Friday, August 03, 2012

Hebrews 10:25-31


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?