Worship --> Work --> Rest
Hebrews 1-4
Life’s rhythm: Worship, work, rest.
This article is woefully short and unfinished. It also diverges more to inferences I make from the text, rather than a thorough exegesis.
This book spotlights Jesus as superior to all of the other modes of revelation, ritual and religion. While it may not directly prescribe a command to worship, the inference is certainly fair.
Chapters 1 and 2 speak of Jesus as being God’s clearest statement. The nature of Jesus is that He is crowned with glory and honor. If Jesus is the exposure of God’s heart, then it follows that our first response should be worship.
Chapters 3 and 4 talk about the striving required to enter His rest. The typology already was clear – they were saved from Egypt, yet not ready to take the fullness of God’s promise. God brought them from Egypt by His power, and would take them to Canaan by His power, but not on a conveyor belt of grace. There was collaboration. That collaboration started with worship (see the context of Psalm 95, which is quoted in Chapter 3). God’s people needed to focus on God’s character and abilities. That collaboration also involved human effort, “Let us strive to enter…” and “Today if you hear His voice, do not harden your heart as in the rebellion…” How did they harden their hearts? They refused to act in faith and obey the command to take the land. If God could topple the Egyptian pantheon and split the Red Sea and drown the most powerful military on earth, then God could certainly do the same for the inhabitants of Canaan.[1]
But He did not – and He refused to do so.
God is most glorified when we activate our faith into practical obedience and watch Him work. But when our faith is weak, we retreat in lazy indifference. Worship doesn’t become the God-centered experience of pouring ourselves at His feet, “lost in wonder, love and praise” but the me-centered weekly fill-up get what I need to keep me going.
Reexamine worship. When you are in worship, you are giving yourself away in praise and adoration to the Creator!
Reevaluate work. “Today if you hear His voice…” When your worship is surrendered, passionate, authentic and real – you can expect that God’s voice will be heard. How do you recognize God’s voice? There is much more written on this in general, but in this context, God’s voice was a call – and it was a call to do the impossible. I know a lot of worship services expect to hear God’s voice in some form of encouragement and people get excited and make “prophecies” that are little more than emotional outbursts of optimism and good feelings.
Yes, God does speak words of assurance. But in this context, when He speaks, He’s giving orders. He’s also not giving orders that will be easy or comfortable. I’ve seen many young people think that “God spoke to me” just to bless and confirm what their own emotions have already desired to do – and some form of quasi-spiritual experience “confirmed” it to them. God’s commands may do that, but it will come with the confirmation of Scripture and the guidance of Godly counsel.
God calls us to work – and to work hard – and to work toward an impossible goal.
His call means that our faith will be stretched in ways that are unimaginable. This makes it all the more important that we get worship right! If we aren’t lost in worship and a proper vision of who God is, we will never see through the impossibilities of His call.
And then there is rest. The goal is a relationship of rest. This is not the rest of lazy couch-potato welfare brats who get bored watching TV, but the rest that veterans enjoy after they have won a great victory; the rest of a builder who walks away from a happy family who just moved into the house he built, the rest of a scientist who just cracked the DNA code, the rest of an inventor who just discovered a breakthrough in aeronautical physics. This kind of “rest” is rejuvenating – and it is to be shared together.
In those moments of rest, you leave behind the stress and tension of getting to where you got, and you enjoy the fruit of that, and you dream –you dream together of what lies ahead.
In our spiritual walk, I think there is a “Canaan land” of rest that we come home to. We can walk with enjoyment and assurance of God’s presence and favor in our lives. But this is nowhere near the end. The Israelites needed to occupy Canaan because that would serve as the anchor point for God’s purpose to spread the Gospel to the entire world.
If you don’t have the place of rest that God provides, you’ll never get to the next mission.
All three of these (worship, work and rest) deserve a lot more attention, but I’m afraid this article is too long already.
[1] Obviously I overlooked the voluntary response of faith that required the observation of the first Passover and that fact that people were not teleported, but actually had to expend their own physical energy to leave the house and country, but that seems to fade in light of what would follow.
Encouraging thx