Biblion Bible Commentary
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They Could Not Enter
Hebrews 3:12-19
12 Beware, brothers, lest perhaps there might be in any one of you an evil heart of unbelief, in falling away from the living God; · WEB
The remedy prescribed against hardening is other people, daily, and four questions narrow the cause to one word.
Beware, brothers, lest perhaps there might be in any one of you an evil heart of unbelief, in falling away from the living God.
The warning is addressed to a group about individuals — any one of you — and the fault is located in the heart rather than in conduct. What it produces is described as falling away, and the one being departed from is called the living God, which is the letter's way of saying that the alternative is not a different religion but an absence.
Then the remedy, and it is not what the diagnosis would suggest.
But exhort one another day by day, so long as it is called "today", lest any one of you be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.
The cure for a hardening heart is prescribed as other people, at daily frequency. Not resolve, not vigilance, not study — mutual exhortation, which is the one measure a person cannot apply to himself. And the reason is in the last phrase: sin is called deceitful, so the hardening is not detectable from inside. Someone else has to say it.
The word today is picked up from the psalm and given a shelf life — so long as it is called today. The offer has a duration and the duration is not stated.
Verse 14 repeats the conditional of verse 6: we have become partakers of Christ, if we hold the beginning of our confidence firm to the end.
Then four questions in three verses, and each answer is the same group of people.
Who, when they heard, rebelled? Wasn't it all those who came out of Egypt led by Moses? With whom was he displeased forty years? Wasn't it with those who sinned, whose bodies fell in the wilderness? To whom did he swear that they wouldn't enter into his rest, but to those who were disobedient?
The questions tighten around the same identification. The rebels are the redeemed, the excluded are the delivered, and every answer names people whose deliverance was not in doubt.
And verse 19 gives the cause in one word: we see that they weren't able to enter in because of unbelief.
Not weakness, not the strength of the Canaanites, and not God's reluctance. The stated obstacle is unbelief, which is exactly what the paragraph opened by warning against.
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