If you have Bibles with you please open up with me to Hebrews chapter 3 and we’ll be looking at the final verses of Hebrews 3, wrapping up the that chapter this morning, Hebrews 3:7-19. Hear now the word of the Lord.
7 Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says,
“Today, if you hear his voice,
8 do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion,
on the day of testing in the wilderness,
9 where your fathers put me to the test
and saw my works for forty years.
10 Therefore I was provoked with that generation,
and said, ‘They always go astray in their heart;
they have not known my ways.’
11 As I swore in my wrath,
‘They shall not enter my rest.’”
12 Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. 13 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. 14 For we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end. 15 As it is said,
“Today, if you hear his voice,
do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.”
16 For who were those who heard and yet rebelled? Was it not all those who left Egypt led by Moses? 17 And with whom was he provoked for forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose bodies fell in the wilderness? 18 And to whom did he swear that they would not enter his rest, but to those who were disobedient? 19 So we see that they were unable to enter because of unbelief. Hebrews 3:7-19, ESV
This is the word of the Lord.

About 61 years ago or so NASA introduced to the world the so-called Mercury 7. That is the first seven American astronauts, all of whom would eventually be launched into space and return, people like Alan Shepard and John Glenn. Though NASA eventually selected only seven astronauts to be part of the Mercury space program, the first American space program, the first people to represent America in outer space ,they started with far more candidates than just seven.

As I understand it when NASA first started the selection process, they started with a pool of some 500 candidates, 500 test pilots, which was then quickly whittled down to something like 110. Then after further interviews and tests that number was reduced to 62, and then to 32, and then after another round of grueling tests that number was cut down further to 18, and then finally from that final 18 number, NASA selected the famed Mercury 7 astronauts.

Now I have no idea to know no way to know if the original 110 or 500 astronaut candidates were ever in the same room together, but if they were I like to imagine one of those dramatic theatrical sequences where the program director stands up and looks at each participant and says, “In less than four months’ time only one in 10 of you will be standing together.” The disappointing reality each program participants surely had to take stock of was that the vast majority of their fellow candidates wouldn’t cross the finish line. Each candidate had to come to grips with that for themselves too.

Then if we think that survival rate of seven out of a hundred and ten or seven out of five hundred, however we want to parse the numbers, is pretty bad and indicates a pretty grueling process that must have been in place.

Well, let me offer us another figure another number to think about. Let’s imagine for a moment that the pool of candidates was more than 110, or even more than 500. In fact let’s say that it was something like 603,550 give or take. Of that number, by the end, only two remained. Well, I’ll let you do the math on your own on that one, but I’ll give you a hint, it’s a much worse survival rate than with the Mercury program.

Yet that number that is rattled off is also no hypothetical number, because in the Bible we learned that when God carried his people out of slavery and captivity in Egypt in the Exodus event, we learned that there were 603,550 men over the age of 20 who made that journey, not to mention all of the women and children and also the whole tribe of the Levites who weren’t counted among that number. Yet when all was said and done and the Lord finally permitted his people to enter into the land of promise, Canaan, some 40 years after their departure out of Egypt, only two of the more than six hundred thousand men were permitted to enter into the land. The remaining six hundred and three thousand five hundred and forty-eight died in the wilderness.

The reason they were forbidden from entering God’s rest in the land of promise, the reason they died in the wilderness boiled down to one key issue, unbelief.

Well when we come to our text in Hebrews this morning as we’ll see in a moment this is the biblical example that our author draws upon, that is the example of the wilderness generation. He draws upon that example to drive home the important point that unbelief in the promises of God will wreak havoc in the Christian life, just as it did in the wilderness generation, should that unbelief take root in our hearts and proceed unchecked.

So our big idea this morning is this, beware of unbelief.

To give us a roadmap for where we’re going, three points.

1. A Story of Unbelief
2. An Anatomy of Unbelief
3. An Appeal Against Unbelief
A Story of Unbelief
Notice when our passage opens, our author begins with this long citation out of Psalm 95. As we’ve seen thus far in Hebrews, our author is quite fond of citing at length passages out of the Old Testament to make a point or to drive home something for the audience in his own day. He does the same thing here. He cites Psalm 95, and specifically he cites for us the second half of Psalm 95, verses 7 through 11.

