Before we begin the fourth chapter of Hebrews, let us briefly review the third chapter; for, although we have a chapter heading thrown in, there is not the slightest break in the subject. It is impossible to understand the fourth chapter unless the third stands clearly in mind.
In the beginning of the third chapter we are told about the house of God, the rule of which is faithfulness. “God is faithful,” and Christ the Son was faithful over His house, even as Moses was faithful as a servant. We are God’s house, provided we hold fast our confidence, that is, provided we are faithful to the end.
If we are thus faithful, we shall find rest in God’s house, for it is a place of rest. When Naomi told her two daughters-in-law to return to there own people, because she herself was about to go back to Judea, she said, “The Lord grant that ye may find rest, each of you in the house of her husband.” Ruth 1.9. God sustains many relations to His people; indeed He is the fullness of every relation, so that He is Father, Brother, King, and Husband, for He represents Himself as married to the house of Israel. So He gives us the blessing of rest in His house. We become members of God’s household by faith (for it is a “household of faith” (Galatians 6.10), and faith brings rest, as we learn from the statement that “they could not enter in because of unbelief.” Hebrews 3.19
Ancient Israel, like the people of these days, saw the works of the Lord, but did not become acquainted with His ways, and therefore they did not enter into His rest. It needs no argument to prove that it is impossible to enter into the Lord’s rest while ignorant of His ways; that is self-evident. To know God is eternal life, and there is no eternal life except in the knowledge of Him; but eternal life is eternal rest, because it is everlasting youth. It is unconquerable. Life in light and the light shines in the darkness, and darkness does not quench it. The darker it is, the more brightly does the true light appear. Rest, therefore, God’s rest, the only real and enduring rest, is found only in God’s life, in an experimental knowledge of His ways.
Rest must follow labor. Indeed, rest presupposes labor. But more than this: rest means labor completed. No one can rest from a work that is unfinished. It is true that we can cease our physical exertions for a time, but we do not rest from the labor until we are done with it. We may say that we are resting; but if we must again take up our round of work that shows that we do not rest from our labor. Still more: one does not rest from a task that is unfinished, even though for a time he remits his exertions, for his mind is not at rest. If the night comes on, and we see that there is a task that we ought to have completed, but which is still unfinished, our rest is unsatisfactory. We have regret for the past and anxiety for the future, and though we lay our bodies down to sleep, our rest is broken. Now it is an undeniable truth that,
“Labor with what zeal we will,
Something still remains undone,
Something uncompleted still
Waits the rising of the sun.
“By the bedside, on the