Sermon Text: Hebrews 3:7–19
Preacher: Pastor Brian Sauvé
On Being The Antitype
This morning, we are continuing our expository study of the book of Hebrews, so naturally, I’d like you to begin by turning with me to Psalm 95.
If you were here for the very first, introductory sermon to the book of Hebrews, you may remember that I told you there were eight chapters of the Old Testament we would need to know if we were to understand the book of Hebrews, which makes extensive use of them. Psalm 95 is one of those chapters.
Psalm 95 is one of what is often called the Royal Psalms, which include Psalms 93–99, all of which celebrate the Kingship of God over his people and over all people.
So Psalm 93:1, “The LORD reigns!”
So Psalm 94:2, “Rise up, O judge of the earth!”
So Psalm 96:3, “Declare his glory among the nations!”
So Psalm 97:1, “The LORD reigns, let the earth rejoice; let the many coastlands be glad!”
So Psalm 98:2–3, “The LORD has made known his salvation; he has revealed his righteousness in the sight of the nations… All the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God!”
So Psalm 99:2, “The LORD is great in Zion; he is exalted over all the peoples!”
Now, remember the theme of Hebrews: That Jesus is this King, better than his rivals and forerunners, and that his Kingship and his conquest is going to be a global conquest—he is Lord of a New Canaan, a new Promised Land, a heritage of all of the nations and peoples. The Royal Psalms are about Jesus.
A Warning in the Wedding Sermon
That’s the context in which Psalm 95 sits—the context of Jesus’ universal Kingship, his inheritance, judgment, deliverance, and rule over the nations. It’s a segment of Psalms that the author of Hebrews has clearly marinated in. Let’s look at it together, starting with the first half, which runs through the first half of verse 7. This, Refuge, is the Word of the Living God:
“Oh come, let us sing to the LORD;
let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation!
Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving;
let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise!
For the LORD is a great God, and a great King above all gods.In his hand are the depths of the earth;
the heights of the mountains are his also.
The sea is his, for he made it,
and his hands formed the dry land.Oh come, let us worship and bow down;
let us kneel before the LORD, our Maker!
For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture,
and the sheep of his hand.”-Psalm 95:1–7a
As you see, the first 7 verses of the Psalm are a call to gladness and worship in light of God’s salvation: “Let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation!” His salvation is mighty, and it is worth singing about.
And by the end of the Psalm, we learn that David would have us read it with a very specific salvation of God in mind—the salvation of the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt. It turns out to be a Psalm we must sing with our Bibles open to Exodus and Numbers.
See this context whispered, even in the first half of the Psalm: How was the Exodus accomplished? By proving Yahweh’s superiority over the Egyptian king and his false gods, hence the whole of verse 3 reads, “For Yahweh is a great God, and a great King above all the gods.”
God definitively proved this in the ten plagues and the slaying of the firstborn sons of Egypt, culminating in death passing over his own people by the blood of the Passover lamb, smeared over their doorways. And then, to cap it off, he brought the people through the Red Sea—dry as July in Utah—and brought down the flood of deadly judgment on the horses and riders of Pharaoh’s armies.
In recalling these events to mind, Psalm 95 is a Psalm of gladness, right? “Sing of God’s triumph! Sing of his deliverance!”
So locate the first half of the Psalm in the Exodus story; picture the people of Israel, singing the song of Miriam in Exodus 15, standing on the shores of the Red Sea: “The horse and the rider you have thrown in the sea!” Watch it turn on a dime, now, second half of verse 7,
“Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts,
as at Meribah [quarreling], as on the day at Massah [testing]
in the wilderness,
when your fathers put me to the test and put me to the proof,
though they had seen my work.For forty years I loathed that generation and said,
‘They are a people who go astray in their heart,
and they have not known my ways.’
Therefore I swore in my wrath,
‘They shall not enter my rest.’”-Psalm 95:7b–11
Can you see the picture in your head? Go there, picture this, the people dancing and singing of the Lord’s salvation, who will be led through the wilderness towards the Promised Land by a pillar of cloud by day and fire by night—those very people singing and dancing are going to drop dead in the wilderness for their unbelief.
Think about the story of these people with me for a moment, the story of the Exodus. They were enslaved in Egypt, as God had promised they would be in Genesis, for centuries, where they grew from a small clan to a nation of millions.
And God delivered them from their enemies through massive displays of his power. He not only brought them out of Egypt and through the Red Sea, the entire story after that, from Exodus 16 on, is a continuous, relentless display of God’s love and care and visible power.
