Living and Active.
Rest. It’s what Moses and his wilderness wanderers never tasted, dying on the borders of a promise, locked out because they’d lost faith. This rest, now perfected in a perpetual Priest, is also what the author of Hebrews wanted his audience to experience. But they, like Israel before them, had started to drift. No longer paying attention to a message once embraced, their ears now becoming dull, their hearts becoming hard. What could they do? How might they escape the doom of dead faith? By paying closer attention to words—God’s words—spoken to one another as an act of fueling each others’ faith.
God’s words live. They aren’t just read—they read. When we open our Bibles, our Bibles open us—revealing as much about our hearts as they do about God’s mind. Our encounter with God’s speech comes in a form easily mistaken—written words, drained of their vitality and color. They sit there, still and unmoving upon the page, inside the book, lying idly without our help. How easy it is to mistake these words for corpses, set as they are beside lifeless companions on our bookshelves. But these words aren’t dead specimens, laying obediently in our laboratories, waiting for dissection. They’re alive—and they’re the ones dissecting us. Mastery runs in a counter-intuitive direction, from Book to beholder, and never the reverse. We’re not encountering the formal announcement of some faceless institution, typed anonymously on lifeless letterhead. No, God’s promise comes as the personal voice of our immanent Maker; whispers of a caring Father, summons from a watchful Shepherd.
Not just alive, but a living sword, sharpened for a singular purpose—killing faith-killing sin. Our hearts soften to believe God’s Word as God’s Word strikes down unbelief in our hearts. This word becomes both the object and means of our faith—what and how we believe. Keeping them close to our ears keeps us near to God. They’re the nutrition we need during our pilgrimage to the place of Rest—not just a send-off meal to get us started.
The danger presented to the original audience is the same danger we face today—hearts hardened by inattentive ears. We stop listening; stop responding; stop believing. When God’s word stops entering our ears, our hearts undissected by its blade, we pay the unfortunate price—sin’s cancerous hostage unabated, its grip on our allegiance undeterred. ‘Pay closer attention,’ says the author, ‘and exhort one another daily’—these two instructions serving as our antidote. We keep on listening so we can keep on believing, God holding onto us as we hold onto his Word.
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