What Does It Mean to Enter God's Rest?

 God rested.

We are told in the account of creation that we find in Genesis that after God had completed six days worth of creation work, that His work was good, even very good, and that He rested on the seventh day. Later, during the Exodus of the Israelite nation from Egypt, God spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai and laid out the rules and laws by which His people were supposed to live as part of His covenant with them. These rules include that the people were to rest on the seventh day, just as God rested. This is the fourth commandment, found in Exodus 20:8-11," “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. ⁹ Six days you shall labor and do all your work, ¹⁰ but the seventh day is a sabbath of the Lord your God; in it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male or your female servant or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you. ¹¹ For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and made it holy."

Now later on, the various religious leaders places additional specific rules around what constituted work so as to keep the people from breaking the fourth commandment. Think of it like this; the commandment was like a piece of art on display which the art gallery has told you not to touch. The art gallery fills the role of God in this scenario. The rule is made known by the art gallery and is expected to be respected. Then the religious leaders felt that this instruction was not sufficient to keep the people from touching the art piece, so they erected a rope barrier six feet away, all around the exhibit. Now, this appears to be a reasonable step to take, given that people are notorious for breaking the rules. But that is not where it ended. The religious leaders felt that there was not enough protection for the art piece, and they knew that people would still act to touch the exhibit, even with the rope barrier in place. So they decided that nobody was allowed on the same floor as the art piece anymore. You could only view it from the balcony above, which would keep every body at least 30 feet away from the art piece. So there was the rule, then the first barrier against breaking the rule, then there was the extreme second barrier against breaking the rule. This is where the Jewish laws were at. 

We know that Acts 1:12 refers to a "Sabbath's walk", which is one of the rules that the leaders put around the Sabbath. This is a unit of measure for distance and is the maximum distance that a Jew is allowed to walk on the Sabbath day, and which is apparently limited to 2000 cubits, or about one kilometre. I have also heard that when Jesus healed the eyes of the blind man on the Sabbath, the reason that the Pharisees were angry was that Jesus spat on the ground and made mud, which they constituted as a breaking of the Sabbath law, their law, but take that for whatever it may be worth. If you want just a peak into the kinds of man-made rules in place to protect the Sabbath, you can click here to get a glimpse into it. I have also seen that there are actually 39 different categories of rules for the Sabbath.

That is already more ink than I wanted to spend on the rest that God partook of and how it pertains to us, but there are many that believe that this is the only rest of which the Bible speaks. So then what are we to do with Hebrews 3:7 - 4:13 where we hear of "God's rest"? It is a long passage to paste here for you to read, so I will leave it to you to look it up as a whole, but let's start with verses 7-11 of chapter three; "Therefore, just as the Holy Spirit says, “Today if you hear His voice, 8 Do not harden your hearts as when they provoked Me, As in the day of trial in the wilderness, 9 Where your fathers tried Me by testing Me, And saw My works for forty years. 10 “Therefore I was angry with this generation, And said, ‘They always go astray in their heart, And they did not know My ways’; 11 As I swore in My wrath, ‘They shall not enter My rest.’” This passage is a reference to Psalms 97 where the psalmist is writing referring  back again to Numbers 13 and 14, where the Israelites rejected God's promise of the new land out of fear. They heard God's voice, but they hardened their hearts and provoked God by their disobedience. The result of this was that they were not allowed to partake of God's promise to them. God turned them around and lead them into the desert for forty years of wandering in which they did not experience the rest that He had in store for them if they had only obeyed Him.

"And to whom did He swear that they would not enter His rest, but to those who were disobedient? 19 So we see that they were not able to enter because of unbelief."(vs. 18-19) So the unbelief of the people lead to their inability to enter into God's rest that He had intended for them. This is sometimes used to indicate another level of God's rest that people latch onto, and that is the matter of receiving salvation and the hope of eternity with God or the rejection of salvation and the eternal turmoil of Hell. This is an important type of rest; rest from our fears of damnation and punishment which we all well deserve. But I don't want to dwell on this form of rest, because I don't think this is what the writer of Hebrews was actually referring to either, except for just on the surface.

