NOTES for Heb 3:7-19

In today's reading from Hebrews, the words "as long as it is called 'today'" somehow touched the heart very deeply. While there is still time, before Eternity has come... We keep thinking that we have time, or more precisely, we do not even think about it; we live as though we have it. But we do not have time. Only God has it. Time, like Eternity, belongs to Him. And no one knows when time will end for us. Then eternity will come, the eternity we created during our earthly life in our relationship with God... The choice of eternity depends on us, but only while we are inside time.

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.

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.