What Is God’s Rest?

How to enter God’s rest.

The warning is repeated: don’t miss God’s rest.  

A. Therefore: The idea is carried on without pause from Hebrews 3, that unbelief kept the generation that escaped Egypt from entering Canaan. The promise remains of entering His rest, and we can enter into that rest by faith. Unbelief will make us fall short of the rest God has for us.

The old Puritan commentator John Owen described five features of this rest for the believer:

• Rest means peace with God.  
• Rest means freedom from a servile, bondage-like spirit in the worship and service of God.  
• Rest means deliverance from the burden of Mosaic observance.  
• Rest means the freedom of worship according to the gospel.  
• Rest means the rest that God Himself enjoys.      

B. Let us fear lest any of you seem to have come short of it: This place of rest is so wonderful it should concern us when others or we seem to come short of it. It isn’t enough to almost enter His rest; we don’t want to come short of it.

• Adam Clarke on come short: “It is an allusion, of which there are many in this epistle, to the races in the Grecian games: he that came short was he who was any distance, no matter how small, behind the winner.”    

Based on the Enduring Word Bible Commentary by David Guzik.