Psalm 95:8

“For he is our God” is the reason for everything around it. The first half of the psalm calls us to worship because he is our God, and the second half calls us to listen for the same reason. The word for God, ʼĕlôhîym, is plural in form, and when it names the true God it is a plural of majesty that speaks of the fullness of the one God, with its verbs usually singular. To say “our God” is to speak of a covenant. He has bound himself to his people, and they belong to him.

The word for pasture, mirʻîyth, means pasturage, and it can also mean the flock that feeds there, so “the people of his pasture” are the flock God himself feeds and keeps safe. The word for sheep, tsôʼn, is a collective word for a flock of sheep or goats. The hand, yâd, is the open hand, and Scripture uses it for power, means and direction. Sheep “of his hand” are under his own care, led, fed and guarded by his power, and wholly dependent on him for their welfare and their way.

Shepherding was everyday work in Israel, and the shepherd was a familiar picture of a leader who provides for those in his care, protects them and guides them. For Israel the picture spoke of God’s tender care, his provision and his protection, and the trust it calls for is the trust of Psalm 23. Jesus takes up the picture when he calls himself the good shepherd who gives his life for the sheep (John 10:11), and Peter says that believers have returned to the Shepherd and Bishop of their souls (1 Peter 2:25).

This comes before the warning, and the order matters. The people who are told to hear his voice already belong to him, and the privilege of being his flock carries with it the call to listen to the Shepherd.

Here the psalm turns from praise to warning. The verb shâmaʻ means to hear with understanding and attention, and it often carries the sense of obeying what is heard. The word for voice, qôwl, is a voice or sound, a call made aloud. To hear his voice is to take in what God says and to act on it with a willing heart.

“To day” makes the call urgent. The word yôwm is the ordinary word for a day, and here it fixes the hearing in the present. God’s call is answered now, while he is speaking, and the “if” lays the choice before us. Delay is dangerous, because a person who puts off obeying grows less sensitive to God’s voice over time, and that is the hardening the next verse warns against. God speaks to us today through his written Word, through the conviction of his Spirit and through the wise counsel of his people.

The letter to the Hebrews quotes this line as it opens its warning to believers (Hebrews 3:7–19), and it returns to the same “To day” when it speaks of the rest that remains (Hebrews 4:7–11).

“Harden not your heart” is a direct command, and it lays on us the responsibility for how we answer God. The verb qâshâh means to be hard, difficult or severe, and Scripture uses it of hardship, severity, suffering and stubbornness. Said of the heart, it means stubbornness toward God: a will that refuses to bend, to repent or to believe, often out of pride, fear or a wish to rely on oneself.

The heart, lêbâb, is the innermost part of a person. In Scripture it is the whole inner life, taking in the thoughts and understanding, the will and its decisions, the feelings and desires, and the moral character. A hardened heart is that whole inner self, mind, will and affections, set against God’s working.

In daily life hardening looks like ignoring the Holy Spirit when he convicts us of something that must change, or refusing to forgive when the Lord commands it (Matthew 6:14–15). It looks like knowingly disobeying his commands to love God and our neighbour (Matthew 22:37–39), when Jesus says that those who love him keep his commandments (John 14:15). It shows in resisting the parts of Scripture that cross our own desires, and in growing cold toward prayer, worship and fellowship. It usually comes gradually, and each refusal leaves the heart less able to hear the next time.

From verse 9 to the end of the psalm, God himself speaks: “tempted me”, “my work”, “my ways”, “I sware”, “my rest”. The “fathers”, ʼâb, a word for a father or a forefather, are the generation that came out of Egypt and travelled through the wilderness, and their story stands as a warning for every generation after them.

“Tempted” is nâçâh, to test or try. When people tempt God, they challenge his power, his faithfulness or his presence out of distrust, and demand that he prove himself on their terms. “Proved” is bâchan, a word used especially for testing metals, and more generally for examining something closely. With both verbs together the fathers put God on trial, as if he were metal to be assayed and found wanting.

“And saw my work” is the heart of the charge. The noun pôʻal means a deed or work, and here it is all that God had done for them. The verb râʼâh is the ordinary word for seeing. They had watched the plagues in Egypt (Exodus 7), walked through the Red Sea (Exodus 14), eaten the manna and the quail (Exodus 16), drunk the water from the rock at Rephidim (Exodus 17:6) and followed the pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night. Their testing came with all of that before their eyes. God’s works are the ground for trusting him, and faith comes when a humble heart answers what it has seen. God sums up their record when he says that they had tempted him ten times and would never see the land he swore to their fathers (Numbers 14:22–23).

