Have you been a seeker? Have you begun to ask that God would save your soul and change you and bless you? And yet you're uncertain, and you wonder whether he will; of course he will, if you're sincere. But you wonder and you're apprehensive and you're anxious. May you come into that rest, where you’re certain and you know it, where you know God has received you, because you know you've been changed and you have altogether different desires and tastes. You have a new nature and you're concerned to please him and serve him and live for him and these are the most important things in the world to you now, and that is your evidence, that he has saved you and blessed you.
You have rest from seeking and struggling and desiring, because you are in the rest of God. You have rest from facing life’s struggles alone, unaided, with no friend in heaven, no one to answer your prayers. Now you can commit everything to the Lord confident that he will strengthen you and bless you; you have rest from struggling alone. You have rest from the vacuum of ignorance and deceit that once dominated your life. You didn't know about God; you didn't know about his ways. You were a confused person, and society misled you, and the critics poured scorn upon the Christian faith and upon the word of God. They talked up their theories on evolution and everything else and you were led astray. There are many, many people led astray by the deceits of this present world. When you entered into God's kingdom you had rest from all that misleading. You have rest, satisfaction in Christ, life and peace.
Why is it this way round? Why isn’t the reasoning: ‘For unto them was the gospel preached as well as unto us’? That is how we would put it if we wanted to emphasise that the same gospel was preached to Old Testament Israel as is preached to us now. But no, it has to be this way round, because the argument here is not that. What the writer is saying is, ‘Don’t you also fail to enter that rest as they failed.’ He takes for granted that the offer of rest to that generation of old was equivalent to the preaching of the gospel. The problem was that they didn’t believe. Yes, they were offered a physical land, and that was only symbolic, but they also heard the gospel, the offer of eternal rest. They not only failed to enter the land; they also failed to enter the eternal spiritual rest, and that was much more serious. Now in New Testament times, the gospel is being preached again, both to Jews and to Gentiles, and it is being preached under the same terms of entering God’s rest. Don’t do what that wilderness generation did and fail to exercise faith so that they died and never saw the land. It is obvious that Psalm 95 is not speaking of Canaan, for it offered rest long after Israel had successfully entered the physical land. It must be speaking of something different – another sort of rest. The gospel is being preached – using the language of Psalm 95 – to us, as well as to them. The rest of God describes entry into great blessings of peace, which runs right through the centuries. It doesn't depend on race; people enter into it if they believe the message of God and have faith in him.