We’ve been moving slowly through these studies, and I hope that doesn’t trouble anyone, because when you really study Scripture, it takes time. Some things can’t be hurried. You have to sit with them, turn them over in your mind, compare passage with passage, meditate, and let the Word teach you.
That’s one reason I leave space in the notes. They’re not meant merely to follow along in class; they’re meant to encourage your own study. We need more than a Sunday lesson and a sermon each week. Those are gifts, but they’re not meant to be the whole of our feeding. I hope you are opening the Bible during the week, tracing references, thinking deeply, learning to linger over truth.
I often think of the Lord’s word to Joshua: “This book of the law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night…then you will make your way prosperous, and you will have good success.” That is not prosperity in the worldly sense. It is prosperity in walking with God. It is spiritual success.
That really has been behind this whole study.
From Creation’s Sabbath to Christ Our Rest
We began in Genesis, but we’ve taken something of a side road into the New Testament, and I’m content to stay on that road as long as the Lord keeps leading us there. The Old Testament gives us pictures and shadows, and the New Testament often opens those shadows and shows us what they meant.
We had been looking at the seven days of creation and especially the seventh day, the Sabbath, which God sanctified and set apart. Later Israel received the Sabbath command formally in the law, but when Christ came, again and again He collided with the Pharisees over Sabbath questions. They had wrapped God’s gift in layer after layer of regulations.
And our Lord said two things that are tremendously important.
First, the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.
Second, He declared Himself Lord of the Sabbath.
That means the One who instituted it has authority over it.
We saw a similar principle when God once declared certain foods unclean, and later said through Peter’s vision, “What God has cleansed, no longer call unclean.” The One who made the rule has authority over the rule.
That matters when we come to the New Testament understanding of Sabbath. The ceremonial regulations concerning special days and feasts and Sabbaths were shadows. They pointed forward. Their substance is found in Christ.
And that led us into Hebrews.
“Today” — Entering Rest Now
One of the great words in Hebrews 3 and 4 is “Today.”
Not someday.
Today.
The writer is not talking about dying and going to heaven. He is speaking of a present reality believers may enter into now.
Hebrews says, “For the one who has entered His rest has himself also rested from his works, as God did from His.”
That takes us all the way back to Genesis.
God ceased from His works, and the believer is called into a corresponding rest.
Now that doesn’t mean inactivity. It doesn’t mean we stop serving. I’m busy myself—even in retirement, maybe busier than I expected. But the issue is not activity versus inactivity. The issue is whether we are operating in self-effort or resting in God.
There is a way of living the Christian life where we are striving in our own strength, trying to produce spirituality, trying to please God through our own energy.
And Hebrews, tied together with other passages, calls those “dead works.”
That phrase has arrested me.
Dead works are not only sinful acts. They can even be religious efforts done in the energy of the flesh.
Even as believers, we know something of what Paul describes in Romans 7. There is that struggle. We desire what is right, yet how often we attempt to do what is right through ourselves rather than by dependence upon the Spirit.
And Isaiah says that “all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags.”
That can be unsettling until you understand what is being exposed. Even good things can be mixed. You can do something outwardly kind and still have the flesh tangled up in it. You might bring cookies to a neighbor, and hidden somewhere in the heart is the thought, “I hope they think well of me.” And then you realize how deeply self can creep into things.
That is why true righteousness has to be something God produces.
Christ Living His Life in Us
Several passages come together here.
Philippians says it is God who works in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure.
Hebrews says He is working in us that which is pleasing in His sight.
Paul says, “Yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.”
Jesus says, “Apart from Me you can do nothing.”
And Galatians says, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.”
Those verses all point in one direction. The Christian life is not mainly imitation. It is participation. It is the life of Christ being expressed through us by the Spirit. That is very different from merely trying harder.
And I want to be careful here, because people can hear that and turn it into a new kind of burden. They start analyzing everything. Was that flesh? Was that Spirit? Was this motive pure enough? And now they are laboring over the very thing meant to bring them rest.
Don’t do that. Trust Christ with this, the way you trusted Him for salvation. Live before Him. Love people. Serve Him. Walk with Him. And rest in the fact that God Himself is at work in you.
That is entering His rest.
God’s Larger Purpose from the Beginning
Step back and look again at creation.
God made a perfect world, rested on the seventh day, and placed Adam and Eve in the garden for fellowship with Himself.
Human beings were created in His image.
Sometimes I stop and think what the earth might have become had sin never entered—an earth filled with image-bearers living in perfect harmony with God and one another.
But sin marred that image. It turned humanity into enemies of God. And much of Scripture is the story of God restoring what was ruined.
Israel was called in a special way to display God’s glory, but failed repeatedly.
Then came the Second Adam. The perfect Man. The exact image of God.
Jesus Christ.
Through His death we are reconciled. And, as Romans 5 says, through His life we are saved. That is not merely something future. There is a present saving activity of Christ in His people. God now has sons and daughters scattered through a hostile world, indwelt by His Spirit.
And our calling is not merely to talk about Christ, though we do witness with words. It is also to be His presence, as it were, wherever He places us. At work. In the neighborhood. In the store. Everyday places. Displaying His character.
The Dwelling Place of God
That brought us into another astonishing truth.
Jesus told the Samaritan woman true worship is not tied to this mountain or that mountain.
Not this location or that location.
True worshipers worship in spirit and truth.
In Eden, God walked with man. Later, under the old covenant, He dwelt in the tabernacle and temple, in the Holy of Holies. But under the new covenant something remarkable has happened.
“We are the temple of the living God.” “Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit.”
We are being built together into a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.
Those are not just doctrinal statements to memorize. That is reality. God has always desired to dwell among His people. And in Christ, He does.
I said in class—and I mean it quite literally—when you walk through Meijer, you are a walking temple of the living God.
Think of that!
When believers gather together, we are collectively His dwelling place. God in our midst.
That should shape how we think about life.
We carry the presence of the Holy Spirit everywhere we go.
Where we go matters.
What we watch matters.
How we speak matters.
Because we do not go anywhere alone. The Spirit goes with us.
And this, too, reaches back to the beginning and forward to the end. Because what began in Eden and is realized spiritually now will one day be openly and perfectly fulfilled.
“Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men…He will dwell among them, and they shall be His people.” (Revelation 21:3)
That is where this whole story is going.
In a very real sense, it has already begun.