You may recall just a moment ago, or a few minutes ago, we also used this Psalm as part of our liturgy. That was intentional. The first part of the Psalm 95, verses 1-7 functioned as our call to worship, where we hear in that part of the passage that part of the song God call his people into worship. He also tells us why we should worship. Then in the second half of the Psalm 95, verses 7 through 11, that was our call to confession. We heard of the consequences for worshiping the Lord with hardened hearts.

Historically this was an important psalm, Psalm 95, in the worship of God’s people. Even from the time it was first written it was used in the synagogue services, later in Israel’s history, and of course it was used in the church ever since the church became the New Testament church some 2000 years ago up until today.

It’s a Psalm that itself looks back in history, Psalm 95 looks back in history and it reflects upon two stories from the wilderness generation. Two stories that narrate specifically how the people of God failed to worship and trust in the Lord as they should have. Instead it tells how they put God to the test and eventually reaped severe consequences for doing so.

So let me tell you about those two stories. The first of those two stories comes to us out of Exodus chapter 17. Now to give a bit of context, the events found in Exodus chapter 17 follow on the heels of God’s miraculous deliverance of his people out of Egypt and out of slavery. The Lord, if you remember and you might know those stories, the Lord displayed his power against Egypt and giving 10 plagues which eventually led to his people being set free from Egypt. Then the Lord led his people through the Red Sea. Then finally to safety in the wilderness.

By the time we get only a couple chapters passed their great deliverance out of Egypt, in Exodus chapter 16, the Israelites begin what we have come accustomed to seeing them do in the wilderness. They begin to grumble against God and against Moses for what they lack in the wilderness. They even begin to reason that it would have been better for them to have died in Egypt with pots full of meat and bread than to be dragged into the wilderness and starved to death.

I think C.S. Lewis’s conclusion that in our human nature we are far too easily pleased, would seem to apply to the wilderness generation, who at this point can’t appreciate the great salvation that God has just worked for them in the chapters proceeding Exodus 16 and 17 because their bellies are a little bit achy. Nevertheless when we get to Exodus 17, again one of the two passages that our Psalm points us back to, the grumbling in the congregation picks up momentum again. Rather than trusting in the Lord the people of Israel begin to grumble against the Lord for what they lack, specifically for their lack of water. They grumble so much that it reaches a point where Moses appeals to the Lord frantically, “What shall I do? These people are about ready to stone me.”

Yet even when the anger of Israel reaches a boiling point, what we find in Exodus 17 is that God shows mercy. First he withholds his anger, what Israel really deserves at that point. Then second he graciously provides much needed water for them in the desert. In the aftermath of this event in Exodus 17, Moses names the place where all of this went down as Massah, which means testing and Meribah, which means quarreling.

If you notice back when we read the call to confession, those place names are preserved in the text of Psalm 95 centuries after those events originally transpired. They are preserved to remind God’s people, including us, not to do the same. So that’s the first story of unbelief that our Psalm reflects back upon, a story of unbelief found in Exodus 17.

The second story our text reflects back upon is a story recorded for us in Numbers 14. A story that happened in a place called Kadesh. Now to provide some context for that story, the people of Israel when Numbers 14 rolls around, have been in the wilderness for quite some time. In the lead up to the events of that text, the Lord commanded Moses to send 12 spies into the land of Canaan, the promised land.

You might know this story it’s a pretty famous one out of the Bible. The spies were commanded to go into the land to spy it out and to return 40 days later with a report of what they saw. So the spies do as they’re told and when they return from 40 days in the land, they tell Moses and the rest of Israel that this is indeed a pretty good place. It’s a land flowing with milk and honey, just as the Lord had promised his people. Yet there are also dangers in the land, terrifying strong people dwell on the land. They report that it’s a land that devours its inhabitants.

Now after sharing the news about what the land is like, the spies are split on what to do next. You may remember the story two of the spies, Joshua and Caleb, insist that even though all the dangers, we can take the land by force because God promised that God calls us to do that. The other ten insists we can’t go up against the people of this land, they’re stronger than we are.

