Hebrews 4:3

For we who have believed do enter into that rest; even as he hath said, As I sware in my wrath, They shall not enter into my rest; although the works were finished from the foundation of the world.

The use of the present tense, "we do enter into that rest," stresses the first and immediate phase of the Christian's rest and focuses the attention of the believer upon the benefits and joys of that Christian service which are already his and in the process of being enjoyed by him. This verse again strikes at the tragic failure of Israel who, though entering Canaan, did not in fact enter into God's rest, in the higher and better sense of becoming a holy nation of righteous and devoted worshipers of God, as God had commanded them (Exodus 19:3-6); but on the other hand, they rebelled against God time and again; they rejected the theocracy, demanded a king like the nations around them, worshipped idols, oppressed the poor, and even made their children pass through the fire to Molech! Thus, while entering a type of God's rest, they failed to attain any reality of it; and furthermore, all this came about in spite of the fact that God was fully prepared to welcome them into such a glorious rest, indeed, had been anticipating it "from the foundation of the world."

What is meant by "the foundation of the world"? The words are used in Hebrews 9:26; Matthew 13:35; 25:34; Luke 11:50; John 17:24; Ephesians 1:4; 1 Peter 1:20; Revelation 13:8; 17:8 and the message these references carry is that God's plans and purposes for people predate the formation of the world itself. "He chose us in him before the foundation of the world" (Ephesians 1:4). And this coincides with Paul's word that "We speak God's wisdom in a mystery, even the wisdom that hath been hidden, which God foreordained before the worlds unto our glory" (1 Corinthians 2:7). All efforts to construe "the foundation of the world" as a reference to its reconstruction following the disaster in Eden must be viewed as incorrect, since, by definition, God's "eternal purpose" (Ephesians 8:11) has existed always, and the world has not. Regarding the efforts of some scholars to lessen the force of this, Bruce said, "The attempt to render it `downfall of the world' and link it with the catastrophic interpretation of Genesis 1:2 cannot be sustained."[2] Dummelow's perception of this is also helpful:

The promise of rest applies to us who are Christians, seeing that those to whom the promise was made failed to attain it. And their failure was not due to the fact that the rest had not been prepared, because it existed since the day that God finished his work of creation. This is proved by the words, "And God rested" in one place, and the words "my rest" in another. God's rest is therefore a fact, and it is clearly his purpose that some shall enter into it.[3]

[2] Ibid., p. 71.

[3] J. R. Dummelow, Commentary on the Whole Bible (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1937), p. 1019,