Psalm 95 is an invitation to us to worship God. It is not known who the author is but we can definitely tell that whoever it was, loved the Lord.
Psalm 95:7,8 - "...Today, if you hear his voice, 8-do not harden your hearts as you did at Meribah, as you did that day at Massah in the desert"
A hardened heart is as useless as a hardened lump of clay or a hardened loaf of bread. Nothing can restore it and make it useful. The psalmist warns against hardening our hearts as Israel did in the desert by continuing to resist God's will (Exodus 17:7). They were so convinced that God couldn't deliver them that they simply lost their faith in him. When someone's heart becomes hardened, that person is so stubbornly set in his ways that he or she cannot turn to God. This does not happen all at once; it is the result of a series of choices to disregard God's will. If you resist God long enough, he may toss you aside like hardened bread. Don't resist him.
Psalm 95:11 - "So I declared on oath in my anger, 'They shall never enter my rest.'"
What keeps us from God's ultimate blessings (entering his rest)? Ungrateful hearts, not worshiping or submitting to him, hardening our hearts, testing God because of stubborn doubts. In Hebrews 4:5-11, we are warned not to harden our hearts, but to reject the glamour of sin and anything else that would lead us away from God.
Hebrew 4:4-11 says, "... And on the seventh day God rested from all his work. 5-And again in the passage above he says, 'They shall never enter my rest.' 6-It still remains that some will enter that rest, and those who formerly had the gospel preached to them did not go in, because of their disobedience. 7-Therefore God again set a certain day, calling it Today, when a long time later he spoke through David, as was said before: "Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.'" 8-For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken later about another day. 9-There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God; 10-for anyone who enters God's rest also rests from his own work, just as God did from his. 11-Let us, therefore, make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one will fall by following their example of disobedience"
Psalm 95 / New International Version
ReplyDelete1 Come, let us sing for joy to the Lord;
let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation.
2 Let us come before him with thanksgiving
and extol him with music and song.
3 For the Lord is the great God,
the great King above all gods.
4 In his hand are the depths of the earth,
and the mountain peaks belong to him.
5 The sea is his, for he made it,
and his hands formed the dry land.
6 Come, let us bow down in worship,
let us kneel before the Lord our Maker;
7 for he is our God
and we are the people of his pasture,
the flock under his care.
Today, if you hear his voice,
8 do not harden your hearts as you did at Meribah,
as you did that day at Massah in the desert,,
9 where your fathers tested and tried me;
though they had seen what I did.
10 For forty years I was angry with that generation;
I said, ‘They are a people whose hearts go astray,
and they have not known my ways.’
11 So I declared on oath in my anger,
‘They shall never enter my rest.’”