Hebrews 4:5 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Hebrews 4:5

Comments

‘This place’ means back to Psalm 95 – ‘If they shall enter into my rest.’ So it’s Genesis in verse 4, and Psalm 95 in verse 5. The words of the psalm are not quoted in their entirety, and we realise that the writer of Hebrews is adapting them to his argument. He has already quoted the passage fully in Hebrews 3:11 and 4:3, so he is not ignorant about what the text says. He expresses it conditionally, and the conditional element is certainly present in the text of Psalm 95. The point is that the rest of God is spoken of again such a long time after it was originally referred to at the time of creation in connection with the institution of the Sabbath. Much had happened between then and this further reference to God’s rest by David. Israel might have thought that they had entered into God’s rest in every conceivable way by the time of David, and that no further entering in was possible, but, if so, this verse in the psalm corrects that mistaken view. Something was still outstanding, and there still remained an opportunity of entering in which many Israelites had never yet taken advantage of. Indeed, the psalm warns that unless they enter this rest which David, speaking as a prophet, refers to, they have really gained nothing and all other senses of the rest of God fall short of God’s true blessing of rest which they must attain.

Application

Questions

The KJV translation of Hebrews 4:5 is literal but results in this conditional clause; other versions remove this in their effort to align with the Hebrew original and introduce a negative particle, but the word ‘if’ is deliberate. The Israelites in the time of Moses had certainly not entered into the promised land and that was a matter of past fact, but the words ‘Today if ye will hear’ (Psalm 95:7) refer to a further opportunity to enter God’s rest, which is made conditional on faith and which governs the interpretation of the words quoted here from the psalm. By trying to align too closely with the original rendering of the words from the Pentateuch (Numbers 14:23), other translations fail to see what the writer to Hebrews is doing in moving now to the yet outstanding offer of rest made by God in the psalm.

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Hebrews 4:5 Commentary and Bible Study