‘Wherefore (as the Holy Ghost saith, To day if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts, as in the provocation, in the day of temptation in the wilderness’ (Hebrews 3.7-8).
Every believer in Christ wants to know the biblical antidotes to backsliding, and this passage in Hebrews is the inspired guide to many of them. Of course, the primary purpose of the passage is to warn unconverted people about the consequences of unbelief, but the points that are made apply also to believers, and this will be our concern in this article.
The preceding verses have already spoken of the faithfulness (or trustworthiness) of both Christ and Moses. The Lord when on earth was utterly faithful to the divine plan, and Moses followed very exactly all the instructions given him by God for the law and for the Tabernacle with its furnishings and equipment for worship. He had to be precise, for all these things were prophecies in symbols, and types and shadows of all that would be revealed when Christ came. Faithfulness was paramount, and this, in a word, is the opposite of backsliding.
Our passage for study begins in verse 7 of chapter 3 with the word ‘wherefore’. In the light of the perfect faithfulness of Christ, and the admirable faithfulness revealed in Moses, here is how we should guard against the weakening of faith, and backsliding.
Heed the Voice of God
The quotation from Psalm 95.7-11 begins with the words, ‘To day if ye will hear his voice.’ If we do not hear the voice of God every day, we are on the road to backsliding. We may have heard his voice yesterday, but then been struck by spiritual deafness so that we do not hear it today. We hear the voice of God whenever we are moved or challenged by the Word, and are impressionable before him. We hear God when we are open to the Word, and concerned to be guided or corrected by it. We hear him when we are moved by the record of his attributes and ways. We hear him when we respond to his commands, duties and promises. We hear the Lord when the Spirit moves our consciences to draw back from sin, and we are gripped by the necessity of obedience.
The temptation to coldness and indifference can be launched suddenly, and our minds carried away so that our interests and priorities are focused elsewhere. The word that stands out for us is, ‘To day if ye will hear his voice.’
Hearing God is something we choose to do as believers. We consciously and longingly open our hearts to the voice of God in his Word, ready to be affected, sensitive to challenge. We pray fervently that we may find life and blessing and sanctification from the sacred page. We yield not only our minds but our hearts and feelings to our Lord and Saviour. We genuinely humble ourselves, praying especially against coldness and ‘detachment’ of spirit. Every day might well begin with the plea, ‘May I truly hear thy voice today.’
Our desire must be to be open to the nearness of the Lord (through the Word) and to his voice. To distract us, Satan will try to drive our thought-life agenda, inciting us to dwell on earthly desires, or hardships and difficulties in life, or even foolish fantasies designed to throw the heart out of tune with a devotional life. Recognise his wiles and cut short distracting thoughts. Feel afresh your great need to hear the voice of the Lord daily.
Don’t shrink God’s will to suit your own
The text reads: ‘To day if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts, as in the provocation, in the day of temptation in the wilderness.’ These words identify a lapse even in the life of believers to which Satan will draw us daily, if we do not guard against it, and it is a frequent cause of backsliding. The text goes on to explain, ‘as in the provocation, in the day of temptation’, not referring to the temptation of the people, but the temptation of God by the people. ‘Temptation’ here means testing or trying. We remember how it is, sometimes, in the classroom at school, when pupils push against a lenient teacher to see how far they can go in straining the rules or avoiding assignments. This is what went on in the wilderness in a far more serious way. The Israelites pressed all the time to get what they wanted, seeing how much disobedience to God they could get away with.
The Israelites, whether they were lusting for the foods of Egypt, or complaining against their sojourn in the wilderness, or rebelling against Moses, or protesting about the manna, mounted a constant struggle to widen the margins of fleshly liberty rather than accepting God’s pathway for them. Their conduct is called, ‘the provocation’, meaning conduct that drove God to indignation over them.
We see this attitude in a subtle form in our hearts and we see it manifested in evangelicalism generally. When tired, distracted or busy we wonder how far we can cut down prayer, skip devotions, opt out of the prayer meeting, omit midweek Bible study meetings or even miss one of the Sunday services. How much more can we watch on television?
