The great exhortation is repeated: ‘Take heed’. Let every one of us watch, keep an eye on the soul. Am I functioning spiritually, am I reading the circumstances of my life in terms of why is God permitting this to me? I must read these things so that I can respond, be trained, prove him, and mend my ways; witness for him. ‘Take heed’, watch out, ‘lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief in departing from the living God’, a heart that takes so many benefits from God – salvation and answered prayer – and yet will not trust him and believe that he allows all our circumstances and our trials, and go to him in prayer and faith.
Another means of hardening the heart is when, to use old-fashioned language, ‘crosses are not sanctified’. You have a trial and a great problem, a mountain to climb, and instead of viewing it spiritually: ‘God means me to prove him in this; this is perhaps a discipline to reprove to me; or this is a training to me.’ Instead of looking at it spiritually and sanctifying your cross – bringing spiritual value out of it – you resent it. You hate it and it casts you down, and your heart is hardened towards spiritual things. Look at the ninth verse: ‘When your fathers tempted me, proved me, and saw my works forty years.’ This is why it was such a provocation, they saw wonderful things, and yet they tempted the patience of God – that’s human language of course. God is almost viewed in human terms to get across to us the scandal of what they were doing. They saw their circumstances resolved by miraculous means. They saw all the works, they proved the Lord, and yet they still had no reflection and no faith for the next trial.
Other things too can cause hardening of the heart. Bad company, sometimes young people make their best friend somebody who is not a believer, and they slip back into those ways and into their worldly talk and worldly things that hardens heart most surely. Sometimes it's older people: that pursuit of wealth and applause and notice. You're making your way back into this world to get your satisfaction from it; that hardens the heart and spiritual tastes diminish.