In Exodus 33:12–13, Moses famously pleads with the LORD to not abandon Israel after her apostasy with the golden calf — but he pleads in a curious manner:

See, you say to me, ‘Bring up this people,’ but you have not let me know whom you will send with me. Yet you have said, ‘I know you by name, and you have also found favor in my sight.’ Now therefore, if I have found favor in your sight, please show me now your ways, that I may know you in order to find favor in your sight. Consider too that this nation is your people.

And what are the LORD’s ways, which he grants that he will show Moses? Verse 14: “My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.”

But Psalm 95 reveals the consequence of the wilderness generation hardening their hearts when the LORD’s presence is among them:

For forty years I loathed that generation and said, ‘They are a people who go astray in their heart, and they have not known my ways.’ Therefore I swore in my wrath, ‘They shall not enter my rest.’

There remains, then, a rest for the people of God — as the writer to the Hebrews remarks; a rest into which the wilderness generation failed to enter, but (as he infers from the later composition of the Psalm) which further generations also did not achieve. The LORD is the rest-giver, and that rest comes with His presence.

So it is striking to turn to St. Matthew’s Gospel and reread those well-loved words of Christ: “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”