Seder 57: Psalm 95---Entering into God's Rest

 In some sense Psalm 95 contains an entire worship service.  It starts with a double call to praise God, the Creator and Ruler of all and the Shepherd of his people.  He is the "rock of our salvation," the one who fights for his people and delivers them, as in the battle with Amalek in Exodus 17.  He is creator of everything, high and low, land and sea, including all powers and forces of chaos.

After the praise song, the remainder of the psalm is an exhortation, urging worshipers to learn from the example of the exodus generation.  Many of the adults who left Egypt failed to develop an abiding faith in God, and all but a few failed to enter God's "rest"---the Promised Land, where they could have had a home in peace and safety.

Worshipers at the temple were already in the Promised Land, so what "rest" was at stake for them?  The author of the epistle to the Hebrews took up this question centuries later, expanding on the message of Psalm 95 for his own audience.  He wrote to Jewish Christ-followers of the first century AD who faced Roman persecution and the trauma of the Temple destruction.  He urged them to walk with Jesus rather than to become discouraged and fall away.

The rest at stake for readers of the book of Psalms and the book Hebrews is the rest of God's eternal kingdom.  It is a rest that God entered on the very first Sabbath and has inhabited ever since.  It is the rest of ruling with Jesus the Messiah on a renewed earth.  It is a rest that believers experience a foretaste of now, in particular on each Sabbath day, and can enter fully in the future.  

Today is our "today."  As we read in Heb 4:11, "Let us therefore strive to enter that rest, so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience."

(Incidentally, the rabbis asked whether the adults who left Egypt and never reached the Promised Land would have a place in the world to come.  Rabbi Eliezer answered in the affirmative.  When God was no longer angry, Rabbi Eliezer said, he would be merciful---b. Sanhedrin 110b.)

In a sermon at Church of the Messiah on May 29, 2021, Rob Wilson looked at lessons that we can learn from the Exodus generation, including the importance of striving for unity.