The Shepherd's Warning Text: Psalm 95:8-11
Introduction: When God Speaks
Psalm 95 begins with a great and glorious call to worship. It is corporate, it is loud, it is joyful. The people of God are exhorting one another to come, to sing, to make a joyful noise, to give thanks, to worship, to bow down, to kneel. And the reasons given are massive. We do this because the Lord is a great God, the King over everything. He made the world, from the deepest parts of the earth to the strength of the hills. The sea is His, and His hands formed the dry land. He is our God, and we are His people, the sheep of His pasture.
But then, in the middle of verse 7, the voice changes. The psalm pivots. The sheep have been exhorting the sheep, but now the Shepherd begins to speak directly. And what He has to say is a sharp, sobering, and necessary warning. The call to worship is immediately followed by a demand for obedient hearing. Joyful noise in worship is wonderful, but it must be matched by submissive listening. God is not interested in the songs of those who will not heed His words. This warning is not an afterthought; it is the very heart of the psalm. It is a warning against hearing God's voice and then refusing to obey it. It is a warning against a hard heart.
And this is not a warning that has expired. The author of Hebrews picks up this very passage and applies it directly to the new covenant church. He presses the word "Today" with great urgency. This ancient warning, first given to Israel in the wilderness, is brought forward by David in this psalm, and then brought forward again to Christians. The danger is perennial. The temptation to hear God and then to shrug, to grumble, to test Him, is an ever-present reality. And the consequences are eternally significant. So we must attend to this warning as though it were spoken from heaven to us this morning. Because it is.
The Text
Do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah,
As in the day of Massah in the wilderness,
"When your fathers tried Me,
They tested Me, though they had seen My work.
For forty years I loathed that generation,
And said they are a people who wander in their heart,
And they do not know My ways.
Therefore I swore in My anger,
They shall never enter into My rest.”
(Psalm 95:8-11 LSB)
The Great Prohibition (v. 8)
The Shepherd's warning begins with a direct command, a negative imperative.
"Do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah, As in the day of Massah in the wilderness," (Psalm 95:8)
The central command is "Do not harden your hearts." A hard heart is one that is unresponsive to God's voice. It is stiff-necked, stubborn, and rebellious. It is not a state that someone is simply born with, like having brown eyes. It is an active, culpable condition. You harden your own heart. It happens when you hear the voice of God, you know what He requires, and you refuse. It is a choice. Each time you hear His command and disobey, your heart gets a little harder, a little more calloused, a little less able to hear Him the next time. It is a spiritual sclerosis.
God immediately provides us with two historical examples of this very sin: Meribah and Massah. These names mean "strife" and "testing." They refer to the incident recorded in Exodus 17, when the people, having just been miraculously delivered from Egypt, found themselves without water at Rephidim. Instead of asking God for water, they quarreled with Moses and put God on trial. "Is the LORD among us, or not?" they demanded. This was not a humble inquiry; it was an insolent cross-examination of the Almighty.
This is the very nature of a hard heart. It does not ask God for help; it puts God in the dock. It does not trust His goodness; it demands that He prove Himself, on our terms. The hard heart says, "If God were good, He would not have led me here." The hard heart looks at the circumstance, not the covenant. They had seen God crush the most powerful nation on earth, part the Red Sea, and lead them with a pillar of cloud and fire. But the moment they got thirsty, all of that was forgotten. A hard heart has a very short memory for God's past faithfulness and a very sharp focus on present discomforts.
The Indictment of Unbelief (v. 9)
God continues by explaining precisely what their fathers did at Massah and Meribah.
"When your fathers tried Me, They tested Me, though they had seen My work." (Psalm 95:9)
They "tried" and "tested" Him. This is the language of the courtroom. They were putting God to the proof. The great sin here is unbelief, but it is a particular kind of unbelief. It is unbelief in the face of overwhelming evidence. They tested Him "though they had seen My work." This is the aggravating circumstance. They were not acting out of simple ignorance. They had a mountain of evidence of God's power and His good will toward them. They had seen His work of salvation in Egypt and His work of provision with the manna. Their sin was not a lack of evidence, but a refusal to draw the obvious conclusion from that evidence.
