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If the real world that God has created includes the reality of divine judgment and vengeance and the terrifying, furious fire of God’s wrath, then honesty and love and wisdom will all include warnings of danger, not just promises of blessing.

Here in the West, we do not want to hear about hard things or hard times. We are soft people. While most of the world watches death every day without morphine or any medical help, and deals with deep gashes and amputations with no antiseptics or stitches, we gag at the sight of dead dog and grumble when 911 takes five minutes to respond instead of three.

We are soft and we are presumptuous. What’s amazing is when it comes to God, all we want to hear is the sweet side the tender side, the warm side, God is love, not the hard side, that God is a God of wrath.

Hebrews 10:31It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

To many believe that the only good motivation comes from hearing about grace, not judgment. And little by little we let that motivational conviction (as unbiblical as it is) creep into our view of God himself, until we have no categories anymore to understand, let alone love, a God whose wrath is a fury of fire against sinners. But the writer of this book of Hebrews will not be silent about the wrath of God.

It is a book utterly devoted to living by faith in future grace. O, the grace of God in this book! Chapter after chapter celebrates the glorious provision of God in Jesus Christ to free us from our sin and turn our future into a paradise of hope.

The book begins and ends with Christ making purification for sins and sitting down at the right hand of God—our perfect sacrifice and priest and shepherd, who will never leave us or forsake us. But, like no other book of the New Testament, this book is also relentless in its warnings about the dangers of carelessness in the Christian life. And the warnings are not that we might forfeit a few heavenly rewards, but that we might forfeit our souls in the fury of God’s wrath.

So here is a book that stands against the motivational assumption that the only motivating news is good news. There is both the promise of joy and the warning of pain. In 2:3, “How shall we escape if we neglect so great a salvation.” 3:11–12, As I swore in my wrath, they shall never enter my rest. Take care, brethren, lest there should be in any one of you an evil, unbelieving heart, in falling away from the living God.” 6:4, 6, “It is impossible to restore again to repentance those who have once been enlightened … if they then commit apostasy … [they are like land that is] worthless and near to being cursed.”

Whatever your view of God, the Creator of the universe and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, if it does not include this, it is a distorted, unrealistic view. God is a God of vengeance, and to fall into his hands is a terrifying thing.

A serious Warning

Hebrews 5:11–6:20

“We have much to say about this, but it is hard to explain because you are slow to learn. In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.

6:1 Therefore let us leave the elementary teachings about Christ and go on to maturity, not laying again the foundation of repentance from acts that lead to death, and of faith in God, instruction about baptisms, the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment. And God permitting, we will do so.

6:4 It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age, if they fall away, to be brought back to repentance, because to their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace.

The Scriptures are full of encouragements to press on, to persevere, to stay the course, and they offer many warnings against falling away, against moving from a position on which one once stood. Technically, that is all apostasy is … the moving away from a position on which one once stood

2:1 Therefore we ought to give the more earnest heed to the things that were heard, lest haply we drift away from them. 2 For if the word spoken through angels proved stedfast, and every transgression and disobedience received a just recompense of reward; 3 how shall we escape, if we neglect so great a salvation? which having at the first been spoken through the Lord, was confirmed unto us by them that heard

1. The peculiar apostasy dealt with in this book is not toward hedonism, not toward relativism, not toward atheism, and not toward postmodernism; it is toward Judaism. It is a going back to the early revelation at the expense of abandoning the exclusive sufficiency of Christ. The closest parallels probably in the New Testament are found in Galatians, although the language is quite different.

2. The second important thing to understand the enormous gravity to the apostasy in this book concerning two things.

First, the emphasis on the seriousness of this falling away, precisely because this gospel is the climatic gospel; in chapter 2. If that covenant produced such massive curses, “How shall we escape if we ignore such a great salvation?” the warning gets stronger and stronger throughout the book. Chapter 10 is blistering in this respect.

Secondly, there is no return. The seriousness works out unambiguously in saying that there is no return from this falling away.

Paul in 1 Corinthians 5 where there is horrible sin, Paul tells them what to do with him, and there is a chance he might repent. Paul doesn’t know how this one is going to turn out. But here, in Hebrews, the whole emphasis is: If you fall away in the order of things I’m depicting (chapter 6 and chapter 10), there is no hope.

Likewise, in chapter 10, equally strongly. Verse 26: “If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire.”

