"We who have believed do enter into rest. . . . For He spake in a certain place of the seventh day on this wise, And God did rest the seventh day from all His works. And in this place again, If they shall enter into My rest. Seeing therefore it remaineth that some must enter therein, and they to whom it was first preached entered not in because of unbelief, again He limiteth a certain day, saying in David . . ., Today, if ye will hear His voice, harden not your hearts. For if [Joshua] had given them rest, then would He not afterward have spoken of another day. There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God. For he that is entered into His rest, he also hath ceased from his own works, as God did from His" (Heb. 4:3-10).

Here the whole condition of blessing, so far as we are concerned, is faith. We who believe will enter into rest. The subject here is the future rest of God. The apostle says that in a certain sense God’s rest had been from the time of creation:"He spake … of the seventh day on this wise, And God did rest the seventh day from all His works." God ended His work and then He rested. In that sense, the sabbath of God began. But as a matter of fact we read, when our blessed Lord was here upon earth, "My Father worketh hitherto and I work" (John 5:17). God’s rest, so far as this world was concerned, was marred by sin, for He can never rest in the presence of sin. As one has beautifully said, "Holiness cannot rest where sin is. Love cannot rest where sorrow is." "Ye have made Me to serve with your sins," He says. Men make God labor with their sins. There can be no rest for God save as He would immediately judge the ungodly. If He is going on with man in any way, He must resume a toil compared with which the work of creation was nothing. God ended that work of creation and rested; but the toil He entered upon as soon as sin came into this world through our first parents, went on and on increasingly, and goes on to this very day. As we may say, God is laboring. He labored all through the Old Testament; He sent His beloved Son into the world who continued that labor; He sent the Holy Spirit here at Pentecost, and now the Spirit of God is laboring. It is a scene of divine toil, when God is seeking to induce men by His toil to cease from their sin and to bring them into His rest.

He goes on further to David’s time. Joshua had brought them into the land of Canaan. He says if Joshua had given the people rest, there would have been the accomplishment of God’s purpose (verse 8). But many years later, in King David’s time, the people still did not have rest. And if we trace their history through, we find they have never had true and genuine rest. What is the result of this? "There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God" (verse 9).

What is this rest? Is it the rest that comes through believing in Jesus, referred to by our Lord when He said, "Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest" (Matt. 11:28)? Not exactly, but the rest the Lord mentioned in this passage is a foretaste, for the soul, of the rest referred to in Hebrews 4. The rest for the people of God is found where Christ is now_in the glory. This is the final rest, and he who enters into that rest not only ceases from his work for salvation, but he ceases from all work. He ceases from toil in the sense of it being toil; for though activity and service will continue throughout eternity, it will never mar the sabbatic stillness of that blessed place where there is no sin and therefore no toil in that sense of the word.

How significant it is that God imposed toil upon man when sin came into the world! It was in the sweat of his brow that man was to earn his bread. At first he was put there to dress and to keep the garden, but the bitterness of service and toil was not there. So in that heavenly Paradise, the rest of God into which we eater, there will be service, there will be ministry throughout eternity; but there will be no weariness, no toil, no witness of the presence of sin.

That rest remains. How are we going to enter into it? "We who have believed do enter into rest" (verse 3). Is that the living, blessed reality that is before us now_the rest of God? the rest where sin never can come and which it never can mar?

Oh, we know what it is to have rest in believing in Jesus here; we know something, too, of what it is to have rest in bearing His light and easy yoke. But why do we groan? "The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now" (Rom. 8:22). Why these sighs and groans?

We will not get the full thought of this rest until we see that it is primarily God’s, and not ours. A perfect Being can only rest where all is in accord with His nature. Thus even the first creation was completed and all pronounced "very good" before God rested. So in the new creation. All must answer to the divine thought. Sin must be eternally banished; evil in all its forms must be obliterated. The results of sin too_the sufferings, sorrows, woes of life, and death ("the last enemy")_must be done away. All, too, must have the stamp of permanence, in contrast with the change and decay which prevail now.

All the perfections of God’s being can then survey with delight His wide creation. The heavens will nevermore be disturbed in their harmony or stained with the pollution of Satan’s presence. The heavenly city which is the Bride, the Lamb who is its light and glory, and the new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness will all be the object of God’s supreme satisfaction. Again will those words "very good" be spoken, and God Himself will cease from His labors.

The work of Christ is the eternal basis of this rest. There the righteousness of God was glorified along with every attribute of the divine nature. That is why, after completing His work, our Lord sat down. He rests, waiting till His enemies are put beneath His feet. The final rest is the outcome of that accomplished work, and in spirit we can enjoy it now, though surrounded by so much that mars our outward rest.

Dear brethren, we are made for God’s rest, and until we enter into the sabbath of our God we will be a weary people. We are in the wilderness; the brightest scenes of earth_the joys of communion, the joys of fellowship one with another_are not these foretastes broken into or disturbed by the malice of the enemy? Is not the divided state of the people of God at present, and the unrest we all deplore, a witness that we are in the wilderness and have not entered into the rest of God? We are waiting for that rest, we are looking forward to that. Let us exhort one another that we do not settle down in our souls to any rest short of that eternal rest of God which He has prepared for us. "There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God" (verse 9).

(From Lectures on the Epistle to the Hebrews.)