He fed them with bread from heaven, Exodus 16.
He gave them water from a rock, Exodus 17.
He defeated Amalek before them, Exodus 17.
He clothed Mt. Sinai in smoke and fire and gave them the Law, carved on tablets of stone by his very finger, Exodus 19–20.
He met with Moses before their eyes in the tent of meeting, covering it in a pillar of cloud, Exodus 33.
He made Moses’ face shine with radiance, Exodus 34.
He dwelt in their camp in the Tabernacle, Exodus 40.
He regulated their life for their good through his Law in the book of Leviticus.
He defeated their enemies before them as they journeyed towards the promised Land in the book of Numbers.
And then, the pivotal moment, the Lord brings them to the very edge of the Promised Land, and in Numbers 13, God commands spies to be sent into Canaan to spy it out. He says explicitly about this spying out, that it is a spying out of “…the land of Canaan, which I am giving to the people of Israel.” And they go. And they spy out the land. And they return a report that “…flows with milk and honey,” a fruitful land.
But the spies also say that the land is filled with fell foes, foes they couldn’t possibly defeat. And the people tremble. But Caleb, one of the spies, says, “Let us go up at once and occupy it, for we are well able to overcome it!”
And what happens? The people believe their fears rather than the Living God, who ransomed them from Egypt, and God in his fury vows that of that generation, only Caleb and Joshua shall enter the land. And so they wander for four decades in the wilderness until the last one drops dead, and their descendants are allowed to enter the land.
And so in Psalm 95, recounting these things, gladness and weighty seriousness kiss—as one minister put it—like when a pastor includes a warning against divorce in the wedding sermon.
Weddings are glorious things, but they include vows and warnings precisely because of how glorious they are. God’s amazing grace and his awesome salvation are glorious things—and so they are terrible things if neglected, and so we need be warned.
Typology 101
What does all of this have to do with the book of Hebrews?
In the very first sermon in the book of Hebrews, I told you that we would need to enroll in Typology 101, in the hopes that by the end of the book, we would have at least a Bachelor’s degree in the subject.
Remember, typology is what’s happening when we find out that this is about that. It’s what’s happening when the New Testament writers point at something, often a “something” in the Old Testament, and then with the other hand point at something else—often, Christ himself, that Jesus is the true and better Prophet, Priest, and King; that Christ is the true and better Temple, Lamb, altar, Tabernacle, feast, shepherd, Manna, and Exodus.
But as the New Testament writers point one hand at the Old Testament, sometimes they point the other hand—not at Christ—but at you.
Sometimes, Refuge, you are the antitype to the Old Testament types. Not you all by yourself, mind you, or even us—this one, little, rinky-dink local church in Ogden, Utah in the year of our Lord 2019—but big-u Us, the big-c Church.
And maybe you’re like, “Yes! That’s my favorite subject—me! I love talking about me. Wanna talk about me! Wanna talk about my! Wanna talk about number one, me, my! What I think, what I like, what I know, what I want, what I seeeeee! Where would you like to start? My likes and dislikes? Funniest anecdotes? Family history? Hobbies? Accomplishments?”
But then you find out that the this you are being compared to for the sake of warning is that complaining, grumbling, unbelieving generation that fell dead in the wilderness. And so we’re like, “Nah, let’s talk about something else. I don’t want to talk about me anymore.” Too late. Look with me at Hebrew 3:7.
“Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says,
“Today, if you hear his voice,
do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion,
on the day of testing in the wilderness,
where your fathers put me to the test
and saw my works for forty years.
Therefore I was provoked with that generation, and said,
‘They always go astray in their heart;
they have not known my ways.’
As I swore in my wrath, ‘They shall not enter my rest.’”Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called ‘today,’ that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.
For we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end.
As it is said, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.” For who were those who heard and yet rebelled? Was it not all those who left Egypt led by Moses? And with whom was he provoked for forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose bodies fell in the wilderness? And to whom did he swear that they would not enter his rest, but to those who were disobedient? So we see that they were unable to enter because of unbelief.” -Hebrews 3:7–19
Lay Them End to End
So one of the things that we should be able to do by the end of an expository sermon series—that is a sermon series that goes verse-by-verse, in order, through a whole book of the Bible—is to basically line up all the sermons end to end and hear a coherent conversation.
We don’t pick up our next text each week as if it is hanging somewhere in midair, like it’s some kind of independent, Platonic theology-unit. The end of last week’s sermon should be like a puzzle piece that the beginning of this sermon nests in.
