26 If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have
received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, 27 but only
a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the
enemies of God. 28 Anyone who rejected the law of Moses died without mercy on
the testimony of two or three witnesses. 29 How much more severely do you think
someone deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God underfoot, who
has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified them,
and who has insulted the Spirit of grace? 30 For we know him who said, “It is
mine to avenge; I will repay,”[d] and again, “The Lord will judge his
people.”[e] 31 It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
Dig Deeper
Have you ever lost something and then begin to search
frantically for it because you’re short on time and need to find it
quickly? I know that I have certainly
done that many times in my life. It’s
funny how when this happens the first thing we tend to do is to think about the
places that our lost item cannot be.
Once we have safely ruled out those places either because we just know
that it cannot be there or because we have already searched there in our haste
and can now rule that area out, we decide that we don’t need to look in those
places. For instance, the other day my
youngest son lost an item that was important to him and could not find it. He immediately came to me for help. After thinking about it for a moment I
suggested that perhaps he had left this favorite jacket of his down at our
church’s building. Well he knew that
simply could not be because he had never taken this item down there. Of that he was certain. So we began to look all over the house and in
our vehicles and spent a great deal of time in so doing. Eventually we gave up and had to resign
ourselves to the fact that his beloved jacket might be gone for ever. The next day I went down to the building to
do a little work and as soon as I walked into the building, there it was draped
over a back pew in the sanctuary. The
one place he had rejected as possible was the precise place that we found the
jacket. It can certainly be foolish to
“know” that something cannot be found somewhere only to be proven wrong
later. But doesn’t it seem like we tend
to find our lost items in the one place you knew that it couldn’t be an awful
lot.
Life is like that in things much bigger than just a lost
jacket or some misplaced keys. Our world
seems full of people that have already determined that “four” cannot be the
answer and then scramble around in life trying to discover what the answer to
“two plus two” is, all the while waxing eloquent and impressing one another
with their vast intelligence. The
problem is that the answer is “four” and no matter how intelligent they
convince themselves that they are, they will never find the actual answer. Everywhere I look I see this phenomenon of
people who have already determined, for a variety of reasons, that Jesus is not
the answer to life that they seek and they arbitrarily reject him. The devastating problem with that is that he
is the only answer. They then struggle
through life looking for answers to the meaning and purpose of life having already
rejected the answer.
The writer of Hebrews, though, has found an even sadder
group than that. He was writing to a
group of people that had embraced Christ as truth and had begun to live the
life to which he called his disciples.
They had been part of his people and embraced the resurrection life of
the people of God. But they had found it
challenging to say the least. They had
watched many of their own number cave into the ongoing daily struggle and the
persecutions and walk away from Christ and his people. Some of them were still wavering with making
the same short-sighted decision. But, as
the writer explains in this section, that would be a tragic mistake of monumental
proportions.
“If we deliberately keep on sinning,” says Hebrews,
“after we have received the knowledge of the truth,” then the only thing left
is “fearful expectation of judgment” because there is no sacrifice for sin for
left. This is truly a frightening
sentence and was no doubt intended as such, but it can have rather dangerous
implications if we don’t read it carefully in context. As a warning of that we only need to look to
many in the 3rd and 4th centuries who developed a doctrine of delaying baptism
to their death beds because of the very point of not reading this passage in
its proper context. They read this
passage universally rather than applying it appropriately within its context
and began to fear that any sin committed after one’s baptism would leave one
locked outside of the forgiveness of Christ with nothing to look forward to
except the frightening judgment of God.
So they began to wait until just before death to be baptized into
Christ.
But the author has carefully defined for us already the
sin to which he is referring in the previous section. He is talking of the one who has drawn near
to God and become part of his people but has failed to hold unswervingly to
that truth and abandoned God’s family due to the persecutions and struggles
that had come as part and parcel of a life in Christ. They were giving up meeting together and
returning, in many cases, to their old religions (whether that was Judaism or
even some of their old pagan beliefs).
