Genesis chapter 2 says, Thus
the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of
them. And on the seventh day God ended
His work which He had made, and He rested on the seventh day
from all His work which He had made. And God blessed the seventh
day, and sanctified it, because that in it He had rested from
all His work, which God created and made." Now turn to Exodus
chapter 20, and we'll read that couple of verses in Exodus. So
God created the world, and He rested on the seventh day. That's
what I want to consider. The title of today's sermon is,
Rest. Our rest, the everlasting rest
of God's saints in Christ. Rest. In Exodus chapter 20, in
verse 8, God gave this commandment. He says, remember the Sabbath
day to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labor and
do all thy work, but on the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord
thy God. In it thou shalt not do any work,
thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant,
nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates. And
here's why. For in six days the Lord made
heaven and earth, the sea and all that in them is, and rested
the seventh day, Wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day,
and hallowed it." And now look at Deuteronomy. I'll read these
texts of Scripture first, and then we'll get into the connection
between them. Deuteronomy, in chapter 5. He says in verse 12, Deuteronomy
chapter 5, six days, "...thou shalt labor, and do all thy work."
But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God. In it thou
shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter,
nor thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thine ox, nor thine ass,
nor any of thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates,
that thy manservant and maidservant may rest as well as thou, Verse
15, "...and remember that thou wast a servant in the land of
Egypt, and that the Lord thy God brought thee out thence through
a mighty hand, and by a stretched out arm. Therefore the Lord thy
God commanded thee to keep the Sabbath day." So far we've seen
two mention two places, two different types of Sabbath in scripture. The first one was the Sabbath,
or the rest of God in creation. The second one was the rest that
God commanded his people in Exodus and Deuteronomy, and repeated
it there on the seventh day, called the seventh day Sabbath.
In Exodus, God told them to keep the Sabbath Because keeping that
Sabbath, the basis, the foundation for that was God's rest on the
seventh day from creation. So they're connected. The seventh
day Sabbath is connected to the rest God rested in creation. And then he says here in Deuteronomy,
also remember that you were a bondman in Egypt. You were slaves in
Egypt to Pharaoh. And God delivered you out of
Egypt. Remember how he delivered them? by the blood of the Passover
Lamb." And so those are the Sabbaths. And then I'm going to go to Hebrews
chapter 4 now. We're going to look at... Actually,
stop at Leviticus chapter 16. This will be the third Sabbath
mentioned here. Leviticus, which is before Deuteronomy. Leviticus 16. Take a look at this. This was
on the Day of Atonement. In the Old Testament, there was
one day every year in which the high priest would have to go
into the tabernacle, into the holiest of all, the holiest place
of all, that second chamber of the tabernacle, and offer the
blood of the goat, sprinkling it there, and make atonement
to God for the sins of Israel. And so we read in verse 20, 29, he says, and this shall be a
statute, this day of atonement, this shall be a statute forever
unto you, that in the seventh month, on the tenth day of the
month, you shall afflict your souls and do no work at all,
whether it be one of your own country or a stranger that sojourneth
among you. And here's why, for on that day
shall the priest make an atonement for you. to cleanse you, that
you may be clean from all your sins before the Lord. It shall
be a Sabbath of rest unto you, and you shall afflict your souls
by a statute forever." Now this was explained in the New Testament
that the priest offering the blood of the animal here actually
did never put away sin. But God gave it here as a ceremonial
law in order for the people to keep every year because its fulfillment
would come and it would teach what was coming. It was basically
God preaching the gospel here through a physical means. And
that's done throughout scripture. When God created the world, we
can see that. It teaches us something about
the nature of what God did. About His almighty great power
and His eternality. All the things it teaches us
about God and creation. We see it. God speaks of things
that are earthly first, and then He speaks of spiritual things
so that we might understand the spiritual. And here in Leviticus
and throughout the Old Testament, God gave a lot of things that
were physical and earthly things in order to teach the gospel,
the spiritual things. In order that we might believe
the spiritual things, He first gives us the physical. In physical,
working out things that we can actually touch and feel and smell
and see. And He tells us about them, and then He points to that
spiritual fulfillment of that thing, which is revealed in the
New Testament. So here we have three mentions
of Sabbath. The Creation, the seventh-day
Sabbath, and now in the Day of Atonement. But now turn to the
New Testament in the book of Hebrews. Actually, yeah, we'll
go to the book of Hebrews, chapter 4. Because Hebrews chapter 4
actually pulls out two other mentions of the Sabbath and we'll
just look at it here because it's explained here and it makes
it a lot easier than rather trying to reproduce the truth that's
already revealed. So let's here, look at it in
Hebrews chapter 4. Now in Hebrews chapter 4, The
Sabbath is mentioned here, but the context for it occurs in
Hebrews chapter 3. And I'll give you the background. was delivered by God out of the
land of Egypt. They were slaves for 400 years,
430 years they were slaves and God brought them out. And bringing
them out of Egypt was another one of those physical things
that pointed forward to the spiritual reality of God's people being
delivered out of the bondage of sin, and the guilt of sin,
the curse of sin, and also the bondage and curse of God's law.