And so while I’m not going to rebuild the case for what I said last week, I do want you to see that this section is very much just a longer stare at the exhortation we received last week. Last week, Hebrews gave us basically a warning-label-sized exhortation: “We are his house, if indeed we hold fast our confidence and our boasting in our hope.”
If. You are the very household of God, built by the great architect and older brother, Christ, if you hold fast. Or to put it another way: His true house holds fast. So I told you that the Bible gives us three positions with respect to this household:
1. You can simply be one who never even went in the door of the house; a stranger.
2. You can be in the house, but as a tourist, not a son. You will leave one day, proving you are not actually of the house. And so we established that there is a real category of people who look like Christians, claim Christians, and even believe in a certain sense—believe they are Christians—but who are not.
3. And you can be in the house as an adopted Son, a free son forever, dwelling in the house—but more importantly, actually turning out to be the house in which your Father dwells.
We are aiming to be that third category, and one of the means through which our Lord will work to keep us in that category is the means of warning. Last week, the warning was just a seed dropped in the ground. Now, the seed grows up into a fully-orbed warning, complete with exhortations to help us obey the warning.
Our Fight To The Death
And so all of this—really everything from verse 6 through the end of the chapter—draws together to underline a single, massively important point, which is simply verse 12:
“Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God.”
-Hebrews 3:12
Don’t fall away from the Living God! Don’t do what that generation did! Hold fast your confidence to the end, that you might enter his rest! Don’t harden your heart in rebellion!
And because our God is a good Father, he doesn’t just give hard words, but also help in obeying them. Right in the text, he provides us with three helps in holding fast:
1. Declare war—to-the-death war!—on unbelief.
The first help that our Lord provides us in this fight against unbelief is to tell us the nature of the fight: It is not a tickle-fight. It is a to-the-death fight.
The warning is that, if we have evil and unbelieving hearts, we will fall away from the Living God, which is to say, from life. This is not a trifling thing. Unbelief is a dragon, not a gnat.
It is a grace to know the stakes, right? That every day we wake up, we know how to pray; we know our enemy. We know that we need to pray, “Father, I believe! Help my unbelief!”
And so the warning is to take care. Take care! That’s what he says, and he’s talking, as the very next word in that line shows us, to brothers. Beware, brothers, lest there be in any of you this evil and unbelieving heart.
Meaning we—the “we” here sitting in the pews at church, right now!—can’t go to sleep. We can’t drift. We can’t be lackadaisical in this thing, guys. Even the conclusion, the punchline at the end of this whole section—which is going to be about rest, that is, about entering the rest we have in Christ—is going to say, Hebrews 4:11, “Let us therefore *strive* to enter that rest, so that no one may fall but he same sort of disobedience.”
And so we are to treat the enemy of unbelief as a deadly foe, one to be fought every day, to our dying breath, which is why the Apostle Paul tells his acolyte, Timothy, to “Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called and about which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses.”
Hear that? Not, “Sit the good sit of the faith,” or, “Feel the good feels of the faith,” but, “Fight the good fight of the faith!” Number two, in this fight, we must…
2. Exhort and be exhortable.
Verse 13,
“Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called ‘today,’ that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.”
-Hebrews 3:12–13
We are to exhort one another, which means to strongly press, encourage, and charge one another. About what? What are we pressing each other towards? What are we urging each other against? He says it right in verse 13, “…that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.”
Listen, sin is sneaky, and it’s out to slit your throat. It is a thing which hardens us. What does that mean? Well, the clearest place in the whole Bible on the nature of hardening is Romans 1, where we learn that hardening is what happens when human beings suppress the truth in unrighteousness.
What is that, suppressing the truth in unrighteousness? It is what we do when we clearly perceive God’s voice, his Law, his righteous commands, and we plug our ears and stop listening.
Just a few weeks ago, we were at the abortion clinic down in SLC, and we were preaching at the window of the waiting room, where we know women can hear us. Not yelling, not being disrespectful, but preaching the good news of a sin-forgiving Christ, who loves these women and their babies and doesn’t want them to pay somebody to dismember them.
And a man who worked in the adjacent office came out, and just let us have it—cussing us out, just furious. And my brother, Brian, was trying to speak with him, to engage, but he just wouldn’t listen, stormed off cussing.
Now listen, think about this: Here is a man who works, day in and day out, about 40 feet from a place that makes money poisoning and dismembering babies—and he is more mad about being disrupted at his desk by people pleading for that atrocity to end than for the atrocity itself.
