This past year I faced a bit of a dilemma.
My high school class, the class of 1970, was planning to celebrate its 50-year class reunion. I was invited. Would I go?
That wasn’t the real dilemma. The real dilemma was that my spiritual father was on the organizing committee—yes, the fellow who led me to Christ. That wouldn’t normally be a problem, except that he no longer counts himself to be a Christian. After following Christ for 20 years, leading dozens and perhaps even hundreds of people to Christ Himself, he fell away. And fall from grace has, if anything, been more colossal than his success in following Christ. By all accounts he has committed innumerable unspeakable sins and has resisted all attempts to call him back to the faith. And the main reason I was considering going to the reunion was to attempt to return the favor that He provided me with when we were 17—when he pursued me for Christ’s sake. And I now wanted to pursue him for Christ’s sake.
The question is an example of a larger question that probably affects most of us in one way or another. What is our proper response to those we know who seem to have fallen away from Christ?
Although, that’s not the primary concern of the writer to the Hebrews in Hebrews 6, the subject is at least touched upon. His primary concern, though, in the passage is to again to warn those of us who might be contemplating abandoning Christ ourselves not to even think about it. And in what is no doubt the most controversial, difficult to interpret passage in all of the New Testament, this is what I think he’s saying: Watch out. Don’t fall away or you may make an irreversible spiritual decision with great eternal consequence.
As I looked over my seminary notes from 35 years ago this week, I noticed the professor said that this passage is an exegetical nightmare—that is, it is an absolute nightmare to properly interpret and understand. Biblical scholars are not merely split on what this passage means, they are splintered and smashed into many different pieces because of the great difficulties in interpreting this passage. One commentary I looked at listed at least 10 different suggested interpretations.
So, of course, this morning, I’m going to resolve all those controversies and settle once and for all time what God is really trying to say here. (You should be laughing at this point!) If not, you’re a little naïve. The best I can tell you is I will give it my best shot. And I’m sure that God does have a lesson for all of us this morning—and it is this—Don’t even think about falling away from the faith. The consequences may well be irreversible and deadly.
Now before we go any further, I must simply confess, the subject is also very sobering. As we enter into our meditation on this passage, it’s good to keep a few other passages in mind. For instance, the Parable of the Prodigal Son tells us God is always willing, even incredibly eager, to welcome a straying child back into the fold. And II Peter 3:9 says, “God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.”
The writer of Hebrews has just been urging his readers to stop being baby Christians, to graduate from spiritual milk to solid food and so seek to mature in Christ in chapter 5. Now He wants to give them some solid food, some spiritual meat, but is concerned they may not be able to digest it. And so he tells them they must move ahead spiritually—they must leave behind the basics of the Christian faith to move ahead spiritually.
And that’s his point to us—Move ahead spiritually. Make spiritual maturity your goal. Don’t be satisfied to know the basics of the Christian faith. Don’t stand still in your understanding. Always be striving to grow spiritually, and to become mature.
Hebrews 6:1: “Therefore, leaving the elementary teachings about the Christ, let us press on to maturity, not again laying a foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God.”
Now imagine building a house, but never putting up the super-structure. You start with the foundation, and then go back and lay another foundation on the foundation. Foundation upon foundation upon foundation! Where do you end up in the winter? Without a house to live in! Without walls and roof to protect you from the elements. The reason these believers were vulnerable to apostasy is that after all these years as believers they were still sitting on a foundation rather than in the house that was supposed to be built upon it that would protect them from the dangers of exposure.
And what does the foundation of the Christian life consist of? For the most part, just what you and I would think. The first two items mentioned in verse one are both essential to salvation: Repentance from dead works is repentance from sin which causes death. Repentance and faith in Christ are necessary for salvation. How much more basic can you get? As Jesus himself said in Mark 1:15 both are necessary for salvation, though at other times one is mentioned and not the other. But in Mark 1:15 we find Jesus making this statement: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.”
Add to that a third, which you might find surprising as we find it translated in the New American Standard Version. “Of instructions about washings.” Washings is an appropriate, yet in this context, confusing translation of the Greek word baptismos, plural for baptism. We would expect baptism to be referred to here. What’s the next issue after faith and repentance? Acts 2:38 tells us it’s baptism, as does the Great Commission.
