Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 3169
“We who have believed do enter into rest.” Hebrews 4:3.
[Other Sermons by Mr. Spurgeon upon the same text are Sermons #866, Volume 15—REST and #2090, Volume 35— A DELICIOUS EXPERIENCE.]
THE text does not say that we who have believed shall enter into rest. That is a very great Truth, but it is not the Truth that is taught here. We “do enter into rest,” even in this present life! All who are Believers in the Lord Jesus Christ are already enjoying rest of heart and, in proportion as faith possesses their souls, in that proportion they enjoy perfect rest. It is not a future privilege—it is a matter of present enjoyment. And I pray my Brothers and Sisters in Christ not to impoverish themselves by making the text apply to the future, but to seek for the spiritual enrichment which God has given them by accepting the text just as the Apostle wrote it and so realizing that “we who have believed do enter into
rest.”
It appears from the connection in which these words appear that the type and pattern of all true rest for men was the rest of God at the end of the six days of Creation. After He had worked so wondrously and finished all His creative work, we read that the Lord “rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had made.” It is not easy for us to understand how the rest of God could ever have been broken, yet there must have been a deeper kind of rest for Him on that seventh day than during the previous six days, for it is expressly said that God did rest then. Into that great mysterious deep we will not try to plunge, but we know that the Lord was pleased, then, to institute the Sabbath as a perpetual memorial of His own rest and that Sabbath was to be observed by all men—and especially by all the Lord’s own people in perpetuity, as if, I think, He would not only commemorate His own rest, but would also indicate that He intended men to be partakers of it.
God’s grand ideal of man’s happiness was that he could not only work, but that he should also rest. What a wonderful restfulness there seems to be in every part of Creation into which man does not come! Go into any part of the country where man is and there you find the plow cutting into the earth and the ox and the donkey and the horse toiling—and you meet with men and women in sickness and poverty and need. But get away into the woods, traverse the wilds of Nature and see how restful everything is there! Note how the birds seem to have little else to do but to sing God’s praises. Mark how the very brooks warble as they flow and how all Creation that is untouched by man appears to delight in a deep profound calm and peace! Had there been no Fall, the world would have been all restful—there would have been no thorns or thistles to vex and wound and add to man’s labor—and no need for us to be always asking for fresh water power and steam power with which to alleviate the burden of the toil ofman. Sweat from a weary brow, or the throbbing of a tired brain would have been altogether unknown! Earth would have kept her Sabbath even as God kept His. But sin has come into the world and from that blessed state of rest, man has fallen! Yet God is bringing us back to a rest similar to that—and all who have believed in Jesus have been brought into it. The Sabbath is to them the Divine memorial of God’s rest, the type of their own and also a continual reminder of the spiritual rest which they have found in Christ!
There is another type of rest given us in the Word, namely that of the children of Israel entering into the promised land. “If Jesus (that is, Joshua), had given them rest,” says the Apostle, “then would he not afterward have spoken of another day.” All the while the children of Israel were in the wilderness, they were constantly moving to and fro, dwelling in tents and enjoying but little comfort. Notwithstanding all the blessings with which God enriched them in the wil-
derness, it wasa wilderness, and Moses truly called it, “the waste howling wilderness.” They had no rest there and they were always looking forward to the land flowing with milk and honey to where they were journeying. Their eager longing was for a land where they could settle down, build houses, plant vineyards and dwell in quiet resting places. Canaan is, therefore, the type of the rest which God intends to give His people here. It is not the type of Heaven, except very imperfectly, for in Canaan there were Canaanites to be fought and to be gradually driven out. And there were some that were never driven out. But we thank God that there are no Canaanites to trouble the saints in Heaven. Canaan is the true pattern and type of the Believer’s condition upon the earth We who have believed in Jesus have crossed the Jordan. He has divided it for us and we have entered into rest. It is true that the Canaanites are still in the land, but the Lord also is in the land and, by His Grace, we shall surely drive them all out. We ought not to say that we hope to reach Canaan’s peaceful shore, by-and-by—we are on it now! If we have truly believed in Jesus, our condition is rightly typified by the Israelites in Canaan who had obtained their inheritance, for Jesus has obtained His inheritance and God “has raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.”