What Happens When Unbelief Sets In?

“Do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion, in the day of trial in the wilderness, where your fathers tested Me, tried Me, and saw My works forty years. Therefore I was angry with that generation, and said, ‘They always go astray in their heart, and they have not known My ways.’ So I swore in My wrath, ‘They shall not enter My rest’” (Hebrews 3:8-11).

What reason is given for why God’s people were not able to enter his rest? Was it because of adultery, covetousness, drunkenness? No, it was because of unbelief alone. Here was a nation exposed to forty years of miracles, supernatural wonders that God worked on their behalf. In fact, no other people on earth had been so loved, so tenderly cared for.

They received revelation after revelation about the goodness of the Lord. They heard a fresh word preached regularly from Moses, their prophet leader, and yet, they never mixed that word with faith. Therefore, hearing it did them no good. In the midst of all those blessings, they still did not trust God to be faithful, and over time, unbelief set in.

Beloved, unbelief is the root cause behind all hardness of heart. The Scripture goes on, “Now with whom was He angry forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose corpses fell in the wilderness?” (Hebrews 3:17). The people’s unbelief kindled God’s anger against them; moreover, it hardened them into a continual spiral of unbelief: “Beware, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief in departing from the living God … lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin” (3:12-13). 

Unbelief is also the root of all bitterness, rebellion and coldness. That is why Hebrews 3 is addressed to believers. You can be saved, Spirit-filled, and walking holy before God and still be guilty of unbelief. It is so important that we accept his supernatural power by faith and say with confidence, “Do it again, Lord. And let your strength be made perfect in my weakness.”