In churches at large the cry is, ‘Why can we not incorporate the music styles of worldly immorality into worship and the Christian life? Why not indulge in fashion, show, immodesty, sexual looseness?’ The obvious answer is: because it insults the Lord, his tastes and his commands, curtailing the blessing of God upon his people, and ultimately bringing firmer discipline upon them.
Do we harden our hearts to some known duty in our Christian lives? Do we leave some vital element out of our sanctification, toughening our hearts so that we no longer feel any obligation about that matter? In a sense, we are challenging or pressing or tempting God to see how long he will bless us on our terms. Some believers, for example, leave out the duty of affection and courtesy to their wives or husbands. We cannot here go into all the examples of omission in life, but we make ourselves like the Israelites of old, pushing the boundaries, and shrinking the standards of God to whatever we want, and what suits us. This is the high road to backsliding. Therefore, says our text: ‘Harden not your hearts, as in the provocation, in the day of temptation in the wilderness.’
Remember Always the Works of God
In our text, a vital point is added when we are told that the provocation was possible because the people no longer marvelled at the works of God. It was, ‘when your fathers tempted me, proved me, and saw my works forty years.’ They saw wonderful things over a long period of time. ‘Wherefore I was grieved with that generation.’ Here is another common route to backsliding, and another favourite strategy of Satan, that of encouraging forgetfulness, leading to ingratitude and the loss of wonder at the kindness and power of God.
Failure to reflect, remember, and praise God is to fail to moisturise and nourish the heart. It is a foolish omission because it not only hardens the heart but forfeits so much happiness and renewal of trust. Think of that wilderness generation. They saw the miracles of the Red Sea, the provision of food, the manna, the water from the rock, the preservation of their clothes and their footwear, and the miracle of experiencing no illnesses or diseases. They witnessed continual and unprecedented miracles, but all were soon taken for granted and forgotten, the people losing all sense of God, and the awe they formerly felt.
So the third measure implied here is that of remembering and responding to the mighty works of God. We should take time to remember great answers to our prayers in the past, as well as recent answers. It may be that a week or so ago we experienced a very significant answer to prayer. Perhaps someone we prayed for over months gained light and life from the Lord, and we were overjoyed. Surely we have not already ceased to be filled with thankfulness? The magnitude of that blessing was so great that our praise should have lasted for weeks not hours, and the event stored in the memory to be a continuing encouragement to us. Our memory store should become increasingly expanded with the Lord’s mighty deeds.
A forgetful Christian risks becoming a faithless Christian, ever weaker on the rough sea of life. Our thinking and reflecting agenda must dwell on the frequent blessings of the Lord, or our hearts, like those of the wilderness Israelites, will become hardened. The better we remember, the more we trust. The better we trust, the more we exercise active faith, and find ourselves carried through the knocks and trials of life.
Recoil from grieving God
Our fourth point to be gleaned from this passage (verse 10), is that cold or hard-hearted lives bring grief to the Lord. ‘Wherefore I was grieved with that generation, and said, They do alway err in their heart.’
God cannot be injured or diminished in any way by suffering, because he is unchangeable, being always truly and wholly perfect and divine. But God feels grieved. We learn in Scripture of the grieving of the Holy Spirit, when God senses pain (Ephesians 4.30). In James 4.5 there is a complex statement which means that the Holy Spirit yearns jealously over believers, in a protective and helping way. The Holy Spirit who indwells us, yearns to see us through the spiritual warfare to sanctification and honour, and he is grieved by our coldness and by our falls. Have we grasped that the indwelling Holy Spirit, the third person of the Godhead, is grieved when we fall to worldliness or fleshly desire, or lose our footing? It is a powerful source of both dismay and incentive to remember that this is so. Here is a strong antidote to backsliding.
Don’t fail to govern the thought life
The fifth antidote to backsliding is seen in the words (verse 10) – ‘They do alway err in their heart.’ In their innermost desires and thoughts the wilderness generation roamed and strayed. The word translated ‘err’ refers to hesitating, wavering or wandering. It suggests a vague, uncontrolled imagination easily diverted from the right path. It could describe a ship with no rudder, or a person with no controlling principle restraining his desires. Perhaps covetous desires, self-serving desires, or worldly desires flit into the mind to be seized upon by the imagination.