Pharaoh represented Satan, and God, by the blood of the Lamb
in Egypt, delivered the whole nation out from under his hand. God, by the blood of Christ,
has delivered his people out of the tyranny of the devil,
out of the guilt of their sin and the condemnation for it,
out of the bondage and the curse of the law. So, Egypt represented
that. And the Sabbath day that they
were to keep, we just read in Deuteronomy 5, was to remind
them that they had been redeemed from Egypt's Egyptian bondage.
Redeemed meant God paid a ransom price and set them at liberty. That's what the word redeemed
means. A price is paid and the lawfully imprisoned debtor goes
free. God paid the ransom price in
order to set his people free from Egypt, but the price was
paid to him, because the debt of sin is always to God. And
so God told them to offer the lamb and sprinkle its blood on
the doorposts, and they did that. And it says in Exodus 12, 13,
the Lord said, when I see the blood, I'll pass over you. In other words, when God sees
the blood, He doesn't consider the crimes, the sin crimes against
Him for which we owe Him our lives, and instead He receives
from the Lamb, the Lamb's blood, satisfaction to His law for our
sins. And so the Israelites who were
in the house represented those whose sins were taken away by
the blood of Christ. And Egypt's ruler, Pharaoh, is
representative of Satan. And we're delivered out of Satan's
kingdom by what Christ did on the cross. Now, this other rest,
this other Sabbath, which we haven't talked about yet, After
Israel came out of Egypt, they were going to a land called the
land of Canaan. And Canaan is called the land
of rest in scripture. The land of Canaan. God says
it's a land flowing with milk and honey. And everything there,
God has already provided. You don't even have to work.
The cities are already built. All you have to do is go and
take the land. And so Israel came out of Egypt,
going through the wilderness. And in the wilderness, they had
to go across this for a couple of years. It took them to first
get to the land of Canaan. And when they arrived at the
land of Canaan, and they were about to go into that land, they
sent in spies to find out what the land was like. And the spies
came back. There were 12 spies sent in,
one for each tribe in Israel. And 10 of the spies came back
and said, it's true, the land is great. One of them, two men,
carried one cluster of grapes between them. That's how fruitful
and bountiful this land was. It was a land of plenty. But
they said there's a problem. There are giants in the land.