The forty years are the years of wandering after the exodus. The journey to the promised land was meant to be short, and unbelief made it long. At Kadesh the people refused to go up into the land (Numbers 14), murmuring and rebelling against the leaders God had given them (Numbers 14:1–4). God then decreed that the whole adult generation, those twenty years old and upward, would die in the wilderness, all except Joshua and Caleb, and that their children would wander there forty years (Numbers 14:20–35).

Moses later told Israel that God had led them those forty years in the wilderness to humble them and to prove them (Deuteronomy 8:2–3). The wilderness was a place of testing and of revelation, where Israel was to learn to depend wholly on the LORD and to take his covenant to heart.

“Was I grieved” is qûwṭ, which properly means to cut off, and figuratively to detest or loathe, and it is also used of being grieved. The KJV’s “grieved” carries that strength: a deep and lasting displeasure with a people who kept rebelling. God’s displeasure is personal. He had bound himself to them, and their unfaithfulness touched him. “This generation” is dôwr, an age or a generation of people.

“Sware” is shâbaʻ, the word for taking an oath. When God swears, he binds himself to his word, and what he swears is certain and final. The oath was spoken in the wilderness itself (Numbers 14:28–30), and Moses recalls it in Deuteronomy 1:34–36. Hebrews quotes it with the rest of these verses (Hebrews 3:7–11).

“Wrath” is ʼaph, a word that properly means the nose or nostril and came to mean anger, from the hard breathing of someone stirred with passion. God’s wrath is his holy and just anger against persistent sin and against the rejection of his covenant, and it shows his holiness and his faithfulness to his own word.

“My rest” is mᵉnûwchâh, repose, quiet, a settled resting, and the word can also mean consolation. To “enter”, bôwʼ, is the ordinary verb for going or coming in. For the wilderness generation God’s rest was the land of Canaan, promised to Abraham’s descendants, where they would have peace and security after their wandering and their battles. The generation that hardened their hearts died outside it, and the LORD gave rest in the land to their children under Joshua (Joshua 21:44). To be shut out of this rest was to lose the blessing God had prepared and promised.

The letter to the Hebrews builds much of Hebrews 3 and Hebrews 4 on these verses. After quoting them it warns believers against the unbelief and disobedience of the wilderness generation (Hebrews 3:12–19), and then it shows that Canaan was a shadow of a deeper rest (Hebrews 4:1–11). That rest is peace with God through faith, a ceasing from the striving to make ourselves righteous, and at the last the eternal rest of God’s presence. Those who have believed enter into it (Hebrews 4:3), for “There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God” (Hebrews 4:9). Hebrews shows Jesus to be greater than Moses and Joshua, the greater Joshua who leads his people into the rest that remains.

Jesus offers this rest himself: “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28–30). Its fullness is the new heavens and new earth, where God wipes away every tear and death is no more (Revelation 21:4).

God has spoken to us by his Son (Hebrews 1:1–2), the Word made flesh (John 1:14), so the voice this psalm calls us to hear is heard most clearly in Jesus. He says, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me” (John 10:27), and of those same sheep, “neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand” (John 10:28–29). The people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand are gathered into Christ’s flock and kept by his hand.

Where Israel tested God in the wilderness, Jesus was tempted in the wilderness and trusted his Father perfectly (Matthew 4:1–11). Where the fathers had come to know nothing of God’s ways, Jesus is himself “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6), through whom we come to know the Father. He was obedient unto death, even the death of the cross (Philippians 2:8), and he is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29).

The hard heart is the deepest human trouble in these verses, and God promised its cure through Ezekiel. He would take away the heart of stone, give a heart of flesh and put his Spirit within his people so that they would walk in his statutes (Ezekiel 36:26–27). That is the new covenant (Jeremiah 31:31), secured by Christ’s atoning work, in which the Spirit makes us able to hear God’s voice and answer it with a soft and obedient heart. The fathers saw God’s work and still doubted, and Jesus tells us the work God asks of us, which is to believe on the one he has sent (John 6:28–29).

These verses hold God’s warning and his kindness together. The God who swore in his wrath is the God who calls himself our God and keeps us as the sheep of his hand, and the warning itself is the Shepherd’s care, spoken so that his flock will listen. He showed Israel his works, bore with them for forty years, and kept his word both when he judged that generation and when he gave their children the land. In Christ he has opened a rest that remains for his people, and his voice still speaks in his Word. The “To day” of this psalm is still today.