‘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).
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. . . to be continued