to be complete. You see, Satan is not anti-religion, he is anti-Christ. He wants us to take personal credit for any good in life and to blame God for anything that might disappoint us, or that we might label as evil. Israel did not enter God’s rest because of unbelief, the "belief" that God does not really know or love us or know what is best for us.
The eternal truth is just the opposite. What God tells us to do are the very things that brings wholeness to life, human flourishing, meaning and purpose to life. And the wonder is, that, when you believe God, He gives you the power to do what He asks you to do. He gives the power of the Holy Spirit, for the will of God is either done in the power of God or it is never done.
The brokenness, evil, and devastation we see in the world today is humanity’s fault. It is the fruit of unbelief, refusing to trust God and take Him at His Word. We would rather trust and enthrone our feelings and rely on our own internal broken moral compass. Which no longer having a “true north”, continues to give birth to horror, terrorism, war, hatred, divisiveness, all the while dehumanizing us and those we disagree with.
For the Word of God to find a home in us, to redeem and transform us, undoing the dehumanization we have come to see as normative, we must believe God. We must put our trust in what Jesus Christ has done for humanity by His life, death, Resurrection, Ascension, and the sending of the Holy Spirit to unite us to God. We must surrender all we are to Him, yielding to the One Who alone can restore our souls. He brings us into life. He is the Initiator. We add nothing to the equation but to respond with, “Yes, thank you. I surrender to You!”, or, “No, I do not believe you.” God’s rest, that which He longs for us to know and live in, is not some set of circumstances, it is a new creation. It comes from receiving new life from Him by grace through faith, a new heart and a new spirit. Eternal Life that comes from God is a gift of grace to any and all who will believe Him.
Hearing God must be united to believing God if you want to live once more and become fully human again.
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