‘Wherefore (as the Holy Ghost saith, Today 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).
Don’t shrink God’s will to suit your own
The text reads: ‘Today 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.’. . . to be continued