Hebrews 3:16

Hebrews 3:16

The Warnings of Advent.

The true translation of these words is this: "For who were they, who, when they had heard, did provoke? Nay, were they not all who came out of Egypt with Moses?" So far from meaning that some and not all did provoke, He lays a stress on the universality of the evil.

I. There is something striking in the season of the natural year at which we celebrate the beginning of another Christian year. It is a true type of our condition, in which all the changes of our lives steal upon us, that Nature, at this moment, gives no outward signs of beginning; it is a period which does not manifest any striking change in the state of things around us. The Christian spring begins ere we have reached the half of the natural winter. Nature is not bursting into life, but rather preparing itself for a long season of death. And this is the type of a universal truth: that the signs and warnings which we must look to must come from within us, not from without; that neither sky nor earth will arouse us from our deadly slumber unless we are ourselves roused already, and more disposed to make warnings for ourselves than to find them.

II. If this be true of Nature, it is true also of all the efforts of man. As Nature will give no sign, so man cannot. There is no voice in Nature, no voice in man, that can really awaken the sleeping soul. It is the work of a far mightier power, to be sought for with most earnest prayers for ourselves and for each other; that the Holy Spirit of God would speak and would dispose our hearts to hear; that so being wakened from death, and our ears being truly opened, all things outward may now join in language which we can hear; and Nature and men, life and death, things present and things to come, may be but the manifold voices of the Spirit of God, all working for us together for good. Till this be so we speak in vain; our words neither reach our own hearts nor the hearts of our hearers; they are but recorded in God's book of judgment, to be brought forward hereafter for the condemnation of us both.

T. Arnold, Sermons,vol. iv., p. 157.