And these giants are formidable. And we appeared to them as grasshoppers. In their eyes we looked like
grasshoppers. So these men already judged the
situation and they brought back this evil report, God said. And
the men who brought this report back put fear into the hearts
of the Israelites who had gone through the wilderness to get
to Canaan, the land of rest. In fact, the people were afraid
and they didn't believe God's promise that He would actually
bring them into Canaan. And so, in their hearts, they
didn't believe God. God had redeemed them from Egypt,
had given them His laws, reminding them of His work and creation,
and that they were delivered from Egypt. And they kept those
laws, that seventh-day Sabbath, all through the wilderness, and
going into the land of Canaan. Now, they had all of this evidence
of God's faithfulness and His power and His purpose to bring
them into that land, and yet they didn't believe God. They
saw His works. They saw Him bring water out
of a rock and feed them with manna day by day, and yet they
didn't believe God. They saw Him bring them through
the Red Sea, and yet they didn't believe God. And that's the context
of Hebrews chapter 4 here. And I will read in Hebrews chapter
3 these words. It says, In verse 8 of Hebrews chapter
3, "...harden not your hearts, as in the provocation, in the
day of temptation, in the wilderness, when your fathers tempted me,
and proved me, and saw my works forty years. Wherefore I was
grieved with that generation, and said, They do all way err
in their heart, and they have not known my ways. So I swear
in my wrath, they shall not enter into my rest. Take heed, brethren,
lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief in departing
from the living God. but exhort one another daily
while it is called today, lest any of you be hardened through
the deceitfulness of sin. For we are made partakers of
Christ if we hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast unto
the end. While it is said, today, if you
will hear his voice, harden not your hearts, as in the provocation,
for someone they had heard did provoke, albeit not all that
came out of Egypt by Moses. But with whom was he greed forty
years? Was it not with them that sinned, whose carcasses fell
in the wilderness? And to whom swear he that they
should not enter into his rest, But to them that believe not,
so we see that they could not enter in because of unbelief."
And what he's talking about is entering into Canaan, the land
of rest. The people provoked God. They
provoked Him over and over. They would complain against Him.
And when He would work a miracle, like bringing water out of the
rock, or manna from heaven, or Delivering them from their enemies.
A cloud over them. Bringing them through the Red
Sea. They just continued to complain. They never believed God. They always had in their heart
an attitude of unbelief. Unbelief is an absence of faith. And so when they came to the
edge of the wilderness, going into the land of Canaan. When
God was going to bring them into that promised rest. That land
flowing with milk and honey. And He was going to deliver them
from all their enemies into their hands. They looked at their enemies,
and they saw that they were giants. And they looked at themselves
through the eyes of their enemies, rather than looking at their
enemies through the eyes of God. And seeing that they were in
God's sight, nothing, no barrier, God could easily bring them in. And they turned in their hearts,
because even though they had seen God's works in the wilderness,
They never understood His ways. His ways. They never understood
His ways. They knew His works, but did
not know His ways. So that's where we are in chapter
4 of Hebrews. Let's read on here. He says, "...let us therefore
fear, lest a promise being left to us of entering into His rest,
any of you should seem to come short of it." Now he's directing
us to the reality of the rest that Canaan represented. Remember,
that's an earthly thing. It was for the nation of Israel.
It was an earthly thing that had a spiritual meaning. An eternal
meaning. Earthly things are temporal.
Things we see are physical. But the eternal things are revealed
to us by faith, by God revealing it to us. That's the only way
we can know spiritual things. And so when he speaks here in
chapter 4, he's saying, let us therefore fear. Wait a minute.
He's speaking in the New Testament time. The people of Israel had
already gone into the land of Canaan. The nation that didn't
believe God, I mean the people that didn't believe God, they
all died off. Their children actually were
brought in. But that whole nation occupied Canaan for all the time
between then and the New Testament when this was written here in
Hebrews. So these people It wasn't the rest of entering Canaan that
God is speaking about here. "...let us therefore fear, lest
a promise be left us of entering into his rest." Any of you should
seem to come short of it. He was speaking here of another
rest. Another Sabbath. Because that's
what the word means. Sabbath means rest. You see,
these rests, these Sabbaths in the Bible, all point to the same
thing. They point to the spiritual rest
that God is talking about. And we want to understand what
that rest is. Because God says, because of unbelief, those Israelites
failed to enter into rest. And God was angry with them.
