“This people honor Me with their lips, but their heart is far away from Me. But in vain do they worship Me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men.”
Mark 7:6-7
We often don’t see worship as eternally significant. But God says to us, “We can either worship Him with great joy or harden our hearts and perish”.
Psalm 95 urges us to worship God, why we do, and what happens when we don’t. Verses 7b-8a tells us, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts…” Before we write this off as Old Testament, the writer of Hebrews quotes this directly in verses 7-8 and again in verse 15. In between those two verses is this gem, “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 3:13.
Israel’s wilderness wanderings were due to their heart wanderings. In the Bible, the heart refers to our total inner being—the mind, the emotions, and the will. Paul tells us that these things happened (the Old Testament) as examples for our instruction, so that we would not fall into the same sins (1 Corinthians 10:5, 11).
It would be wonderful to focus on the first half of this Psalm, but we need to be reminded of the consequences found in the last verses of this Psalm. Worship God – or perish!