At this point with the spies divided, well the entire camp of the Israelites just ascends into utter chaos and rebellion. Once again they begin to grumble against the Lord and against Moses for bringing them out of the land of Egypt in the first place. Then they resolve to choose a new leader, to wash their hands of this whole mess, and to make a return back to Egypt. They rebel against Moses. They rebel against God. As a consequence of their unbelief, God finally issues a judgment that none of those who came out of Egypt from 20 years of age and upwards, with the exception of Joshua and Caleb, would be permitted to enter the land of promise. Rather they would be confined to the wilderness instead for 40 years, until every member of that older generation fell dead, one by one, for their rebellion and sin. Only the younger generation would eventually enter the land and take it by conquest.

You see at every turn in the wilderness generation, they failed to trust in the one who bore them on eagle’s wings and who had miraculously delivered them out of slavery and captivity in Egypt. At every turn they disbelieve God’s promises when things look dire. They don’t trust in the Lord, instead they react spontaneously and sinfully against God and against their God-appointed leaders. As a consequence the vast majority of them, 603,548 will not reach the finishing line.

Now none of this is proof that those who didn’t reach the finish line, the 603,548 men who originally journeyed into the wilderness and eventually fell and died on account of their sin, it doesn’t mean that they also suffered eternal judgment too. At least one commentator makes that point. After all, some may have, we don’t know, but some may have repented after the events of Kadesh and looked in faith to the promised Christ and the sacrifices that were being offered in the tabernacle. Even so they didn’t escape the judgment of death in the wilderness. They would still fall dead, and they wouldn’t see Canaan or taste the land flowing with milk and honey.

Whatever we say about issues of eternal salvation and judgment among the individuals of the wilderness generation, for the author of Hebrews, for our author and our text, the wilderness generation serves as a pretty powerful picture of how unbelief can grip the hearts and minds of people in the covenant community, people even in the church.

In other words for the author of Hebrews, the wilderness generation is a powerful historical example of spiritual realities that we face today in the church. Just as most in the wilderness generation started out well but didn’t cross the finish line, so too there are those in the church who appear to start out well with us, who we break bread with, who speak Christian lingo like we do, but who eventually walk away from Christ, from his church, and never finish.

Just as unbelief grit the hearts and minds of those in the wilderness generation, well so too unbelief can grip the hearts and minds of those in the church today. Just as that unbelief or severe consequences for the wilderness generation, so too perpetual unbelief in the church also bears consequences even more severe than simply temporal death in a wilderness. It bears eternal consequences.

If unbelief is that big of an issue, which I’m advocating it is and I think our author also advocates that it is, well then we better understand what consists in unbelief. What unbelief consists in and how it works. Fortunately our author tells us quite a bit about unbelief in the next half of our passage.
An Anatomy of Unbelief
So this brings us to our second point when we’re focusing on an anatomy of unbelief. You may notice if you’re following along in your Bibles that in the final four verses of our passage, that would be verses 16 through 19, our author returns to the Psalm he just cited in the very beginning of the passage. Now he pauses on that Psalm and on the historical stories that that Psalm points to and he asks some rather obvious question about the Psalm and about the stories that Psalm looks back to.

In fact the final four verses of our passage ask questions that are so obvious, it seems to anyone even remotely familiar with the stories that the Psalm points back to, that it might not be initially clear what they really add to our author’s argument. After all I would bet that if his audience were to take a test with these three questions laid out, that they would have scored a hundred percent if they were tasked with answering them. Yet pausing again on the issue of unbelief as it’s related in the Psalm, and as it ultimately it’s related in the wilderness generation, our author is inviting us, you and me, to pause with him and really consider some of what unbelief entails.

So for our second point, an anatomy of unbelief, we’re going to camp out in these final four verses on these final three questions that make up verses 16 through 19, to hear what they tell us about unbelief.

The first principle we find articulated here is that unbelief is inherently irrational. In verse 16, notice our author asks a question he says,
16 For who were those who heard and yet rebelled? Was it not all those who left Egypt led by Moses? Hebrews 3:16, ESV
Now when the Bible elsewhere reflects on the wilderness experience of Israel it often gives us one of two complementary perspectives on that period of time. On the one hand we come across plenty of texts like the one we have here in Hebrews and in Psalm 95 that reflect upon Israel’s unbelief sin and rebellion in the wilderness.