He says, Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you an
evil heart of in departing from the living God, because God had
sworn in His wrath, they shall not enter into my rest. They
excluded themselves by their unbelief. They kept themselves
from that Canaan rest by their unbelief. And then he applies
it now in verse 1 of chapter 4 to us. To us now. Faith is the issue. Unbelief excluded them from entering
Canaan. The rest he has in mind here
is the rest of God. And we want to understand what
that is. So he goes on in verse 2. He's going to explain to us
what that rest is. He says, take heed. He says,
let us therefore, I'm sorry, let us therefore fear lest a
promise being left us of entering into his rest, any of you should
seem to come short of it. For unto us was the gospel preached
as well as unto them. But the word preached did not
profit them, not being mixed with faith in them which heard
it." So the gospel was preached to the Israelites and it has
been preached to us. How was the gospel preached to
the Israelites? Because you don't read Christ
died for our sins according to the scriptures in the Old Testament.
That's not until the New Testament. When did God preach the gospel
to Israel in the Old Testament? The way that God always preached
the gospel in the Old Testament. Through these earthly things.
Remember when Nicodemus was talking to Jesus in John chapter 3? Nicodemus
was a master of Israel. And yet he didn't know that the
only way he could enter heaven and see the kingdom of God is
if he was born of God's spirit into that kingdom. He had to
be made a son of God by birth. The spirit of God had to birth
him spiritually. into that kingdom so that he
could see it. Nicodemus didn't understand that.
And yet he was called a master in Israel. And so Jesus said
to him, If we have spoken unto you earthly things, and you believe
not, how shall you believe if I tell you heavenly things? And
so you wonder, what earthly things did Jesus tell Nicodemus that
he didn't believe? Because Nicodemus had the Old
Testament. All the earthly things in the
Old Testament were given to them. So we see the creation itself. God spoke the light into the
darkness. That's the light of the gospel
coming to us to show us that Christ is our light. He's the
light from God that reveals God in his perfections and how we're
saved by his work on the cross. There was the skins that covered
Adam and Eve. Again, to teach us that the shame
and guilt and nakedness of our sins are covered by the obedience
of Christ in His death. And on and on it goes. And the
very earthly thing that Christ spoke to Nicodemus was, He said,
as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness. Even so, the
Son of Man must be lifted up. So that earthly preaching of
the gospel then was that incident in Numbers where God sent serpents
to bite the Israelites because of their unbelief and sin. And
having been bitten and dying, God then told Moses, hang the
serpent on the pole and everyone who looks at the serpent on the
pole will live. And Jesus is telling Nicodemus,
He revealed the meaning of that earthly sign. He gave him the
spiritual thing. Because Nicodemus obviously didn't
understand. He didn't believe the earthly
sign. Because he didn't see Christ in it. He didn't understand the
gospel because it wasn't mixed with faith. The faith that God
gives has to reveal Christ to us. And so faith is eyes. God gives us, who are blind,
He gives us a sight of Christ and Him crucified and explains
in seeing Christ that He is all of our salvation. And that's
what faith is. It's the God-given sight to see
Christ in all the preaching of the gospel throughout the Old
Testament and the New. Not that we can understand it
all, but that's the point. Faith from God, given to us,
opens Christ and Him crucified to us so that we believe, we
come to rest in Him. And so he says here, the gospel
was preached to them as well as unto us, but it wasn't mixed
with faith in them that heard. Where does that faith come from?
Do we have it in ourselves? Is it something that God has
to wait for us to exercise? Is faith something that we bring
to God in order to get from God something? Is it the part that
we bring in order to complete the transaction of our salvation?