I base this largely on the start of the next chapter. Hebrews 4 begins with, " Therefore, let us fear if, while a promise remains of entering His rest, any one of you may seem to have come short of it. 2 For indeed we have had good news preached to us, just as they also; but the word they heard did not profit them, because it was not united by faith in those who heard." (vs. 1-2) I think that this can pertain to the division between believers and non-believers, but that there is also a further meaning. Let's remember that the writer is talking to believers in Jesus' sacrifice; Christians. He is warning these Christians that they need to be wary that they can fall short of "entering His rest". We are told that "a promise remains of entering His rest", but these are all believers already, so the promise of salvation and the acceptance of that promise and gift are not the means of, nor result in entering God's rest. Why is this? Because "the word they heard did not profit them, because it was not united by faith". One can believe that Jesus died and was raised again, but if that is the sum total of what they do with the Gospel message, this is of no profit to them; there is no gain. So there must be more!

If we jump ahead to verse 6, we read, "Therefore, since it remains for some to enter it, and those who formerly had good news preached to them failed to enter because of disobedience,". We are then told that this disobedience was due to the hardening of their hearts; "Today if you hear His voice, Do not harden your hearts.” Hardening of the heart indicates that a person has decided to ignore the calls of the Holy Spirit, as either a believer or a non-believer. We see this many times throughout Scripture, and I think most of those times it is in reference to the kings and leaders who seek after their own desires instead of seeking after God's.

So we have looked at the Sabbath rest and the rest that is found in salvation and have found that these types of rest are not the be all, end all of rest. There is still more to discover;

Here is were I may lose some of you, but please hear me out, and know that not everybody is called to enter into the rest that I am going to talk about. This type of rest comes through the fires of trials combined with faith in God's Word and His promises, both the written (logos) and the spoken (rhema) words. I came to discover this through my conversations with God in the midst of the trials that I have gone through, which I have spoken about previously, and which came about because I made a commitment to Him, the ramifications of which I was not fully aware of at the time.

I have come to understand that there is a rest that God provides to those who submit entirely to Him, for better or for worse, in all things. This is easy to say, and many may even start on this path, but it is incredibly hard to follow through on. This means placing everything into God's hands and letting Him do whatever He wants to do with it. In my case, God took my life as I had built it and allowed it to be torn, stomped, crushed and burned till there was little left that was identifiable. He shut down my business through atrophy through obedience to His instructions to me, which in turn depleted my finances and my sense of self-sufficiency; this lead to financial distress; then He allowed false accusations against me which drove the nails into the coffin of my reputation and many relationships. The false accusations lead to illegitimate legal actions, which God did not allow me to defend against, which eventually lead to the loss of my house through further questionably legal proceedings. I held onto my wife and my children and my other personal possessions as well as a handful of friends; but all else was lost, including most of my family connections. At one time in my conversations with God, I asked Him if what I have gone through is a type of losing my life, which He told me that it was. Of course, I am not dead, but the life that I had was gone and I can never regain it, no matter how long or how hard my own efforts are.

But through all of this and due mostly to my stubborn refusal to renege on my commitment to God, I have learned what it means to truly rely on Him. I have not worked for over five years now as of this writing, and we have gone through lean times and a time of lacking all but food and shelter, but God has provided for us and we have always had a roof over our heads and food in our bellies while keeping my family together through it all. This is what it means to enter into God's rest. This was revealed to me a few years ago when I was reading in Hebrews 4 and I read that, "the one who has entered His rest has himself also rested from his works, as God did from His." So there is a place that we can enter in which our full reliance on God allows for us to rest from our physical works and striving, and live under His provision.

This is not plainly understood in our English translations though. In English we use a single word to have many meanings, but that is not the case in both Hebrew and Greek. These languages tend to be very specific in their word usage in order to present a clear intention. What has really jumped out at me as I have studied this passage are the actually words used for "rest". Throughout this passage the words "katapausis" (G2663) and "katapauo" (G2664) are used to depict rest. These words are defined as "reposing down, rest" and "to settle down, to cease, rest" respectively, and they are used in all the places where we use the word "rest"; except for one.