On the other hand there are also texts in the scriptures that upon reflecting on the wilderness experience of the wilderness generation, they speak of it as a period of time when God’s mercy and grace and provisions were richly on display. For example when Nehemiah 9 looks back on the wilderness experience we read how this was a period of time when God’s nurturing hand was upon his people. In Nehemiah 9:19-21 the people of Israel are praying, they’re confessing stuff to the Lord. In doing so they confess this they say,
19 you in your great mercies did not forsake them in the wilderness. The pillar of cloud to lead them in the way did not depart from them by day, nor the pillar of fire by night to light for them the way by which they should go. 20 You gave your good Spirit to instruct them and did not withhold your manna from their mouth and gave them water for their thirst. 21 Forty years you sustained them in the wilderness, and they lacked nothing. Their clothes did not wear out and their feet did not swell.
< Nehemiah 9:19-21, ESV
Understand that though rebellion and sin and unbelief in the wilderness was certainly abundant, so too was God’s goodness and mercy. In view of just how God revealed his mercy and proved to be trustworthy for his people in the wilderness, for them to respond as they did is the height of irrationality.

This is what our author keys us into in verse 16. He asks who rebelled in the wilderness? Well it was all those who left Egypt led by Moses. It was those who heard. Now if our author simply wanted to give us information at this point he could have simply said Israel, Israel rebelled full stop. His goal isn’t simply to supply information as if his audience doesn’t already know the answers, instead he’s accenting the irrationality of their rebellion. They rebelled even when they were provided an escape out of Egypt, out of slavery. They rebelled even when God set before them his old covenant mediator Moses to lead the way. They rebelled even after they heard the living God speak in their midst.

Understand that the unbelief that shipwrecked Israel in the wilderness didn’t arise from some experience under the thumb of a merciless tyrant, instead it arose in spite of God’s mercies and compassion and revelation. Brothers and sisters, the same can be said of unbelief in our own day too. We have every reason to be a thankful people. We have every reason to trust in the almighty trustworthy God, both for his common grace that he’s lavished upon all humanity and particularly for a special grace that he’s lavished on the church. Yet to respond with thanklessness and unbelief is very simply irrational.

So that’s the first thing we learn in our passage about unbelief. The second is this, we also learn that unbelief is very simply sin and unbelief also hardens us in sin. As one commentator Richard Phillips rightly puts it, “Unbelief is the root system that feeds the whole rotten tree of sin.”

Notice in verse 17 that our author calls the unbelief that pervaded the wilderness generation sin. Those who suffered from unbelief were described in verse 17 as those who sinned. Now I think the word unbelief may sound to us a tamer critique than to say sin. At the end of the day unbelief is sin, unbelief is rebellion. That same perspective is reflected elsewhere in the New Testament too. The apostle Paul for an example tells us in Romans 14:23 that whatever does not proceed from faith, i.e. unbelief, is sin. That’s true among the wilderness generation as well. Their unbelief is itself sin and rebellion.

More than that their unbelief also precipitated hardened hearts. Such that the people of Israel became less and less responsive to God’s word and more and more drawn to sin. John Owen explains that quote, “to be hardened is to be like wax that has gone hard and so cannot receive an impression from a seal that is set into it.”

You know my father-in-law who’s visiting with us this week often likes to write letters, he’s a big letter writer. One of the things he does when he sends a letter off is he puts a wax seal on it, a red wax seal. The way he explains it is if the wax that you’re using to seal the envelope or to steal the letter is cold and hard, it can’t receive the impression of the seal when you try to stamp it down onto it. Instead that red wax has to be hot in order for it to receive the impression of the metal stamp. In the same way a heart that’s hardened by unbelief can’t receive the impression of God’s word.

That’s what happened in the wilderness generation too. The mercy of God, the discipline of the Lord, and the word of the Lord, all of which they received in the wilderness, all of which should have penetrated their hearts and should have driven them to repentance, did not. Instead they remained in bittered and hardened people against God throughout their time in the wilderness. The reason their hearts continued hard and callous in sin was again due to the root of unbelief that rotted and continued to rot the entire tree.