And then there’s an issue that might not be expected today—the laying on of hands in verse 2. Clearly, the laying on of hands was a pretty important issue in Jesus’ ministry and the early church, and perhaps ought to be more so in our day. Hands were laid on people by Jesus to pray for and to heal people, and thereafter by apostles and others; also the New Testament teaches laying hands on people to commission them to certain offices and ministries, and for the impartation of spiritual gifts. And then in the rest of verse two we find reference to teachings or instructions about the resurrection of the dead and eternal judgment--in other words, heaven and hell. How can you hardly preach the Gospel without a reference to the eternal consequence or benefit of coming to faith in Christ? Of course, these teachings involve more than heaven and hell, but these are essential and very basic teachings with regard to the Christian life. They are an essential part of the Gospel presentation. They ought to be a part of a Newcomers Class—foundations of the faith. But the writer of the Hebrews is exhorting us not to be satisfied with them—to leave those teachings behind and begin to partake of spiritual meat and grow.
The best antidote to falling away, or falling backward in the Christian life, is to have some forward momentum.
The story is told of a teacher with 25 years of experience who was passed over for a promotion to an administrative post for another teacher with 10-years-experience. When she complained to her boss about why she had been passed over when she had 25 years of experience, her boss corrected her and told her, “no, you have had one year of experience 25 times over.” She had never been committed to growth, and so she had remained stagnant, and had not profited as she should have from all years of experience as a teacher.
So that’s the question for you. Is your maturity commensurate with your age or experience as a believer? If not, perhaps it’s that you haven’t set a goal and made efforts to really grow spiritually. May I encourage you to do so—not to be satisfied with the status quo but seek to excel all the more for God’s glory, for your good and for eternal reward. Commit to a Bible study, spend time consistently in the Word, be willing to serve and edify others, seek to bear fruit 30-, 60- and 100-fold, join us for prayer this evening. Don’t settle for less. Standing still can be dangerous, you may fall back, or fall away. This is God’s will for you—to move ahead spiritually to spiritual maturity. To never become complacent.
And the writer concludes this exhortation to leave the basics behind and move on with this odd statement: “And this we will do, if God permits.” It’s once again the intensive word for “if”—if indeed, in other words, all this is dependent on God and the openness as well of these who have become dull of hearing. It perhaps points to the fact that it’s hard to get someone moving spiritually who has determined to sit on the sidelines for too long. Get moving if that applies to you. It may take a miracle, but God can pull it off, if you’ll cooperate.
Now for the deep waters, in every respect. The heart of the exhortation, the heart of the warning of the Book of Hebrews is really right here: Beware, falling away can constitute irreversible, spiritual, and eternal suicide. Yes, you heard me right: Watch out. Falling away from Christ can constitute irreversible spiritual and eternal suicide.
Now, again, I’m not saying a true believer can lose his salvation. However, if someone wants to take that position, this is one of the strongest passages that could be used to argue that position in all of the New Testament. And for that reason it is one of the most controversial. However, as I’ve stated many times, my view of the Book of Hebrews is that it’s stating that if someone falls away from the faith he was never really saved in the first place, in accord with the clear statements of Hebrews 3:6 and 3:14 and many other New Testament passages.
However, the major difficulty here is that the passage admits to the very clear possibility that a person who has experienced some of the very things that other passages of Scripture tell us are exclusively the experience of true believers may fall away.
It also seems to emphatically state that a person who apparently falls away from the faith cannot be renewed to repentance, that they cannot return to Christ.
So, it will take a minute to explain and try to sort all of this out.
Verses 4-6: “For in the case of those who have once been enlightened and have tasted of the heavenly gift and have even made partakers of the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the good word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away, it is impossible to renew them again to repentance, since they again crucify to themselves the Son of God and put Him to open shame.”
Now the passage gives us five specific experiences that we think are exclusive to true believers: 1. They have been enlightened. In other words they have seen the light. We equate this with conversion to Christ, and so does the New Testament in most other places including Hebrews 10:32. It’s admitting that these who fall away have, at some point bene enlightened.
2. They have tasted the heavenly gift. What is the gift? Probably the gift of salvation, or perhaps the gift of the Holy Spirit. We might think that the verb tasted means they haven’t fully experienced this gift, but the same word is used in Hebrew 2:9 with regard to Christ’s experience of death, and certainly He fully experienced death.
3. “And have been made partakers of the Holy Spirit”: Wow, this sure sounds like a true believer. Romans 8:9 says that if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, He does not belong to Him. It seems to be the very issue that separates believer from unbeliever—the indwelling Spirit versus being devoid of the Spirit.
