Online Resource Library
Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comJamieson Fausset Brown Commentary - Hebrews 4:3 - 4:3
(Show All Books | Show All Chapters)
This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
For - justifying his assertion of the need of “faith,” Heb 4:2.
we which have believed - we who at Christ’s coming shall be found to have believed.
do enter - that is, are to enter: so two of the oldest manuscripts and Lucifer and the old Latin. Two other oldest manuscripts read, “Let us enter.”
into rest - Greek, “into the rest” which is promised in the ninety-fifth Psalm.
as he said - God’s saying that unbelief excludes from entrance implies that belief gains an entrance into the rest. What, however, Paul mainly here dwells on in the quotation is that the promised “rest” has not yet been entered into. At Heb 4:11 he again, as in Heb 3:12-19 already, takes up faith as the indispensable qualification for entering it.
although, etc. - Although God had finished His works of creation and entered on His rest from creation long before Moses’ time, yet under that leader of Israel another rest was promised, which most fell short of through unbelief; and although the rest in Canaan was subsequently attained under Joshua, yet long after, in David’s days, God, in the ninety-fifth Psalm, still speaks of the rest of God as not yet attained. THEREFORE, there must be meant a rest still future, namely, that which “remaineth for the people of God” in heaven, Heb 4:3-9, when they shall rest from their works, as God did from His, Heb 4:10. The argument is to show that by “My rest,” God means a future rest, not for Himself, but for us.
finished - Greek, “brought into existence,” “made.”