Prayer of the Day: Lord Jesus Christ, You alone give rest to weary souls, and Your cross has opened the door to our eternal rest. Keep us diligent in Your Word, guard us from unbelief and drifting, and bring us at last from the toil of this world into the perfect rest You have prepared for Your people. You live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

There remains therefore a rest for the people of God. For he who has entered His rest has himself also ceased from his works as God did from His. Let us therefore be diligent to enter that rest, lest anyone fall according to the same example of disobedience. For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. And there is no creature hidden from His sight, but all things are naked and open to the eyes of Him to whom we must give account.”

Dearly Beloved Fellow Believers,

There is a line in one of the general prayers in which we say to God, “Our souls are restless until we rest in You.”

We know this to be true from Scripture. We also experience the truth of this statement in everyday life. Apart from God, apart from Jesus Christ, rest in this world is something that flees from us. We work and grow weary; then we sleep and rest only to work and grow weary again. Sometimes we go to bed tired and still find that we cannot sleep; we get up feeling as tired as when we lay down. People sometimes take a vacation and come back worn out. There are people who look forward to retiring from their work only to find that they are restless in retirement. Only in Christ do we find lasting and satisfying rest, for He gives rest for our souls, as He promises to all who come to Him (Matt. 11:28-29). In Him we find rest in the forgiveness of our sins, in reconciliation with God, in the hope of eternal life.

The rest for our souls that we have in Christ now is a foretaste of the perfect rest that will be ours in the world to come. Now we have rest for our souls, but we have it in the midst of a life of toil and trouble. Yet we rest in the assurance that when we reach the end of life in this world we will enter into eternal rest with our Lord.

This is no pipe dream, this is no wishful thinking; this is the promise of our faithful God in His word. We find it in our text: “There remains therefore a rest for the people of God.” Here the writer to the Hebrews holds up to our view the prospect of eternal rest. He does this so that we may desire it. And he encourages us to be careful and diligent to enter that rest.

REST FOR WEARY SOULS

God invites us to enter His rest.

When the writer says that there is a rest for the people of God, he bases his statement on several passages from the Old Testament. The first of them is from Genesis where it says, “And God rested on the seventh day from all His works” (Gen. 2:2). God created the world in six days, but on the seventh day He ceased His creating work. He entered into a Sabbath rest. The writer then goes on to show from Scripture that God’s intention was always that man should enter that rest and enjoy it with Him. We can see that already in Genesis, where God put Adam and Eve into the beautiful Garden of Eden. There they had rest, for God had done all the work for them. They didn’t have to create the garden; God created it for them and gave it to them to enjoy. They weren’t idle in it; they tended it. But their work wasn’t drudgery, but was a joyful service to God. Only with the fall into sin did such work become heavy, burdensome, and frustrating. It was sin that brought toil, weariness, and futility into human life.

But God still wanted humanity to enter His Sabbath rest and enjoy it with Him forever. The writer in Hebrews shows this from a passage where God said of the unbelieving among His people, “They shall not enter My rest” (Psalm 95:11). The writer’s point is that the only thing that kept them from entering God’s eternal rest was their unbelief. God wanted them to enter His rest, but they were not willing. They rebelled against Him, complained about His dealings with them, despised and rejected His word when it came to them through Moses. That’s why they didn’t enter into God’s eternal rest.

Does God still want man to enter His rest? Is the offer still open? Yes, says the writer, because God still calls to His people. He says in one of the Psalms, “Today, if you will hear His voice, do not harden your hearts” (Ps. 95:7,8). The word “today” in that verse is a wonderful gospel word. It’s like an open door to anyone who reads it. In it God is saying to anyone who reads it at any time, “Today is a day of grace. The door is open. You are invited to come in and enter My eternal rest.”

It is on the basis of all this that the writer says in our text, “There remains therefore a rest for the people of God.” So it’s still there for us today. The door is still open, for the gospel call still goes out. It is the Lord Jesus Himself calling to everyone, “Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” He opened the door to eternal rest for us when He offered Himself on the cross as a sacrifice for us and took away our sins. Sin is what robbed man of the rest that God had given to him. By taking away our sins Jesus has restored that rest to us.

The writer also teaches us more about the rest that Christ gives us when he says, “He who has entered [God’s] rest has himself also ceased from his works as God did from His.” When God entered into the rest of the seventh day He ended His work of creating. He looked at what He had made, “and indeed it was very good” (Gen. 1:31). We might say that He sat down to enjoy what He had created. Now as we have said, sin marred that good creation. But Christ did away with sin. And God promises to create a new heavens and a new earth where nothing but righteousness dwells. This will be a place of eternal rest where all who by faith in Christ are cleansed from their sins will live forever.

What will it be like, this eternal state of rest, this ceasing from our works? It will not be a state of eternal inactivity, surely. For when God ceased his works of creation, He didn’t then do nothing. He sustained and upheld His creation and still does so today, “upholding all things by the word of His power” (Heb. 1:3). So also we, when we enter into the rest of eternal life, will cease from the exhausting toil of this life and enter into an eternal life of joyful service to God.

Let us therefore be diligent to enter it.

The writer to the Hebrews was addressing Christians who were weak and wavering in their faith. This is why our text also contains some very strong words of warning: “Let us therefore be diligent to enter that rest, lest anyone fall according to the same example of disobedience.” The “example of disobedience” is the children of Israel who rebelled against God and against Moses in the wilderness with the result that they did not enter the Promised Land. A whole generation died in the wilderness and never saw Canaan; they were never settled in the land God gave to His people. So the writer warns the Hebrews that they too could exclude themselves from the eternal rest that Christ had won for them. The door was open and God was calling to them to enter that rest, but if they turned away from Christ, they would not enter it.

The warning in our text includes a passage on the power of God’s word. The point of this here is that the Children of Israel despised and disobeyed the word of God spoken to them by Moses. That disobedience had terrible consequences: it deprived them of the blessings of the Promised Land. Now the Hebrews were hearing the gospel word. If they shut their ears to that, the consequences to them would be just as severe.

This passage on the power of the word is here to remind us of the responsibility that comes with hearing the word of God. It is a high privilege to hear that word, for it is God Himself speaking to us. It is a great blessing to hear the word, for it is a gospel word from God that offers and gives eternal rest. But if those who hear it despise it, reject it, or simply ignore it, then that word becomes a word of judgment that will condemn them on the Day of Judgment. That’s true even if the despising and rejecting of the word is hidden in the heart. The word of God “is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart,” our text says. Nothing is hidden from God’s sight.

But why would we want to despise or ignore the gospel, seeing what it offers us? It offers us rest from the crushing burdens, the wearying troubles, the exhausting toil of life in this world. We all experience these things, and as our life goes on we experience them more and more. But in Christ we have the promise of eternal rest. We experience it already now when we read the Gospel promises, or remember those that we have committed to memory. In them we hear Jesus calling to us, “Come to Me, and I will give you rest.” We experience this rest now when we gather with fellow believers, hear the Word read to us, and hear it preached from the pulpit by a faithful pastor. We experience it when we approach the Lord’s altar and receive the bread and wine in Holy Communion and hear the assurance, “This is My body, given for you…This is My blood, shed for you for the remission of sins.” Yes, most of all we find rest in seeing that Jesus was punished for my sin. You are forgiven and God’s child and a heir of heaven. God did this in grace. This is rest. Amen.

May God in His mercy bring us safely to the eternal rest He has won for us. Amen.

—Reverend John Klatt

Watertown, SD

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