Philip Schaff's Popular Commentary (4 vols)

Hebrews 4:1-11

Hebrews 4:1-11. TO understand the force of the reasoning of these verses, and the naturalness of the different interpretations of the Psalm which the Apostle is explaining, note that ‘ My rest ' is primarily the rest which God enjoys (Genesis 2:2; Hebrews 4:4) or which God provides (Deuteronomy 12:9-10). The first is the Sabbath rest which God enjoyed after His work of creation was completed, and which He provided for man when He instituted the day of rest, as He did long before the giving of the law; the second is the rest of Canaan, the rest which God gave Israel, a rest which proved very imperfect, partly because multitudes never entered it, partly because the rest itself was never fully realized even for those who did enter it. Both meanings of the word, therefore, point to such rest as the Gospel gives, of which the rest of the Sabbath and the rest of Canaan were types, and imperfect types. Two other facts need to be kept in mind: the word Sabbath and Sabbath-rest (see Hebrews 4:9) are Hebrew words for what is translated ‘ rest ' and (as a verb in Genesis) ‘rested;' and the word ‘entered in,' moreover, is a common word in the Old Testament almost a cant word, like ‘going home to Canaan,' ‘over the Jordan,' ‘one more river to cross' for ‘inheriting the earth,' taking possession of the land of promise. Hence the naturalness of the interpretation which the Apostle refutes. The rest of which the Psalm speaks, and which the unbelieving miss, is not, as the word may mean, the Sabbath-rest which God instituted at the first, nor is it the rest of Canaan into which the Jews entered under the guidance of Joshua. The rest from which the disobedient Israelites were debarred was neither the one nor the other, for at that time the Israelites had both. It was a rest that stood over in David's time for future realization a rest into which those enter, and those only, who believe (see Hebrews 4:3) the rest of the Gospel, completed in the rest above. How natural this argument is may be gathered from the religious poetry of all Christian sects, and from the language employed even now to describe the Divine life. Every incident of the journey of the Israelites from Egypt into Canaan is spiritualized in our common religious teaching, and so may easily have been regarded as the reality, not as the type. How necessary the argument is also clear. The announcement that the Jews are not as Jews part of the true theocratic kingdom, that Canaan was not heaven, was to them one of the hardest sayings of the Gospel.

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Philip Schaff's Popular Commentary (4 vols)

Hebrews 4:1-11

Old Testament

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