What do you hear more often from God, ‘try harder’ or ‘rest in my love’? God had promised the Israelites rest (v 1). The Promised Land – a land flowing with milk and honey. But that promise pointed forward to a far greater rest, a rest like God’s rest at the completion of creation (vs 5,6). They received neither because of their faithless, hard, disobedient hearts (vs 2,6,7). Yet God’s promise of rest remains open today to anyone who would receive it (vs 6–9). It is received by faith (v 2), not by works, not by our own efforts (v 10; see Galatians 2:16). 

And yet, we are warned to make every effort not to fall short (vs 1,11). How do these things work together? How do we make every effort to rest from our work?! By holding firmly to the promise (v 14). Or as the book of Jude puts it, by fighting to trust that God’s love is for us, as we wait for the eternal rest he has promised us (Jude 21). So God does tell us to try harder. But not to earn his love. Rather he says make every effort to rest in my love.

‘So that, having been justified by his grace, we might become heirs having the hope of eternal life.’¹ Rejoice in the hope you have in Christ.

Sometimes, perhaps when on a long walk or involved in a particularly taxing piece of work, we long for the moment when we can take a break and have a rest. That’s the thought here. The rest which the writer sees lies in the future, prepared by God for his people. The idea that there might be a link between God’s ‘rest’ after creation, the ‘rest’ offered to the Israelites in the Promised Land and the ‘rest’ held out to us as followers of Jesus may not strike us as obvious, but the writer is using the methods of interpretation of Jewish scholars of the time and his readers would not have found the connection strange. God’s rest was the model for all subsequent rests. What the ‘Sabbath-rest’ (v 9) that awaits the followers of Jesus the Messiah might look like is not spelt out, but it is worth aiming for and making sacrifices for so that we do not miss out. 

That is the danger. Just as a generation of Israelites missed out on the Promised Land through disobedience and refusal to trust God, so might the first-century or the 21st-century community miss out. We must make every effort (v 11), we must be careful (v 1), we must maintain faith in God’s future (vs 2,3). This raises a question at the heart of Hebrews, which has troubled and divided generations of Christians. Is it possible that we might lose our salvation? A (slightly!) fuller discussion must wait until we come to chapter 6, but for the writer there seems to be a real and present danger, an active possibility of missing out. God has provided a future, but we must receive it; just as the Israelites had to enter the Promised Land physically, so we must continually appropriate by faith the promise of God’s future.

Think about the hope you have. Then think about wider society. Where is hope needed? How might Christians bring it?

¹ Titus 3:7