Not at all. Faith is foreign to us by nature. Romans 11.32 it says that God
has concluded them all in unbelief. And so no man has faith by nature. It's a gift of God. Ephesians
2 verse 8 and 9. And only God's people are given
this faith. Acts 13.48 says, As many as were
ordained to eternal life They were given this faith to believe
on the Lord Jesus Christ. They believed Him. And so, this
faith that they needed, they didn't have. And it was their
fault for not believing God, just like it's our fault. And
yet we are utterly dependent, like Nicodemus was, on God's
Spirit. to birth us into his kingdom
and give us spiritual eyes to see Christ crucified. And that
is the evidence that God has given us eternal life. And so
Jesus said in John 3 15, even as Moses lifted up the serpent
in the wilderness, That those who looked upon that serpent
lived. Even so, Christ is lifted up on the cross. That all who
believe on Him may have everlasting life. We're ruined in sin. We're lost in sin. And we have
no hope. We're guilty before God and cannot
recover ourselves. But God has undertaken to save
the lost and ruined, helpless and unbelieving, by lifting up
Christ and then giving by His Spirit that faith that allows
us to see and rest in Him. And so we read on in Hebrews
chapter 4 in verse 3. For we which have believed do
enter into rest. Now this is the revelation of
what rest is. When we believe, we enter into
rest. Now consider what this rest was
in the Old Testament. The very first case, what was
the first rest? Well, God finished creation,
and when He finished it, He rested. What does that mean? It means
that He stopped working. The work was complete, and since
the work was done and finished, God ceased from His labors. On
the seventh day, He rested. And so the rest in the Seventh
Day Sabbath was the same thing. He said, don't do any work at
all. Not you, or your son, or your
daughter, your manservant, your maidservant, not even your animals.
Don't do any work. Remember what God did on the
Seventh Day in creation. Remember you were redeemed from
Egyptian bondage. Remember those things. And so here he's saying, we which
have believed do enter into rest. What do we believe? What is this
faith he's talking about here? Well, the book of Hebrews unfolds
the fact that everything in the Old Testament was pointing to
Christ the Lord, who would come. You see, The message of the gospel
is that God sent His Son to do for His people what they could
not do for themselves. God sent His Son to save them,
but in order to save them, He Himself had to take on our nature. He had to become man. He had
to be made under the law and he had to fulfill that law in
order that his obedience in our place and his punishment from
God for our sins as a substitute for us might be accepted by God
and God then would treat us as the obedience that Christ provided. He might treat us as righteous
for Christ's sake. In other words, He might look
upon us in His Son and receive us as His Son. And so faith looks
to Christ. I'm dying. I've been bitten by
my own because of my sin. I'm under the curse of God and
there's no hope for me. There was no remedy, no medicine
that could heal the people in the wilderness. The serpent bite
was fatal. Many had died and the rest were
dying who had been bitten. And Moses holds up that serpent
on the pole and he says, look and live. And God speaks to us
from Isaiah 45, 22. The Lord Jesus says, look unto
me. And be ye saved, all the ends of the earth, for I am God,
and there is none else." And so that's our warrant, to look
to Christ. We who are sinners, who are under
the curse and condemnation of God, He says, look. And here
He says, all who believe, do enter into rest. What work are
we resting from? We're resting from all the work
required to save us from our sins. All the work required by
God from us, none of which we can provide. All the obedience
God requires. All the love and all the faith
and all the everything that God requires from us. We can't produce
one thing. We can't keep one thing of all
that God requires. That's the message of God's law. Guilty and helpless. Ruined and
hopeless. And in need of a rescue. In need of a savior. And so Christ
comes from heaven. He takes our nature. And in that
nature, He's made under the law. And under the law, as a slave
under the law, He fulfills it to God in the place of His people. He works out for them an everlasting
righteousness. And because of His obedience,
That was meritorious enough to give them everlasting life. God
gives to them who look to Christ that everlasting life. And that
look itself is the gift of God. So he says here, "...for we which
have believed do enter into rest, as he said, as I have sworn in
my wrath, if they shall enter into my rest." That was in the
land of Canaan. That was in the land of Canaan
when he said, if they shall enter into my rest, he swore that. But then he says, although the
works were finished from the foundation of the world. Now
he's bringing in another layer of resting. This foundation of
our rest in Christ is what God did in the beginning. God finished
the work of creation. Christ finished the work of salvation. God rested on the seventh day
from his work of creation. Christ finished the work of our
salvation, and he sits on heaven's throne. He's satisfied. He's resting. He's exalted. He
