NOTES for Heb 3:12

¹²Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God.

Much has been said and written about sin over two thousand years of Christian history. The same is true of the struggle against it. And even before Christ came into the world, people spoke about this too.

Yet both in the past and today, sin is often spoken of as the violation of a moral norm. Or as a source of evil for one's neighbor. The author of the epistle, meanwhile, draws attention to something else: he speaks of an evil and faithless heart that separates a person from God. He says something that, on the one hand, appears self-evident, and on the other hand returns us to that understanding of sin which could be called originally biblical.

The biblical books were by no means written by philosopher-moralists. And the authors of the biblical books considered sin evil not because sinful acts contradict certain moral norms, even if those norms were established by God. After all, God too is not a moralist. He hates sin not because it is beautiful and worthy for a person to be moral, or at least not only for that reason. Of course, sin distorts the image of God in a person, and this cannot gladden God. But the most terrible thing lies elsewhere: sin separates a person from God. And the most terrible thing here is that God can do nothing about it.

The human person is free, and God respects that freedom. And if this free person, abusing his freedom, builds between himself and God a wall made of his own sins and their consequences, God has nothing left to do but wait for repentance and a new turning. This wall is the most terrible thing sin can bring to a person. And not because everything else is unimportant. It is simply that God can fully deal with everything else, if only the person allows Him to do so. But only the person himself is able to break through and tear down the wall.

Yet this requires firm resolve, which is impossible for a person whose heart is pierced through by sin or who lacks faithfulness. For conversion is above all a change in the spiritual direction of the heart, in what modern psychologists call its intention. And this new intention must be deep and stable enough; otherwise the wall of sin cannot be pierced or broken down. And then new conversion and spiritual renewal will have to be forgotten. If not forever, then for a long time.

Other notes

For Heb 3:7-19

⁷Wherefore (as the Holy Ghost saith, To day if ye will hear his voice,

⁸Harden not your hearts, as in the provocation, in the day of temptation in the wilderness:

⁹When your fathers tempted me, proved me, and saw my works forty years.

¹⁰Wherefore I was grieved with that generation, and said, They do alway err in their heart; and they have not known my ways.

¹¹So I sware in my wrath, They shall not enter into my rest.)

¹²Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God.

¹³But exhort one another daily, while it is called To day; lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin.

¹⁴For we are made partakers of Christ, if we hold the beginning of our confidence stedfast unto the end;

¹⁵While it is said, To day if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts, as in the provocation.

¹⁶For some, when they had heard, did provoke: howbeit not all that came out of Egypt by Moses.

¹⁷But with whom was he grieved forty years? was it not with them that had sinned, whose carcases fell in the wilderness?

¹⁸And to whom sware he that they should not enter into his rest, but to them that believed not?

¹⁹So we see that they could not enter in because of unbelief.

The epistle writer's call not to turn away from the living God seems not so much unexpected as self-evident. Yet, in light of everything he has said, a question arises: why does he suddenly turn to such an exhortation? The context of the epistle, however, makes much clear and understandable. After all, the subject is the Messiah: who He is, whether He is a Man or some great angel. The idea of the Messiah as a great angel could have been connected, in particular, with the events of AD 70, which in the eyes of Christians marked the end of history.

Indeed, when Jesus Himself tells His disciples about the last days, He points to the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple as events preceding His return and the full triumph of the Kingdom. And now what the Savior foretold has come to pass, yet He Himself still does not return. Against this background, many Christians probably decided that they needed to reconsider the ideas about history—and perhaps even about the Messiah Himself—that had become established by then, for this was already the third Christian generation.

It is precisely at this time that various fantastic speculations begin to circulate among Christians: the Messiah has already returned, but not everyone saw Him, only those to whom it was granted, because He is not really a human being at all, but precisely that great angel who cannot be seen so easily. In short, this was an entirely different “messiah,” a mysterious, mystical “messiah” who comes to a few initiates, to those who are “worthy of salvation.” All these fantasies, of course, had nothing to do with the true Messiah to whom the evangelists bear witness. And fleeing from harsh reality into a world of such fantasies amounted in practice to betraying Christ, as the epistle writer reminds his readers.