In verse nine we are told that, "there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God." This use of our word "rest" is actually the Greek word "sabbatismos" (G4520). This word is used only one time in the entire canon of Scripture and it is defined as follows; "the repose of Christianity (as a type of heaven):-rest". Blueletterbible.org gives us "the blessed rest from toils and troubles looked for in the age to come by true worshippers of God and true Christians". This is looking towards a rest from our work and troubles in a blessed existence, but if this is the only place in which this type of rest is referred, then it cannot actually mean the rest that we will enjoy while in God's presence, since that rest is talked about in other parts of Scripture. So this rest must be a heavenly type of rest that is to be found while we are still on earth. Note that the definition includes the words, "as a type of heaven". This is not rest in heaven, but a rest similar to heaven. There is also no correlation between salvation and this rest, since the writer of Hebrews is talking to Christians and is warning them not to fall short of this rest, and we are also told that only "some will enter it [God's rest] (v.6). If this was a rest that is found in salvation, then all who receive Jesus as their Saviour should enter that rest, rather than just some.

So there is a rest to be found on this earth that is neither merely a physical rest nor the rest that comes from the hope of our salvation, but this rest is a rest from our works (v.10) and our troubles. So what does it take to enter into this rest? In verse 11 we read, "Therefore let us be diligent to enter that rest, so that no one will fall, through following the same example of disobedience." We see here that the key seems to be obedience to God. We are all to strive towards obedience and I imagine that we can all point to somebody who lives such a godly life that we feel we can never attain to it, yet they still struggle with their works and their troubles like everybody else. There must be more to the obedience that is spoken of here.

This is where the commitment and follow through come in. God's rest is entered into by those who hear the gospel message (Heb. 4:2), have believed that gospel message (4:3), hear his voice and obey it with a soft heart (4:7) and who so with a right heart attitude, of which God is the judge (4:12). And I will add that this will be in regards to all things, in all ways, to any ends. This is a level of commitment that is so far beyond what is preached from our pulpits, but that God will put on the hearts of those whom He wants to call to it. This is not a commitment that everybody can accept, and had I known what I was going to go through prior to me making my commitment, I would not have thought that I could have held to it, but God strengthened me through it so far, and I hope to see the result of that obedience fleshed out in full in the not too distant future. I am quite sure that my actual physical work on earth is not yet done; I will enter into productive work again, but it will not be my design or efforts that lead me, but the design and provisions of God.

I have to give at least some credit to Christianity.com. Their definition of God's rest is the closest that I have found to what I have determined on my own through the Holy Spirit. Following are some quotes that I have clipped from their article on this subject.

"God’s rest is a state, or place, where God rules and manages his creation, free from the chaos and disorder brought about by sin and rebellion. All who will rest from their own work of bringing their own life under control can enter into God’s rest."; "God himself is in the garden, walking and talking with Adam. This garden represents God’s rest. And humanity, at our beginning, is at rest with God. That rest is not relaxation. Adam has a job to do in the garden. But he is in God’s presence, in the garden, where all is ordered and at peace. He is experiencing God’s rest."; "The Promised Land represented God’s rest; a return to the garden; a land flowing with milk and honey; free from the slavery and oppression they had experienced.", "All who will rest from their own work, the work of bringing your own life and world under control, can enter into God’s rest."

https://www.christianity.com/wiki/christian-life/how-can-we-enter-god-s-rest.html

This rest is what has allowed me and my family to wait patiently upon the Lord to fulfill what we believe He has promised to us. This does not mean that fears and impatience don't raise their heads and harass us, but when these times inevitably come, I have learned, only too recently, to take these things to God, confirm that I am indeed still living within His will for me, and to ask for His peace that surpasses all our understandings to come over me again and carry me forward. I anticipate my work in the garden to commence not too long from now, and I am anticipating God's blessing on the work that He calls me to do.

As always, please feel free to let me know your thoughts on this in the comments section below.