For we have become partakers of Christ if we hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast to the end, while it is said: “Today, if you will hear His voice, Do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.” For who, having heard, rebelled? Indeed, was it not all who came out of Egypt, led by Moses? Now with whom was He angry forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose corpses fell in the wilderness? And to whom did He swear that they would not enter His rest, but to those who did not obey? So we see that they could not enter in because of unbelief. (Hebrews 03:14-19, NKJV).
If-then statements make the world go round. If X then Y else Z is a fundamentally exclusive conditional proposition of logic.
We live it all the time. If you spend more than you have (X) then you will be in debt (Y) else you will not be in debt (Z). Sometimes the 'else' branch is explicit, as in the examples just cited. At other times it is even more obvious, but implicit, as in 'You are guilty of a moving violation if you fail to stop at a red traffic light.' The implied else is very clear: otherwise you are not guilty of that violation.
The opening argument contained in the above verses follow that last pattern of an exclusive conditional statement, and it is the most important proposition of logic in the universe. How do you know you are saved from the eternal penalty of sin? The answer: if your commitment of faith, while it is a commitment of faith, perseveres until you die.
By this I mean that if you wait to declare your allegiance to Christ until it becomes impossible to do otherwise - when He descends from Heaven in glory and all-power forcing every knee to bow and every tongue to confess that Jesus is Lord - then it will be too late. That is NOT a commitment of faith, it is an acknowledgement of undeniable reality.
But if you exercise the gift of faith given to every human being as part of our standard equipment package BEFORE such a declaration is based on incontrovertible evidence, then your confidence is founded on faith, not sight. And it is by grace we are saved through faith, for without faith it is impossible to please Him.
God has ordained that believing Him, and believing in Him, makes us righteous. He can be both just and the justifier of those who believe because the payment for sin was paid by His Son's sacrifice on the Cross. That is the good news - the gospel - because if He had ordained that performance was the key there would be no hope. In our fallenness we could never meet the required standard of perfection to gain entrance into eternal life. Never.
Another component of the standard human equipment package is the ability to choose, and here is the incredibly solemn ramification of that gift - we can choose to NOT hear the invitation to life through faith in Christ. We can willfully and effectively turn a deaf ear in rebellion. Then, if we persevere in that, rather than in confidence through faith, the result is a hardened heart which at some point will become unable to exercise any other choice.
Thankfully, while alive, none of us knows when that willful point of no return has been reached in someone else. We may guess but we can't know. But when it is, the result is given in the bleak picture above of all who came out of Egypt, led by Moses whose corpses fell in the wilderness.
They heard but chose not to believe. They had all the evidence necessary to reach an informed conclusion, and rejected God anyway. Hard-hearted unbelief is rebellion, and rebellion ends in eternal death.
I know people who present all the symptoms of this heart ailment, and while they long for peace, they can have none, ever. In scoffing at God's offer of salvation, for whatever reasons justify their willful rejection, they are choosing not to obey and He swears that they will therefore NEVER enter His rest.
The entire historic 40-year episode of the Children of Israel's Wilderness Wanderings is presented to us in Scripture to graphically illustrate the tragically logical result of such rebellious unbelief.
The horrid image of an entire generation of rotting corpses depicts the outcome perfectly. These souls did not die in epic conquest or noble pursuits, but in a circuitous traversal of a barren desert leading to nowhere, and lasting just long enough for them to drop dead in their tracks.
What a vivid portrait of an unbelieving life! An ignoble and purposeless meandering through wasted time until death makes its inevitable claim.
More unfortunate even than this is the truth conveyed to us by God that the desiccated corpse is not the end of suffering, but merely the beginning.
When a human dies, he or she does not enter oblivion.
Their destination will either be one of eternal blessed rest and joy, or eternal torment.
There are no other stops in the after-death journey.
There is immeasurable joy in knowing that Christ has made the first outcome possible through His death on the Cross.
There should be unmitigated horror in knowing that the other is the default destination without faith in Him.