says in verse 4, "...for he spake in a certain place of the seventh
day on this wise, and God did rest the seventh day from all
his works." Now we just read that in Genesis chapter 2. That's
what we're speaking about. And in this place again, "...if
they shall enter into my rest." Now that quotation is from Psalm
95. Psalm 95, the Psalms, came way further in history, way later
in history, than the land of Canaan. Entering the land of
Canaan and occupying that. And God said in Psalm 95, "...if
they shall enter into my rest..." And the Israelites must have
wondered, wait a minute, I thought we already entered Canaan. The
point is, is there's another rest. And that's what he's talking
about. seeing therefore it remaineth because of that prophecy in verse
5 if they shall enter into my rest he says in verse 6 seeing
therefore it remaineth that some must enter therein and they to
whom it was first preached entered not in because of unbelief i.e. those in Israel and those in
the wilderness who went to Canaan they didn't enter into that rest
and yet God says some must enter that another rest he says again
He limiteth a certain day, saying in David, this is from Psalm
95, today, after so long a time, as it is said, today, if you
will hear his voice, harden not your hearts. In Psalm 95, David
says this, after so long a time, it's been a long time, and you
still haven't believed, if You shall hear his voice today, not
back then, today if you shall hear his voice. Harden not your
hearts. And then he says in verse 8,
he speaks about, he uses the name Jesus here, but he's really
referring to Joshua in the Old Testament. Because they're the
same name in the Greek, Joshua is translated as Jesus. Because
Joshua was, again, a forerunner of Jesus. He says in verse 8,
"...for if Joshua had given them rest," that is, when Joshua led
Israel into the land of Canaan, if that's the rest that God is
speaking about, He said, "...then would he not afterward have spoken
of another day." Psalm 95 comes after Joshua, leading them into
that land of Canaan. He would not have mentioned it
in Psalm 95 if Joshua had brought them into the rest God intended.
Verse 9, "...there remaineth therefore a rest..." To who? "...to the people of God." And
verse 10 tells us again what this rest is. When did God cease
from His works? In creation? What did He tell
Israel to do on the seventh day? Don't work! What did he tell
them to do on the Day of Atonement? Don't work! Rest! And what is
he saying there? Christ has finished the work
of our salvation. Therefore, do not work for your
salvation. Cease from your own strivings. Don't look for an experience.
Don't look inwardly. Look outwardly. Look to Christ
and Him crucified. He is the one God provided and
the only one God accepts for sinners. Just like the Israelites
lying there, dying in the wilderness. Look at the serpent on the pole.
And in looking they lived. So we look to Christ. And in
looking, by God-given faith, we realize we have everlasting
life. Why? Because God accepts Christ
for us. And Christ is in glory. He's
been raised from the dead. He's conquered death. And He's
never going to die again, because all sin has been removed by His
death. In His death, He put death to
death. So he says here in verse 10, I'll read it again. Now that's
a confusing thing. If rest is resting, then what
is laboring? Why do we... You just, seems like he said,
rest and cease from your works, but what is his laboring? Well,
you see, everything in us naturally wants to do something to make
God favorable towards us, wants to do something to assuage our
guilt, to remove it in our conscience. And God is saying, no, no, labor
to enter into that rest. Do not do anything. Look to Christ only and find
in Him Listen to what God says about His Son and His work. He
raised Him from the dead. He says He has fulfilled the
righteousness of the law. Listen to what God said, just
like He said in creation. It's very good. God set Him at
His own right hand. Therefore, He finished the work. What are you going to do to add
to the completion and the perfection of Christ's own obedience in
death? If you could add anything to
it, why did God slay His Son? And so he tells us this in very
adamant terms, very serious terms. He says, let us labor therefore
to enter into that rest, lest any man fall after the same example
of unbelief. And then in verse 12, he gives
this warning. For the word of God is quick. It means it's living. The word quick in our Bibles,
when they were translated, meant alive. It's living. And powerful,
God's Word, is living. It's not dead, it's living. When
we read God's Word, it opens up our intents and our thoughts
and what's in our conscience. It exposes us before God. He
says it's quick and powerful, sharper than any two-edged sword,
piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and
of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts
and intents of the heart. Neither is there any creature
that is not manifest in his sight, that all things are naked and
opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do." What are
these two verses saying? They're telling us that if we
don't find our rest in Christ, we are exposed to the judgment
of God. And let it be known clearly that
God's Word will find out our thoughts and intents of our heart.