That is hardness. That is suppressing the truth in unrighteousness. And that is what we are being warned against—the kind of hearts that the Israelites in the wilderness had, to see the glory of God manifest every morning in bread coming down from heaven to sustain them; of plagues and smoke and fire and cloud and parted sea and split rock with rivers gushing out, and to look at a handful of puny armies and say, “God couldn’t possibly deliver us!”
The hardness of unbelief. Unbelief in response to God’s given Son and his promised salvation is the most offensive sin against God, because it preaches blasphemies about him.
And so we are to exhort one another against that. This requires a few things. Number one, it requires all of us to commit to loving one another more than fearing one another or idolizing one another. If you fear your brothers, you can’t exhort them. If you idolize them, as in you can’t live without their approval, without everyone liking you and thinking you’re great, you can’t exhort them either.
No, the thing is to love your brothers and sisters, and out of love to know them—that’s risky, bold, costly, time-consuming community life, lived around tables and backyards and parks and pews—and then out of your knowing of them, speaking exhortation into their life. Exhortations like,
“Brother, I’m concerned. I’ve only seen you at church twice a month for the last 6 months.”
“Sister, I’m concerned. Every time we talk, you complain about your husband. You need to respect him.”
“Brother, when we hung out last night, your kids were really disrespectful of your wife, and I didn’t see you step up.”
“Sister, do you think that outfit honors the Lord? I’d be worried to have my sons see you in that.”
Do you hear what I’m saying about fear and idolatry? Do you get really, profoundly uncomfortable thinking about saying something like that to your friend? But listen: Do you love them? Do you believe that they are just like you, meaning they are in danger of the same evil, unbelieving heart, leading them to fall away from the Living God?
Exhort one another! And be exhortable. This requires the kind of humility that assumes that you are blind to your greatest sins, and that the Lord might grant sight of those sins to your brothers and sisters for your good.
I would also point you to one of the normal means of God’s exhorting grace: The preaching of God’s Word in the local church.
One of the ways we learn to love and believe and lean into the whole Bible is to sit under the preaching of it on the Lord’s Day with God’s people. We are learning together, not just to tolerate the Bible, but to love it. And if I’m not doing that and the elders aren’t doing that, then we should quit.
So listen: Are you here? Are you with us? Are you neglecting the gathering of the saints? Do you have a pragmatic view of this gathering, as if you can just listen to some Christian podcasts and go to church twice a month or less and call it good?
Let’s get specific: If you are listening to this sermon online, and if you generally make it to worship with us in the flesh once or twice a month, and expect this recording to be enough—repent. Now, if you are unable to go out of the house for medical reasons, I’m not talking to you.
I’m talking to the I’ll-be-camping-9-Sundays-from-June-to-September-and-then-snowboarding-11-Sundays-from-December-to-March folks.
Sermons are important. Hearing them is important, but not as important as being present. Pastors, as we will learn in this book, are called to keep watch over the souls of the sheep. How can we do that if we don’t know you? Who you are? And being known requires being present. I am not and I cannot and the elders are not and the elders cannot keep watch over your souls digitally.
3. Read the Old Testament humbly and Christianly.
Verse 14,
For we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end.
As it is said, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.” For who were those who heard and yet rebelled? Was it not all those who left Egypt led by Moses? And with whom was he provoked for forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose bodies fell in the wilderness? And to whom did he swear that they would not enter his rest, but to those who were disobedient? So we see that they were unable to enter because of unbelief.”
-Hebrews 3:14–19
This story, this history, was written for your help. Don’t do what many Christians do when they read the Old Testament and think, “Why do I have to read the book of Numbers? What does 36 chapters of self-centered, people who grumbled every time they didn’t get their way have to do with me?”
Read it and see yourself where you are intended to. See yourself writ large in the nation of Israel. Look at the generation that died in the wilderness and find it a mirror—see your sin in their sin, your heart in their heart.
Listen to the text: “For who were those who heard and yet rebelled? Was it not all those who left Egypt led by Moses? And with whom was he provoked for forty years?” Who was it? It was those who heard and saw marvels beyond imagining! If they could fall dead of unbelief, how much more might we if we don’t take care and exhort one another and hold fast to Christ?
So even now, as we come to this table of Communion, as we confess our sin to the Lord, make eye contact with your sin and weakness. Name it. And ask the Lord for his help and his Spirit in faith—because ours is a Father who delights to give good gifts to his children.
He is not far from you right now. He delights to pour out mercy on the humble. He delights to exalt the self-forgetful who shelter in his Son.