4. “Having tasted the good word of God:” In other words, these people have experienced the blessings of hearing, believing and apparently, to some degree, obeying the Word of God, again, something we equate with being a true believer as I John 2:3 tells us, obeying God’s commands is a sign of being a believer.
5. “And the powers of the age to come”—I take it that this refers to answers to prayer, God’s power, perhaps even the experience of miracles.
And so, I have to admit, boy, this sure makes it sound like a true believer is in view here—that a true believer can fall away. In fact, at this moment, you might question why I doubt it, given the evidence given here. It’s because of clear statements made elsewhere, such as by Jesus Himself in John 10:27-29: “My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me; and I give eternal life to them, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of My hand. “My Father, who has given to Me, is greater than all; and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s Hand. I and the Father are one.” That’s a pretty plain statement—I give them eternal life and they shall never perish. And likewise John 6:37: “All that the Father gives Me will come to me and the one who comes to Me I will certainly not cast out.” And places like Romans 8:35-39 which tell us that nothing can separate us from the love of Christ.
So how do I explain this? Well, first, it’s evident from this that the one sign of salvation that trumps all other potential signs of salvation is persevering in the faith. It is he who endures to the end who shall be saved. The faith that perseveres is the faith that saves, even if a person has apparently shared in all these other Christian experiences to one degree or another.
The second is that God knows what we don’t know. He knows the real condition of a person’s heart. He alone knows whether a person has fully repented of his sins, whether there is an issue of idolatry, where something or someone is loved more than Christ, and whether a person has really counted the cost of following Christ. He also knows the future, so that in the eternal counsel of God, though He may have granted every other grace that typically comes with salvation, He alone knows whether a person truly belongs to Him or not, and what the ultimate outcome in His life will come to be.
And my third thought is this: Judas Iscariot fooled everybody—but Jesus. He went on preaching missions with the 12 and the 70, he healed the sick and cast out demons just like the other disciples, he experienced the powers of the age to come, and yet with all that experience and evidence of the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit in His life, Jesus knew all along that he was unsaved, and he fell away never to return to Christ.
And my fourth point, though this is difficult to reconcile with the rest of my Biblical theology, it matches fully with my experiential theology. Sadly, as I’ve mentioned before, I have repeatedly been involved with other apparent believers who, from all that I could tell, had all the same experiences of salvation blessings that I had, were greatly used of God in the lives of many, and even my own, who have fallen away, and apparently permanently, after years of following Christ.
So, may a true believer fall away? Now, not permanently, in my view. An apparent believer may permanently fall away, but because he was never a true believer in the first place. I hang my hat on I John 2:19: “They went out from us, but they were not really of us; for if they had been of us, they would have remained with us; but they went out, so that it would be shown that they all are not of us.” Did you notice what it says: “For if they had been of us, they would have remained with us.” The very fact that they went out from us demonstrates, then, that they were not really of us. And this is consistent with the Book of Hebrews itself, as Hebrews 3:14 puts it:
“For we have become partakers of Christ, if we hold fast the beginning of our assurance firm until the end.” Based on this, therefore, an unbeliever may share an amazing array of experiences that we think exclusively belong to Christians, but his apostasy ultimately demonstrates He was never saved, never truly a believer.
Along these lines I like what the writer of Bible.org says about apparent believers who fall away: “As individuals who leave their faith behind tell their stories, we often see that they gradually grew uncomfortable with and eventually rejected aspects of Christian culture. They knew for quite a while that they were going through the motions and simply “playing along” with Christianity. After a while, these individuals accepted that they lacked a deep or connected sense of truth. They didn’t change their ideology, per se, only their identification.
For most of those who turn their backs on God, losing faith really means recognizing they never had faith to begin with. What they had was a vague intellectual agreement with some of the tenets of the gospel, some family traditions, some social connections, and (in the high-profile cases) a bright career path. But, when questions arose, they didn’t have actual faith or trust in the Savior. By and large, that’s the reason people who once identified as Christians change their minds. It’s not that they were true believers, then stopped; it’s that they came to embrace the fact that they were never true believers at all.”
What I have found in the cases I’m familiar with is that there is a latent idolatry among those who fall away. There is always something they loved or valued more than Christ, and that constitutes idolatry. And when they were tested, by means of persecution, or the typical difficulties of life, the tests revealed that they had not really counted the cost, that they had not really fully died to self or to a sin, and that when following Christ involved abandoning their idola, they refused and revealed what had been truly in their hearts, what they had really worshipped all along. In other words, they wanted Christ only as long as Christ gave them what they really wanted, and when it became apparent that the two weren’t compatible, they abandoned Christ for who or what they really worshiped.