He will divide between soul and spirit, between joints and marrow,
between our motives and our intents, and we will not be able to stand
before Him. You see, God gives us every motivation
to look to Christ. The thing that characterizes
every person in this world is this anxiety, this anxious fretful
energy, looking for something that is going to give me happiness
or peace. And we go about our lives. We
go to work. We come home. We go to school. We come home.
We do this for years and then we die. And we look back and
we wonder, what's the purpose? Recently there was someone who
died who was around my age. Back when we were kids. I think he was the Partridge
family singer. I can't remember his name. Anyway, Cassidy I think
is his name. His daughter said his last words
were this, I wasted so much time. I wasted so much time. That's what the Bible tells us. Our life is like the grass of
the field. It's today and tomorrow it's
dried up, it blows away like the flower of the field. And
our life is short and it's for no purpose until we see that
the purpose for which God created this world and preached the gospel
to us is so that we might see and find our salvation in Christ
and glorify God for His mercy and His grace and His wisdom
and His saving power that He could save a sinner, a wretch
like me and bring me to Himself, perfect in Christ. And so He
tells us in the next verse, He says, seeing then that we have
a great high priest." What did the high priest do for the people? He did everything for the people.
He was the only way they could go to God. He was the only way
God would accept them because of what he offered God. If he
failed, to offer the right sacrifice, or if God didn't accept the sacrifice,
there was no hope for the people. And yet, if He offered that sacrifice,
their sins were cleansed. They were cleansed from their
sins. In one day, one high priest offered one sacrifice, and all
the sins of Israel were taken away ceremonially. But in reality,
the Lord Jesus Christ, our High Priest, on one day offered himself
to God, and he really put away the sins of his people. They're
purged, therefore he sits on heaven's throne. Seeing then
that we have a great high priest that is passed into the heavens,
Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our profession. Our
profession is that Christ is our all, that God accepts us
for His sake, and He will receive me into glory because of what
He thinks of His Son. Because He's given me this faith
to see all of God's Goodness is in him, it's not in me. And
in fact, it's so wonderful that he, in Christ, can receive sinners
like me. Verse 15. We have not a high
priest which cannot be touched with a feeling of our infirmities,
but was in all points tempted, like as we are, yet without sin. Our high priest is not unsympathetic. He can feel our infirmities. He was a man. God and man, our
great mediator, our advocate, our intercessor, he says, if
we have such a high priest who can sympathize and empathize
with our infirmities, he says, and who is without sin, therefore
God accepts him and understands our case perfectly. This is what
we ought to do. Let us therefore come boldly
unto the throne of grace that we may obtain mercy and find
grace to help in time of need. That's the rest. When we are
given this sight of Christ, as all of our righteousness, God
sends us to His throne. The throne was the mercy seat
in the Old Testament, in the holiest place, where He sprinkled
His blood. And God, by the chair of Him,
looked down on that blood, sprinkled on that mercy seat, and received
that blood for the people. And God tells us now, go to Christ. His throne is a throne of grace. And the need is every time. There's
an old song that says, now is the needy time. I like those
words. Heard it a long time ago in a
movie we watched. Now is a needy time. Jesus, won't
you come by here? We need to go to that throne
of grace, don't we? Lord, look upon the sacrifice,
receive your son, and in receiving him, receive this sinner for
his sake. That's what the publican prayed,
God. be propitious to me the sinner, be favorable to me because
of the blood of the sacrifice. Let's pray. Lord, we pray that
you would give us this rest, that we might find all the work
you required for our salvation has been finished to completion
and perfection in our Lord Jesus Christ. Hold him up to our eyes,
give us faith to see him, the truth and reality of the revelation
of scripture fulfilled in him, Lord. Make him our desire and
cause us to love him. Every grace must come from you. What can we do that you haven't
given? What can we offer that you haven't
provided? And how can we worship you unless
you make yourself known? Lord, give us this grace. and
help us to come to you at all times to your throne of grace
through the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. In his name we
pray, amen.