“Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says: Today, if you will hear
His voice,
Do not
harden your hearts, as [happened] in the rebellion [of Israel] and their
provocation and embitterment [of Me] in the day of testing in the
wilderness,
Where your
fathers tried [My patience] and tested [My forbearance] and found I
stood their test, and they saw My works for forty years.
And so I
was provoked (displeased and sorely grieved) with that generation, and said,
They always err and are led astray in their hearts, and they have not
perceived or recognized My ways and become progressively better and
more experimentally and intimately acquainted with them.
Accordingly,
I swore in My wrath and indignation, They shall not enter into My rest.
[Therefore
beware] brethren, take care, lest there be in any one of you a wicked,
unbelieving heart [which refuses to cleave to, trust in, and rely on Him],
leading you to turn away and desert or stand aloof from the
living God.
But
instead warn (admonish, urge, and encourage) one another every day, as long as
it is called Today, that none of you may be hardened [into settled rebellion]
by the deceitfulness of sin [by the fraudulence, the stratagem, the trickery which
the delusive glamour of his sin may play on him].
For we
have become fellows with Christ (the Messiah) and share in all He has
for us, if only we hold our first newborn confidence and original
assured expectation [in virtue of which we are believers] firm and
unshaken to the end.
Then while it is [still] called Today, if you would hear His
voice and when you hear it, do not harden your hearts as in the
rebellion [in the desert, when the people provoked and irritated and embittered
God against them].
For who
were they who heard and yet were rebellious and provoked [Him]?
Was it not all those who came out of Egypt led by Moses?
And with
whom was He irritated and provoked and grieved for forty years?
Was it not with those who sinned, whose dismembered bodies were strewn and
left in the desert?
And to
whom did He swear that they should not enter His rest, but to those who
disobeyed [who had not listened to His word and who refused to be compliant or
be persuaded]?
So we see
that they were not able to enter [into His rest], because of their
unwillingness to adhere to and trust in and rely on God [unbelief
had shut them out].” Hebrews
3:7-19 AMP
From Genesis to Revelation the Bible is full of warning
signs and they are meant by God to deter people from the inevitable wrath of
God if they continue in the course of sin. All the way through the Bible in
different settings and by different phrases and words God warns us.
The Old Testament tells us that God has no pleasure in the
death of the wicked. The New Testament
tells us that God is not willing that any should perish but that all should
come to repentance. Because it was not
the purpose of God in the creation of man that man should be doomed to hell,
God then, throughout all of His revelation continues to warn man.
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