What in general leads to apostasy?

The issue simply is immaturity in listening to, studying, absorbing, and conforming to the Word of God.

“In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk.… Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness.”

what leads to this terrible state of affairs in this context is inattentiveness to the Word of God.

In the context of Hebrews, what this means is the reader should have already been thinking through their Scriptures, the Old Testament Scriptures, in line with the way the author is expounding these themes.

It is the teaching about righteousness, the teaching of the Christian faith, the Christian religion, with Christ as our righteousness as explained from the Old Testament texts themselves properly understood.

That’s what the book has been about. Anybody who is really immature, with their kind of immaturity, wants to go back to the Old Testament types and clearly doesn’t understand the real teaching about righteousness in those texts that point us to Christ our righteousness, Christ who achieves what needs to be achieved and presents us righteous before God.

5: 14, “The mature, who by constant use [of Scripture] have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.” That’s not just good from evil in a moral sense, but also good from evil, I think in the context, in a discernment sense, in a sense of understanding what Scriptures really do teach. That turns in substantial part on being good readers of Scripture, studying the Word again and again and again.

What in this specific case leads to apostasy?

The issue is this.… Are the six things that the author here lists as belonging to the elementary teachings about Jesus essentially Jewish things or essentially elementary Christian things? In reality, they apply to both groups.

“Let us go on to maturity, not laying again, it is passive, let us be borne along to perfection, let us be borne along to maturity.

It means, “Therefore, let us leave in place, leave standing, leave where they are, the elementary teachings about Christ and be borne along by God to maturity, not laying again all this stuff mentioned in the next two verses. And God permitting, this is what we’ll do. That is, we’ll leave these things standing where they are and go on.”

Now what are these things?

What is interesting about them is each of the six items mentioned in verses 1–2 is tied in some way to the high priestly Christology of the following chapters.

Now the difficulty with that interpretation, five things that are then listed. These people were once enlightened, they tasted of the heavenly gift, they were made partakers of the Holy Spirit, they tasted the good Word of God, and they tasted the powers of the coming age. At face value, truly to belong to all of these wonderful things surely marks you out as a Christian, doesn’t it? But that’s always the case.

Already in this book the author has made a very careful distinction between those who were saved from exodus in slavery and those who actually got into the Promised Land. In other words, it was possible for a whole generation to be saved from exodus and, thus, in that sense to participate in salvation and its benefits, but not to get into the Promised Land.

When you start looking around in the Bible, you can find a fair number of examples of that sort of thing, can’t you? There is Judas. He stands among the Twelve, and he’s performing miracles with the best of them and preaching the good news of the kingdom, yet he does not go to heaven.

Then you have the parable of the Sower,

with seed falling on stony ground. Stony ground in Palestine is earth with limestone bedrock not far under the soil, and so when the seed falls in it, because it’s such shallow dirt, then in the spring sunshine that dirt warms up the fastest and the seed there germinates the quickest, but then the first rains stop, the latter rains don’t come for a few months, the roots look down to try to find moisture, they hit the limestone bedrock, and the plant keels over and dies.

Mark 4:13And he saith unto them, Know ye not this parable? and how shall ye know all the parables? 14The sower soweth the word. 15And these are they by the way side, where the word is sown; and when they have heard, straightway cometh Satan, and taketh away the word which hath been sown in them. 16And these in like manner are they that are sown upon the rocky places, who, when they have heard the word, straightway receive it with joy; 17and they have no root in themselves, but endure for a while; then, when tribulation or persecution ariseth because of the word, straightway they stumble. 18And others are they that are sown among the thorns; these are they that have heard the word, 19and the cares of the world, and the deceitfulness of riches, and the lusts of other things entering in, choke the word, and it becometh unfruitful. 20And those are they that were sown upon the good ground; such as hear the word, and accept it, and bear fruit, thirtyfold, and sixtyfold, and a hundredfold.

How does Jesus interpret this?

It’s his parable after all. He says, “These are the ones who when they hear the Word immediately receive it with joy.” The point is not only do they seem converted; they seem to be the most promising of the crop. They have life in some sense. They grow, they germinate, they grow, the plant is there and has life, but because, in fact, they never finally bear fruit, then Jesus lumps them with those where the seed is taken away, snatched away, by the Devil before it germinates at all.