Then third unbelief carries consequences. We learned in verses 17 through 18 that their sin and unbelief resulted in death. Think about how many times, if you think back to the narrative of the wilderness experience of Israel’s time in the wilderness, how many times God struck his people with death in the wilderness. In Numbers 11, for example, God’s anger we find is kindled against his people for their persistent complaints. Such that his anger is poured out and it consumes the outlying parts of the camp. In Numbers 16 the Lord splits open the earth and swallows up those who rebelled against Moses and against the Lord. Then in Numbers 21 when the people of Israel again grumble as they always do against the Lord he sends fiery serpents such that many of them fell dead in the camp.

In all of these instances sin and unbelief in the wilderness carried consequences, concrete consequences. As one commentator rightly notes, all of these were pictures of the spiritual reality that the wages of sin is death.

So, in summary the author of Hebrews tells us a number of important things about unbelief. Unbelief just isn’t rational in view of everything that God has supplied. Unbelief is at its core sin which leads to a gradual hardening of the human heart. Then finally unbelief carries consequences. This is how unbelief worked itself out in the wilderness generation and this example of unbelief together with all that’s entailed in unbelief also then forms the basis for our author’s appeal to us. This brings us to our final point where we hear the author’s appeal against unbelief. This is also going to constitute our application, it’s going to consititute our application where we hear authors appeal against unbelief.
An Appeal Against Unbelief
o look with me if you would once again at verses 12 through 14 where we read this,
12 Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. 13 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. 14 For we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end.
Hebrews 3:12-14, ESV
Now when driving home the example of the wilderness generation for us, our author essentially makes four points here. Four points to you and to me.

1. The first is this guard your heart. Now I want to be clear again as we continue to work through passages like this one in Hebrews, passage is known as warning passages in Hebrews. Passages that warn us of the consequences for starting the Christian life well, but then failing to persevere into the end. We need to remember that the scriptures never teach, they don’t teach here in Hebrews and they don’t teach anywhere else in the scriptures, that we could ever lose our salvation. In other words it’s impossible for those who truly belong to Christ to ever finally fall away.

If you belong to Jesus Christ that just won’t happen. That doesn’t mean that these warning passages thereby lose their bite for you and me, because for those of us who truly are resting on Jesus Christ as he’s freely offered to us in the gospel, these passages are a divine means of shaking us and jolting us a little bit when we need it so that we would remember the importance of guarding our hearts.

When we come to passages like this one, we should all seriously pause and examine the quality of our faith. Are we, in the words of Peter, being all the more diligent to confirm our calling an election? Are we today holding fast to Christ and his promises? Or have we been living the Christian life more or less by muscle memory? Reading the Bible periodically, coming to church every Sunday, but all the while letting influences from the world really be the things that take the lead in shaping our minds and hearts.

I’m sure most of us know people who seemed to be once walking with us well, but who later abandoned their profession of faith and thereby revealed that they were never really among us in the first place. When we experience those things in the life of the church, they can be jarring and disheartening. They are also examples, like the wilderness generation of why it’s so important that we all do the necessary heart work of guarding our hearts. So that’s the first application, first appeal our author gives to us.

2. Second is this, exhort one another. Notice in verse 13 that although all of us have a responsibility in the Christian life to guard our hearts ,well our author also dismisses any idea that perseverance in the Christian life is a lone wolf endeavor. Rather we have responsibilities towards one another, specifically responsibilities to encourage and exhort each other every day. John Calvin, I like what he says on this writes this he says, “For as by nature we are inclined to evil. We have need of various helps to retain us in the fear of God. Unless our faith be now and then raised up it will lie prostrate. Unless our faith be warmed it will be frozen. Unless it be roused it will grow torpid (that means sluggish or dormant). We would have us then to stimulate one another by mutual exhortations so that Satan may not creep into our hearts and by his fallacies draw us away from God.”

Now I understand that we’re all in a season of church life where it’s not easy to get together regularly or meet together regularly. I know that many of us, including me, have Zoom fatigue. Yet our perseverance in the Christian life is wrapped up with the commitments that we have to one another in this body. As members we’ve taken vows to each other, we’ve committed ourselves to each other. As such we have the mutual obligation of speaking the encouraging though sometimes difficult truths of the gospel into each other’s lives regularly. Imagine how much better off Israel would have been in the wilderness had they had people, not feeding each other’s unbelief. Imagine if a few people among the wilderness generation rose above the unbelief and anxiety that so pervaded the camp, and acted instead as a calming presence of truth when chaos broke out.

