"7 Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says,
“Today, if you hear his voice,
8 do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion,
on the day of testing in the wilderness,
9 where your fathers put me to the test
and saw my works for forty years.
10 Therefore I was provoked with that generation,
and said, ‘They always go astray in their heart;
they have not known my ways.’
11 As I swore in my wrath,
‘They shall not enter my rest.’”
Hebrews 3:7-11
These words bring us to the second warning of the epistle. The quotation is from Psalm 95:8-11 and the words 'provocation' and 'temptation' are rendered in the RSV as they are in the original, Meribah and Massah. They refer to incidents that took place in the experience of Israel (see Exodus 17:7) in which they murmured against the Lord in their unbelief (see also Numbers 20:13). The former reference stands almost at the beginning of the wilderness journey whereas the latter is at the end. This may be the force of the mention of forty years in 9. The fact is that all the way through the wilderness the Israelites were characterised with this attitude of unbelief. We may recall that Stephen, when giving his masterly summing up of Israel's history in Acts 7, ended with the words 'Ye stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart, ye do always resist the Holy Ghost: as your fathers did, so do ye'. This was the simple truth about the Jews down their long history, and it is this propensity that our Apostle is warning them against here. And the force of the warning is this: If when Moses was disobeyed in the wilderness, disaster befell the people, how much more disastrous will it be if the voice of Him Who is greater than Moses, even Christ, is neglected and disobeyed?