So there is a whole category, it seems in the New Testament for people who receive something of the blessings of the kingdom, who do taste something of the powers of the age to come. have we not seen people under conviction by the Holy Spirit wrestling with their sins and turning from their sins and changing and yet not converted?

What do we do with John 2:23–25? “

Many believed in him. The same that is used for all kinds of expressions of genuine faith. But, “Jesus would not entrust himself to them because he knew what was in man.” He didn’t need anybody to tell him what was there. It wasn’t a genuine conversion.

This is the case of someone who has been brought close enough to taste something of the transforming grace of God, seeing what the gospel truly is, understanding it, believing it, being in some measure cleaned up by it, and then, because there is no grace of perseverance, because that’s not a component of their faith, they look it straight in the eyeball, see it for what it is, and say, I don’t need this, I’ll walk away from it.”

You can’t just go through life saying, “Well, in that case it’s backsliding and in this case it’s apostasy and in this case it’s never genuinely converted at all, just immaturity.” Unless you have a lot more gift of discernment, but it seems that there are enough accumulative texts in the New Testament that preserve this category for special danger,

I think that apostasy in this passage is that special kind of self-removal from where one stood such that after having already enjoyed all of the five blessings listed in verses 4–5, one self-consciously, knowledgably, determinedly, and forever rejects the gospel and one is damned.

How to avoid this danger,

There must be no lack in diligent perseverance on their part. Verse 11. So he encourages them to this again in verse 11. “We want each of you to show this same diligence to the very end, in order to make your hope sure

“We are to imitate those who through faith and patience inherit what has been promised.” What promise? When God made his promise to Abraham. And that has brought us back to the fundamental salvation promise of the old covenant Scriptures; namely, that in Abraham and in his seed all the nations of the earth would be blessed.

That’s why this passage is also in anticipation of the great faith chapter in Hebrews 11, where faith is portrayed as that which intrinsically, if it’s saving faith, which intrinsically perseveres and perseveres and perseveres, and we have all the grounding for that, for God himself has promised. God himself has taken an oath. This is the whole direction of things. How certain can you be after all? Therefore, we have great hope.

What in this specific case leads to apostasy?

In this specific case, judging by the whole book and not just by these verses, there is a desire to go back to the old rites, the old traditions, the old covenant in such a way that their true pointing to Christ is not seen so that one is fixating on the types and not the antitypes, one is fixating on the old covenant and does not see how it is pointing to the new which has now dawned.

As a result, the effect of all of this is to relativize the exclusive sufficiency of Christ and all his work. In that sense, it’s a kind of variation of the Galatian heresy. What it does is, in effect, dismiss the sufficiency of Christ.

We see it in John 8:30–31. in Colossians 1:21–23, but there are many other passages. Jesus says, “He who endures to the end will be saved,”

it seems in all of these cases the New Testament writers, including the writer of the epistle to the Hebrews, insists that genuine saving grace, by definition, perseveres. But that means, then, that where you get a case like this one that does not persevere, you do not, by definition, have persevering grace.

For Whom is there no Longer any Sacrifice for Sins?

Heb 10:26 For if we sin willfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remaineth no more a sacrifice for sins, 27but a certain fearful expectation of judgment, and a fierceness of fire which shall devour the adversaries

The answer is given in two ways in the text. One is to describe what these casualties have become that fits them for judgment, and the other is to describe what they once were which makes their present condition so reprehensible. It’s the contrast that makes their guilt so great.

Verse 26: they go on sinning willfully. Both the tense of the verb (present continuous action in Greek)—they go on sinning—and the word “willfully” show us that it is not any one particular sin in view here. It is the extent and willfulness that is in view here. The unpardonable sin is not a particular kind of sin, but a particular extent and willfulness of sinning against great grace—until one becomes like Esau and cannot repent (12:16–17).

What They Once Were

They had received a knowledge of the truth. Verse 26:

These casualties of wrath who trample the Son of God know the truth. We will all be judged in proportion to the amount of light and truth available to us. These people had received the gospel. They were walking away from Christ in the broad daylight of truth.

Take heed to yourselves. You have received a knowledge of the truth. The Son of God has laid his life down for you to receive as your substitute. You have come under the sway of many sanctifying influences. Do not trample the Son of God or make light of his blood or insult the Spirit of grace that is blowing over your soul even now.