SCRIPTURE Hebrews 3:7–19 “Wherefore (as the Holy Ghost saith, today if ye will hear his voice, Harden not your hearts, as in the provocation, in the day of temptation in the wilderness: When your fathers tempted me, proved me, and saw my works forty years.  Wherefore I was grieved with that generation, and said, they do alway err in their heart; and they have not known my ways.  So I sware in my wrath, they shall not enter into my rest.  Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God.  But exhort one another daily, while it is called To day; lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin. For we are made partakers of Christ, if we hold the beginning of our confidence stedfast unto the end.  While it is said, today if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts, as in the provocation. For some, when they had heard, did provoke: howbeit not all that came out of Egypt by Moses.  But with whom was he grieved forty years? was it not with them that had sinned, whose carcases fell in the wilderness?  And to whom sware he that they should not enter into his rest, but to them that believed not? So we see that they could not enter in because of unbelief.”  

COMMENTARY This passage, like many others, directly refutes the eternal security claim (again, guaranteed, unconditional) eternal security.  It directly affirms a believer’s ability to depart from the living God through continual sin.  It also teaches we can be hardened through sin.  We are partakers in Christ if (conditional) we hold onto our faith until the end, clearly implying we are lost if we fail to hold fast, and reaffirming that salvation is a process that is not complete until our death or rapture.  Again here we remind ourselves that those who hardened their hearts were the Israelites who started out believers according to God (ex. Exodus 4:31). 

Note that the writer has no doubt believers can “depart from the living God, with the context indicating the result will be loss of salvation.  Rest spoken of here (Greek katapausis) means “the heavenly blessedness in which God dwells, and of which he has promised to make persevering believers in Christ partakers after the toils and trials of life on earth are ended.”  This is yet another verse exposing the error of guaranteed, unconditional eternal security.