Well in the same way we have a responsibility in the body to encourage each other and even at times in love expose sin when we see it taking root in our brothers and sisters. So let me encourage all of you to do to do something very practical this week. That is give somebody a call this week in the church, maybe even somebody you don’t know. Ask them how you can pray for them, listen to what’s going on in their lives and encourage them, just as our author exhorts all of us in this one body to do. That’s our second application or appeal.

3. Third is this, watch out for the deceitfulness of sin. When we examine the wilderness generation, we see how easily and how clearly discontentment quickly morphed into contempt for God. The people of Israel often compared what they lacked in the wilderness with what they had in Egypt. That discontentment continually boiled over into blame and contempt for both God and for Moses. They even reasoned to Moses at one point, in Exodus 14:12, that it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness.

In that discontentment in the wilderness, they deceived themselves into thinking that the fundamental problem they had was a problem of lack of food and that that problem could only be satisfied in Egypt. They didn’t appreciate that their fundamental problem was that in Egypt they were enslaved and away from the presence of God, and that only by being first drawn out into the wilderness would they actually live and thrive in communion with God just as they were designed. Just as the Proverb says, “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death.” So too the people of Israel, like the fool, convinced themselves of what was right. They were convinced that they knew what was best for them, but what they thought was best was in reality death.

Brothers and sisters, in the same way that the people of Israel were deceived by sin, it’s very possible that we can deceive ourselves in sin too. Like Israel we can convince ourselves that we know what’s best for us, even if it cuts against the grain of the scriptures. Our reasoning can often act as an echo chamber where we gradually convince ourselves of the rightness of our thinking and actions. Then assuring our conclusions, we plunge headlong into that deception. Then, as Calvin puts it, from that deception emerges hardness of heart. The more we dupe ourselves, the more we convince ourselves, and then the more callous our hearts become to receiving the much-needed shock from the defibrillator of God’s word.

Friends, the scriptures tell us that like Israel in the wilderness, the Christian life is a kind of wilderness pilgrimage. We’re being led by Jesus Christ through the wilderness on the sojourn to our heavenly homeland. Until we get there we’re still in the wilderness and our wilderness, like the wilderness that the people of God experienced all the way back in Numbers, carries dangers and temptations that we often very much like to avoid. It’s a wilderness that can sometimes feel isolating, especially when we’re reminded how our confession of Jesus Christ and of the gospel cuts against the grain and confession of the world, but the Lord is faithful.

The Lord is faithful to feed us in the wilderness. Friends know that as tempting as it might seem to go back to Egypt and embrace what the world embraces, know that it would be better to die in the wilderness and live than to live in Egypt and suffer an eternal death. So don’t be deceived by the wisdom of the world. Don’t be deceived by the allure of sin in the world. Don’t be deceived and hardened in that deception. That’s the third point.

4. The fourth appeal and application is this, hold fast to Christ. Though we often fail in the wilderness, we fail one another and above all things we fail the Lord who bought us with a price, the Lord is nonetheless faithful towards us.

Now you may recall in the gospels, that when Jesus begins his public ministry where does he go? First, well he goes into the wilderness. He had in fact a 40-day wilderness wandering where Jesus Christ was tempted with everything Satan threw at him. Yet where Israel failed in the wilderness, Jesus succeeded, he was faithful. Jesus’ perfect record of faithfulness also wasn’t for him alone, it was also for us. When we put our faith in Jesus Christ, that perfect record of righteousness is also imputed, given, to you and me, so that we too would be seen as righteous in the eyes of God and live.

At the end of the day it’s only through Christ and in Christ that we persevere in our wilderness. It’s only through Christ and in Christ that we are fed in our wilderness. It’s only through Christ and in Christ, if indeed you are believing upon Christ, that you will be kept secure in this wilderness sojourn until Christ Jesus leads us home at last in the glory.

So, final exhortation and appeal is very simple, if you’re not resting on Christ or believing in Christ do that now. Believe in Christ and live. Go into the wilderness with Jesus Christ and live. Don’t live in Egypt and suffer eternal consequences for that. For those of you who are already walking in the wilderness, continue to hold fast to Christ who will keep us infallibly to the end.