Wherefore (as the Holy Spirit says, Today if you will hear His Voice……Heb.3:7.
Notice this verse does not say, “if you can hear his voice but if you will.
For the believer it is not so much a matter of if you can hear the voice of the Holy Spirit but if you will, or are willing to.
What is the most important thing we do during the day?
If the answer to that question is anything but taking up our cross (the Cross of Christ) and denying ourselves, then we need to re-evaluate what we are about.
I guess my point is that if we are not denying ourselves and taking up our cross daily, and if that is not in fact a daily priority, then we will very likely not really be willing to hear His voice. We will rather be more willing to listen to other voices which have to do with whatever our daily priority really is.
Verse 8 says, “Harden not your hearts, as in the provocation, in the day of temptation in the wilderness: 9 When your fathers tempted Me…..”
In the time of temptation in the wilderness, the people of God were not willing to hear God’s voice. They rather, tempted God, provoking Him.
I was not there and the Bible does not say a lot about this, but I doubt these people took up their cross every day (thanked God for his deliverance, in this case from Egypt), neither did they deny their own selves for they wanted to return to Egypt to be again enslaved. The point I believe is that, because these people were not keeping their eyes on what God had done for them, they could not help but have their eyes fall away to something less. In this case (and in every case for that matter), their eyes fell to their own selves; what they could do, what they could accomplish.
Heb. 3:10, says, “Wherefore, I was grieved with that generation, and said, They do always err in their heart; and they have not known my ways.”
God was grieved with that generation because they always err in their heart and have not know His ways, and again, because their thoughts were not on what God had already done for them, but rather on their own selves. If they had kept their minds on what had been accomplished already in order for them to have freedom, they would have known Gods ways.
The same is true for us today. If we keep our eyes on what Christ has done for us on the Cross, we will be walking in God’s way. When we get our eyes on ourselves, we will find that we are grieving God, just as the Israelites were grieving God at that time.
Verse 11 says, “So I swore in My wrath, they shall not enter into My rest.”
The crux of the matter is that they could not enter into His rest because they would not hear His voice. And they were not hearing His voice because they did not keep in memory (not just in the back of their mind some place, but in the very forefront of their minds) from whence they had came.
Heb. 3:12, Take heed, Brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God.
What happens when we do not keep the Cross of Christ before our face continually, is that we will find ourselves living with an evil heart of unbelief, which will cause our departure from the Lord. Remember, verse 14 says, “For we are made partakers of Christ, if we hold the beginning of our confidence stedfast unto the end.