Now I know that won’t satisfy everybody, but I confess, that’s the best I can do. If we take what this passage plainly states, there remains a real danger for those who are only apparently believers. We can fall away.
But then there’s another sobering consequence to consider. It’s found in verse 6: “It is impossible to renew them again to repentance, since they again crucify to themselves the Son of God and put Him to open shame.”
Now I confess I swallow hard when I read this. That’s because I pray every day for some people who appear to have fallen away. I even make attempts, substantial attempts, to win them back to Christ.
And then I also have questions. What about all the disciples that fell away? All 12 disciples fell away, and that’s precisely how Jesus describes what happened to them. We know Judas never repented. But the other 11, who fell away both in belief, profession, and practice after Jesus’ arrest and before His crucifixion, absolutely fully fell away, for three days. And yet they all repented, Jesus fully forgave them all, and commissioned them for a ministry that changed the world!
So what in the world do we make of this? I told you this passage was an interpretive nightmare. And there’s no easy out in the text, that I can see. It is a plain statement that the one who falls away cannot be renewed to repentance!
Again, this is the best I can do, and I haven’t seen anything better. The writer to the Hebrews is speaking to the specific situation of his readers and their specific background. They had apparently been believers for years, even decades. They were over a period of time contemplating the possibility of abandoning Christ for an easier life. Their abandonment of Christ would not be sudden, the result of a horrific crisis, as the disciples suddenly experienced when their Messiah was crucified. Rather it would be a carefully calculated determined abandonment of Christ, knowing full well they would be identifying with the very community and spiritual leaders who had condemned and crucified Christ in the first place, and in so doing they would have repudiated Christ and sided with those who fully still believed his crucifixion was totally justified and appropriate. And by their public repudiation of Christ they would again be subjecting the one who had died for their sins to open shame in the eyes of all the believers and unbelievers who watched the spectacle of their apostasy. What a shame!
And in rejecting Christ after their own experience of the clear convicting power of the Holy Spirit in their lives they would be guilty of the same sin as the spiritual leaders of Israel—the unpardonable sin of rejecting the obvious work of the Holy Spirit who had undeniably revealed that Christ was their Messiah, Savior and Lord and the only source of their salvation.
So the question becomes today, when does a person cross that line. When does a person ultimately and finally commit the unpardonable sin of fully rejecting Christ despite the Holy Spirit’s clear revelation of His identity? Well, I suppose, God only really knows. But I suspect that the circumstances would be something akin to that of these Hebrew Christians being addressed here. They had had years of following Christ, probably as adults, they had experienced the blessings of the Holy Spirit, the Word, and answered prayer. And despite all of that, they had long contemplated and carefully calculated their departure from Christ, despite the fact that they knew they were crucifying Christ to themselves all over again and exposing Him to open shame.
Do I still pray for some who have abandoned Christ? Yes, all the time. But for some others, not so much, whom I deem to have abandoned Christ after sufficient experience of Him, the Word, and the Holy Spirit so that they knew better but did it anyway.
But the concern of the writer is not those who have fallen, but those who have not, and may be considering it, and that could be any of us here. And He’s saying, don’t even think about. Because it could well mean spiritual and eternal suicide.
And to emphasize he brings an illustration in verses seven and eight. An illustration from agriculture that teaches us this: Recognize unfruitfulness results in a fiery end. Yes, a sobering illustration. Unfruitfulness in a Christian’s life results in a fiery end, an end characterized by the judgment of god.
“For ground that drinks the rain which often falls on it and brings forth vegetation useful to those for whose sake it is also tilled, receives a blessing from God; but if it yields thorns and thistles, it is worthless and close to being cruised, and it ends up being burned.”
The illustration is from the practice of farmers who having watered and tilled their land find that all it produces is thorns and thistles, rather than the harvest they desired. To eliminate the thorns and thistles and the seeds they produce, they burn the whole parcel. Now they burn it to re-seed it the next season, but I find it significant that that part of the process is not mentioned here. This was clearly not intended to be a comfort for anyone who was contemplating falling away from Christ, but it was intended as a stark warning, a warning that by the way, is completely in keeping with Christ’s own words as found in John 15:5-6: “ I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing. 6 If anyone does not abide in Me, he is thrown away as a branch and dries up; and they gather them and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.”
Though the passage may be controversial, its intent is not. It’s a very sobering warning. Don’t fall away, for if you do you may be committing an irreversible and eternal suicide.