This tendency was particularly grievous to God, displacing spiritual and wholesome thoughts and goals. To err in our daydreams, reflections, hopes and aims soon develops into the complaining and murmuring that characterised the Israelites, bringing about hardness of heart and backsliding. The imagination must be dedicated to God and monitored with earnest prayer, as a precaution against backsliding.
Value the special ways of God
A very significant antidote to hardness of heart and backsliding, also in Hebrews 3.10, comes from the description of the Israelites as not having known God’s ways. The language is striking. What is meant by God’s ways? Our minds naturally go to the ten commandments and the necessity of holiness, but the text refers not to our duty, but to God’s distinctive ways, such as his giving great promises, his unwavering kindness to the faithful, and his inflexible justice to evildoers. We could add to these God’s distinguishing acts, such as bringing strength out of weakness, or his resisting of the proud and giving grace to the humble. We think of the apostle Paul in later times declaring, ‘When I am weak, then am I strong.’
The Israelites had not grasped or learned the basis on which God blesses and helps, and this is often true of believers today. Modern evangelicals say, ‘We need people who have unusual gifts, who can make an enormous impact. We need choirs of 5,000, or stylish bands and groups operating at maximum decibels. We need strobe lights to make a great show to attract attention and make an impression.’
But God says, ‘They have not known my ways.’ In the corporate work of churches or in individual Christian lives the only way to serve the Lord and triumph in all the trials of life is to know and honour the distinctive ways of God. The proclamation of the Word with earnest prayer is everything, and to align ourselves with God’s ways remains the only basis for undiminishing faith in his power to bless. May we know more and more of God’s ways as life goes on. Here is a key antidote to coldness and backsliding.
The fear of falling
Our seventh antidote is reflected in verses 11-12 and spelled out explicitly in Hebrews 4.1: ‘So I sware in my wrath, They shall not enter into my rest…Let us therefore fear.’ If only the Israelites had been afraid of where their behaviour would lead. Did it not enter their minds that God may withdraw from them? They were utterly unconcerned, and so are we much of the time. We draw from this an antidote for backsliding: we should fear what may happen if we wander from the pathway, allowing our minds to be absorbed by the things of this world, and giving small attention to prayer and the Word. As our pursuit of holiness wanes, the likelihood of God’s withdrawal from us increases.
Puritan literature is full of this. In addressing believers they used terms like ‘the abandoned soul’, to describe times when God withdraws his blessing in order to awaken believers and draw them back to the place of blessing and assurance.
It is a good thing to fear being deprived of usefulness and blessing. Sometimes believers fall into the habit of looking at everything from their personal point of view, and their own wellbeing and not from the Lord’s point of view, and their indebtedness to him. This is a road that leads to coldness, and backsliding, and then perhaps to discipline from the Lord. The prescription from Psalm 95 and Hebrews is – ‘Let us therefore fear.’
Maintain the daily review
Our final antidote gathered from Hebrews 3 is in the thirteenth verse: ‘Exhort one another daily, while it is called To day.’ This follows verse 12, ‘Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief.’ This antidote is broadened to include our watch over each other. To be able to help and encourage one another requires a basis of real friendship coupled with grace and humility in the one presuming to counsel or correct. For the purpose of this article we only pick up the note of urgency and importance concerning gradual, subtle erosion of faith.
Is our trust in the promises and power of God fading? Are weeds of cynicism springing up from the old nature and choking the fruits of the new? If checking the heart is only an occasional activity the battle may be lost. ‘Daily’, is the command of the Word. The garden of the mind must be kept free from despair, pessimism, complaints about the Lord’s service, unworthy murmurings of the heart, or distrust of the promises. Purging out the negative moanings of the old nature is a daily antidote to the chill that can spread through the soul, hardening the heart, and leading into a period of backsliding.
The passage under consideration moves to these final words in verse 19, ‘So we see that they could not enter in because of unbelief.’ When they heard the preaching of Moses the Israelites remained unmoved and unaffected. When they prayed, God did not hear. They remained strangers to real spiritual union and assurance. And even though we are genuinely converted to Christ, we shall suffer a period of spiritual dryness and lifelessness if we take no precautions, and value no antidotes. But ever-increasing spiritual feeling and fruitfulness lies ahead for all who ‘diligently’ keep their souls in faith.
Derived from a Bible study preached at the Metropolitan Tabernacle 1st May 2024