Canst thou not see
That there remains another rest for thee ?
Not this alone
Which comes to all His own —
Which comes to all who hide
Beneath the shadow of the Crucified.
There is a rest which still He waits to give —
A rest wherein we all may daily live —
The rest whereby,
As in His death, by faith, we die,
So He will live in us,
And living thus
Will change our death to life — a life no longer ours,
But His, renewed with resurrection powers.
0 now receive
The calm, deep peace which comes as we believe
That all the works, and zeal, and strife,
With which we sometime sought to fill our life,
Are vain and dead, at best:
Thus shalt thou understand, and enter into rest.^
IV.
The Best that Eemaineth.
1. This rest is an inward and present possession. The fundamental idea of the Sabbath is rest; and this is the idea which the Apostle makes most prominent in this place, because he uses " Sabbatism " interchangeably with a word which signifies " cessation " or " repose." But it can never be granted that mere physical or animal rest was the sole or even the chief thing
^ R. Baxter, The Saints' Everlasting Rest, chap. vii. 2 E. H. Divall, A Believer's Best, 106.
HEBREWS IV. 9, lo 329
enjoined by the Sabbath law under any dispensation. It was the rest of man in God, a rest like that of God, a rest which in man's unfallen state was enjoyed by his working on the same plan and resting in the same spirit with God, and in his fallen state could be recovered only by his return in his whole being to harmony with God and rest in Him. The only Sabbath-keeping on earth that has ever deserved the name is release from the labours and burdens of the soul, and from the labours and burdens of the body as a help to the higher rest. The true Sabbath is entering into God's rest, into participation of His blessedness, and it draws with it the surmounting of every hindrance to this result. It is resting from everything that would hinder rest in God, and then it is the enjoying of this rest in Him.
Our experience here tells of its partial attainment. We have ourselves, not only in spiritual but in other matters, been conscious of approaching it. There have been times, rare but most en- chanting, when heart and hand, thought and shaping of thought, conception and conquest, imagination and execution, have gone together, with swiftness, with splendid harmony, with joys as fresh, as young as morning. What has once been, though im- perfect, in experience, may be an eternal and a perfect possession, and will be an eternal and perfect possession when we are made perfect. It is the rest of the children of God ; and it is a rest which means, which indeed is, eternal work and perfect work, eternal loving and perfect loving.
^ If the question were raised : Is man made for toil or for rest ? the answer would be a mixed and qualified one. He is appointed to toil, he is destined to rest : one is his condition, the other is his end. If man is made in God's image, he is made to share in God's condition: and both Christian revela- tion and heathen conjecture unite in conceiving of Deity as in repose, eternally acting, yet in eternal rest.^
2. We enter into this rest by faith and obedience.
(1) The faith by which a man possesses himself of this is not the mere acknowledgment that God is addressing him and summoning him heavenward, but the practical, obedient, ventur- ous trust by which he mixes (v. 2) the word which he hears with his personal conscious life in its inner springs first, and then in
1 T. T. Hunger.
330 THE SABBATH REST
its streams of conduct. By this trust the believer learns to desist from the fruitless labours which the guilt-stricken attempt in order to merit the pardon of their sins, to effect the cleansing of their souls, to attain to the ideal of restored character. He lives before God, and serves Him with calmer rest as his hallowed desires accord more fully with his sacred duties and these with the will of God.
Then grief expires, and pain and strife, 'Tis nature all and all delight.
^ It is in the life of faith, when a soul learns to trust God for victory over sin, and yields itself entirely, as to its circumstances and duties, to live just where and how He wills, that it enters the rest. It lives in the promise, in the will, in the power of God. This is the rest into which it enters, not through death, but through faith, or rather, not through the death of the body, but the death to self in the death of Christ through faith. For indeed we have had good tidings preached unto us, even as also they ; but the word of hearing did not profit them, because it was not united by faith with those that heard. The one reason why they did not enter Canaan was their unbelief. The land was waiting; the rest was provided ; God Himself would bring them in and give them rest. One thing was lacking : they did not believe, and so did not yield themselves to God to do it for them what He had promised. Unbelief closes the heart against God, withdraws the life from God's power; in the very nature of things unbelief renders the word of promise of none effect. A gospel of rest is preached to us as it was to them. We have in Scripture the most precious assurances of a rest for the soul to be found under the yoke of Jesus, of a peace of God which passeth all understanding, of a peace and a joy in the soul which nothing can take away. But when they are not believed they cannot be enjoyed : faith is in its very nature a resting in the promise and the promiser until He fulfil it in us. Only faith can enter into rest. The ful- ness of faith enters into the full rest.^