NOTES for Heb 3:18-19

Among Christians, and first of all of course among Jewish Christians, discouragement and unbelief began to spread after the catastrophe of A.D. 70. It was the Second Temple that, in the eyes of Yahwists, both Christians and Jews, was the messianic Temple; it was supposed to "meet" the Messiah, and many Judeo-Christians were no doubt sure that the Savior's return and the triumph of the Kingdom would somehow be connected with the renewal of the Temple as well. But Jerusalem and the Temple already lay in ruins, and the Savior kept delaying His return. Against such a background there evidently began to spread ideas about a Messiah "like an angel," about a Kingdom that perhaps had already come and was triumphing, but not on earth, rather in some other dimension, and other spiritualistic views of this kind. On the other hand, political messianism also did not disappear completely; it continued to smolder beneath the surface, flaring up fifty years after the destruction of the Temple in the messianic revolt of Bar Kokhba, the last major messianic political movement of the ancient world. Jesus' prediction about false messiahs and false prophets was coming true, and the warnings connected with it were becoming more relevant than ever before.

That is why Paul reminds them of the ability to listen to and hear the voice of God, so as not to lose the Kingdom just as the descendants of Jacob who came out of Egypt once lost the possibility of entering the land promised them by God. For Paul, faithfulness to the tradition that goes back to the apostles, and to which in many letters he says one must hold fast, turns out to be very important. One can think that the mystical messianism against which he always spoke was, in the situation that had taken shape, a temptingly simple solution that gave answers to all questions, and answers that could appear fully satisfactory. It is no accident that he compares lovers of simple answers and easy solutions with those who lost the possibility of entering the land promised by God because of their own unbelief: in essence, mystical messianism meant precisely unbelief, unbelief that Jesus would fulfill the promises He had given, and an attempt to find some alternative to the faithfulness that unites the Savior with those being saved. An attempt that can lead only to the loss of both the Kingdom and salvation.