This is why unbelief is a moral issue, not an intellectual one. The problem is not that there is insufficient light; the problem is that men love the darkness. That generation saw God's mighty arm, and they responded by trying to put Him in an arm-wrestling match. They saw His work, and instead of worshipping, they grumbled. This is a profound warning for us. We have seen an even greater work than they did. We have seen the work of God in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We have the completed Scriptures. We have two thousand years of church history. To disbelieve now, to test God now, is to commit the same sin, but with even greater light, and therefore with even greater guilt.
The Divine Reaction (v. 10)
The consequences of this persistent, hard-hearted rebellion were severe. God's reaction is described in stark, personal terms.
"For forty years I loathed that generation, And said they are a people who wander in their heart, And they do not know My ways." (Psalm 95:10)
The word "loathed" is a strong one. It means God was grieved, disgusted, and vexed. This was not a fleeting annoyance. It lasted for forty years, the entire duration of their wandering in the wilderness. This should disabuse us of any notion of God as a detached, impassive deity who is unaffected by the behavior of His creatures. He is a personal God, a covenant Lord, and He is grieved by the rebellion of His people.
He then gives His diagnosis of their condition. First, "they are a people who wander in their heart." Their physical wandering in the wilderness was simply an outward manifestation of their inward state. Their hearts were restless, unstable, and unfaithful. They were spiritually nomadic, never settling their trust upon God. Their affections and allegiances were constantly straying. One day they would praise God, and the next they would be ready to stone His prophet and go back to Egypt.
Second, "they do not know My ways." This is not a statement about their lack of information. They had been given the law. They knew God's commandments. The issue was a relational one. To "know" in the biblical sense is to have intimate, personal fellowship. They did not know His character, His goodness, His faithfulness. They knew His acts, but they did not know His ways (Psalm 103:7). They saw the miracles, but they never came to trust the God who performed them. They were perpetually estranged from Him in their hearts.
The Solemn Oath (v. 11)
The divine reaction culminates in a solemn, unalterable oath. This is the final verdict on that unbelieving generation.
"Therefore I swore in My anger, They shall never enter into My rest.” (Psalm 95:11)
When God swears an oath, the matter is settled. He swore "in His anger," indicating the holy and just nature of His wrath against sin. This was not a capricious outburst, but a settled, judicial sentence against covenant-breaking. And the sentence was this: exclusion from His rest.
Now, what is this "rest"? As the author of Hebrews explains, this has multiple layers of meaning. In the immediate context of Psalm 95, the "rest" was the Promised Land, the land of Canaan. That generation, with the exception of Joshua and Caleb, died in the wilderness. They never entered the land. Their carcasses fell in the desert because of their unbelief.
But the story doesn't end there. Hebrews argues that if the Canaan-rest under Joshua had been the ultimate rest, David would not, centuries later in this psalm, still be speaking of a "Today" to enter God's rest. This means there remains a greater rest for the people of God. This rest is, first, the rest of salvation we enter by faith in Christ. We cease from our own works of self-righteousness and rest in His finished work. Second, there is the weekly foretaste of that rest in our corporate Lord's Day worship. And ultimately, there is the final, heavenly rest of the new heavens and the new earth. The warning is that a hard heart, a heart of unbelief, will exclude you from all of it. The path that begins with grumbling in the wilderness ends with being barred from the Promised Land. The principle holds. Unbelief forfeits rest.
Conclusion: Today
The central thrust of this passage is its immediacy. The Shepherd speaks "Today." The warning is for the person hearing the voice of God right now. The temptation is always to put it off, to think that this warning is for someone else, or for another time. But the danger of a hardening heart is that it is a gradual process. No one decides to become an apostate overnight. It begins with small disobediences, with tolerated grumbling, with putting God to the test in little ways.
This is why the New Testament takes this passage so seriously. "Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called 'today,' that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin" (Hebrews 3:12-13).
The antidote to a hard heart is a soft heart, a heart of faith. And faith comes by hearing the word of Christ. When you hear His voice today, whether it is a call to repentance, a command to obey, or a promise to trust, do not harden your heart. Do not put Him to the test. Do not look at your circumstances and ask, "Is the Lord among us or not?" Look to Christ, who is the ultimate proof that the Lord is with us and for us. He is our rock, He is our salvation, and He is our rest. Believe Him. Enter that rest today, while it is still called today.