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testing or resting

Psalm 95:6-11 (JDV)

Psalm 95:6 Come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before Yahveh our Maker.
Psalm 95:7 Yes, he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, the sheep under his hand. Today, if you hear his voice:
Psalm 95:8 Do not harden your hearts as at Meribah, as on that day at Massah in the open country,
Psalm 95:9 where your ancestors tested me; they tried me, though they had seen what I did.
Psalm 95:10 Yes, forty years I was disgusted with that generation; I said, “They are a people whose hearts go astray; they do not know my roads.”
Psalm 95:11 So I swore in my anger, “They will not enter my rest.”

testing or resting

By hardening their hearts against his, and refusing to learn his roads, the people of Israel lost out on God’s promised rest. An entire generation struggled and died in the wilderness, testing God.

You and I have the same choice. We can continue testing God, and never see the fulfillment of his promises. Or, we can choose to obey him, and he can take us where we need to go in this life.

There are all kinds of alternate choices, but none of them clearly reflect God’s will. We can (for example) pretend that the struggles we face today are some kind of purgatorial work. We could pride ourselves on how hard our road is. Wrong choice.

As long as we set ourselves against God’s word and stubbornly seek our own path, we will stay on the wrong road. We have to surrender to his will — bowing down to him. That is true repentance. Only true repentance leads to God’s rest.