Matthew 16:16-17
"And Simon Peter answered and said, you are the Christ, the Son of the Living God. (now look what Jesus said in verse 17.) Jesus answered and said to him, Blessed are you, Simon Barjona: for flesh and blood has not revealed it to you, but my Father which is in heaven."
So how did Peter understand that Jesus was the Christ? God opened his understanding! See? God did it! And so never forget that true trust becomes by way of inspiration or revelation, faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God! Or we could say by the voice of God uttered eons ago. To see this look back at our word study listed just above. Its when we receive the illumination of revelation within ourselves that we know that we know.......and from within there is no changing or debate. We just KNOW!
Hebrews 3:15a
"While it is said, Today…"
Remember, I have been emphasizing this today so far as these people are concerned and so far as we are concerned is this Age of Grace. Where as that it isn’t limited to the Hebrews, and it’s not limited to the Gentile. It’s not limited to any one class of people but it’s for the whosoever will! Now verse 15 again.
Hebrews 3:15-16a
"While it is said, Today if you will hear His voice, harden not your hearts as in the provocation. For some, when they had heard,…" In other words, when God spoke and said, "Go in and take the land. It’s waiting for you. I’ll drive the Canaanites out." Alright, to them that was the good news. That was all they needed to know, but they couldn’t believe it! Alright, so let’s finish the verse:
Hebrews 3:16b-17a
"…did provoke: howbeit not all that came out of Egypt by Moses. But with whom was He grieved forty years?…"
Remember, when we first started here in this chapter, they came in eleven days, if we're not mistaken. Eleven days from Mt. Sinai (the mount of sin) to Kadesh and that eleven days stretched into what? Forty years! Why? Unbelief! Now we see for people today, unbelief is not going to be forty years, it’s going to be eternity lost and with no hope. Alright, so here is the warning.
Hebrews 3:15b-17a
"…Today if ye will hear His voice, harden not your hearts, as in the provocation. For some, when they had heard, did provoke: howbeit not all that came out of Egypt by Moses. But with whom was He grieved forty years? Was it not with them that had sinned,…"
Remember what was their sin. It wasn’t the calf, the golden calf at Sinai. It wasn’t their gross immorality that they danced around that calf. But, what was their sin? Unbelief! God said they could take it and they said what? "No, we can’t." What did the spies say? "Oh, we are like grasshoppers in their sight. The cities are walled, and we can’t take them" And yet, they had the proof of the pudding when they brought back the grapes and everything else. And yet, in unbelief, they couldn’t buy what God had said. We can’t comprehend it. We just cannot comprehend it. But, see, this is the way it has been all the way up through human history. God told Adam and Eve in simplistic terms, "Don’t eat of that tree." That’s all, everything else was theirs. But, in a step of unbelief, the deceiver deceived, what did they do? They ate. And that brought sin and death into the whole human experience.
So, all of these things are just examples so that we can learn from them. It wasn’t their sin, as so far as their action. It was their unbelief, but what prompted their unbelief? Their lawlessness, they were sinners. Now remember, Israelites were just as much the offspring of Adam as we Gentiles. They’ve got the same old Adamic nature as we do, and that old Adamic nature is covetousness and lawlessness, and so it precipitated their unbelief. Now, we're going to just have to speculate here, and we certainly don’t claim to have all the answers. But we like to throw the question out just to make people stop and think. Now of all these children of Israel who came out of Egypt under Moses’ leadership, as they walked through that Red Sea, did any of them stay behind and say, "Well, I’m scared to death the water will come crashing down." Not that we know of. So what did that take to go through the Red Sea? Trust! Simple trust, when one stepped out they all stepped out moving forward as a unit.
Because, anybody with an ounce of sense would know that when that Red Sea water parted, and it must have parted a long ways, because three to four million people couldn’t go through a little canyon of a hundred or two hundred feet and do it in 24 hours. So that Red Sea must have opened, we think, for miles. Well, however much wider it was the higher the water had to be piled. Right? God piled it! You know He did! With invisible walls and dams to hold it. So what did it take to walk down between those walls of water? Trust. Had to. And they came up on the other side as redeemed, bought back people. Every one of them! Thereby being baptized into Moses' ministry by walking through on dry ground, passing through the separated waters. This is a simple illustration of a spiritual reality or Truth.
Alright, now then we follow them on down to Mt. Sinai and they come under the Levitical Law (not the ten commandments as they are a moral code of conduct with the Beatitudes) and even in spite of the golden calf experience, here they come under Moses’ leadership/ministry. The cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night and they encamp at Kadesh. Then the nation says, "We can’t do it," with the exception of Joshua and Caleb and Moses, of course. Now our question is. Were all those Israelites lost? Some of them? What do you think? You can’t give us an answer, because we don’t think any of us have got one. But, it is sobering to think about. Or were they all saved because they came out of Egypt by Faith. We don’t know. We haven’t the answer.
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