The writer then was warning those who were disciples who
were thinking of giving up on Christ. He
had already made clear that Christ was the superior and ultimately the only
true sacrifice for sin. What would that
mean then, if someone abandoned his life and his community of believers, which
was the setting and context for that life to be lived out? It would mean that there was no other path,
no other sacrifice for sin that was available.
Jesus was it and if he was rejected they had better be clear that the
way of Judaism or the pagan gods offered no sacrifice for sin that would bring
them into forgiveness. It is another way
of saying precisely what Jesus declared in John 14:6 when he said that he was
“the way, the truth, and the life” and that the only way to the Father was
through him.
The context was specifically aimed at those who were in
danger of apostasy and abandoning their faith when things got tough, and it is
important to not begin to think that this applies to any sin that believers
might stumble into and become racked with fear of being cast out of God’s
kingdom for the tiniest of infractions. The author does not refer generally to
the sins that we will commit after entering into Christ but the deliberate
choice to abandon that life for our own way or some other path. Although very few Christians these days (at
least in the Western world for right now) will find themselves abandoning the
faith due to persecution, there is still a cogent warning in this passage for
us because there are other reasons that we abandon our faith and begin to seek
our own way or other ways of the wisdom of the world. For those that are toying with that concept,
the point is clear: There is no sacrifice for sin left other than
Christ’s. Two plus two will always equal
four and the only way to find forgiveness of sin is to abide in the life of
Christ no matter how uncomfortable we might find it from a worldly perspective.
This may not be a popular message in the world
today. The only way to salvation is
Jesus Christ. That is it. If you reject that or embrace it and then
abandon it, then the only thing left is the image of the raging fire that will
consume those that set themselves up as God’s enemies. At a certain point God will grant the wishes
of those that choose to reject him or else human will does not matter all. In other words, God respects human choice so
much that he will honor the decision of those that reject him but they will
face the consequences of those choices.
Or as scholar NT Wright so eloquently puts it “If there is no place in
God’s world of justice and mercy for someone who has systematically ordered
their life so as to become an embodiment of injustice and malice, then there
must come a point where—unless God is going to declare that human choices were
just a game and didn’t matter after all—God endorses the choices that his human
creatures have made.”
The author then makes a logical connection to show that
this is only right. None of his readers
would have argued that anyone who willingly rejected the Law of Moses would
face the stern consequences of sin. If
that was true and deserved, then how much more just is it that those that
walked away from the Son of God, trampling him underfoot, and treating his
sacrificed blood as something to be treated with disdain, will face the
consequences of those actions. If
violators of the inferior Covenant faced judgment, how much more fitting that
the violators of the superior Covenant would as well. To do so, after all says the author, is not
some victimless crime. It is a direct
insult of the Spirit of grace.
In verse 30, the author demonstrates the serious nature
of this situation by quoting from two different places in the Song of Moses of
Deuteronomy 32, a passage in which Moses warned Israel by showing them what
God’s judgment looked like upon a people who had turned from him and walked
away from covenant with God. God’s
response to their abandonment of him would be to allow them to experience the
searing judgment of trusting in themselves rather than God. The principles that were true then were just
as true of those who deserted the life of Christ for an easier or seemingly
more comfortable path.
At the end of this longer section, in verse 39, the
author summarizes two groups of people: Those who shrink back, and those who
have faith. In verse 32-38, he will
address those who have faith. But this
passage is a severe warning for those who would shrink back. It is a dreadful thing, he says, using a word
that communicated the concept of sheer terror, to fall into the hands of a
living God. The choice is clear. We can either face the unwavering judgment of
God on our own merits based on our own wisdom of how to live our lives, or we
can put our faith in the life of Christ and be judged according to the perfect
life of the high priest who already sits in the presence of the Father. The choice was theirs to make. It remains the same choice that we have to
make today. Don’t make it lightly.
Devotional Thought
Are you ever tempted to think of following Christ and
remaining loyal to his people as too difficult or something that you are just
not sure you want to do anymore? How
does it help to be reminded of the stark reality that there is no other
sacrifice for sin, no other way to salvation?
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