Hebrews 6:1-8

6 Therefore let us move beyond the elementary teachings about Christ and be taken forward to maturity, not laying again the foundation of repentance from acts that lead to death,[a] and of faith in God, 2 instruction about baptisms, the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment. 3 And God permitting, we will do so.

4 It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, 5 who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age 6 and who have fallen[c] away, to be brought back to repentance. To their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace. 7 Land that drinks in the rain often falling on it and that produces a crop useful to those for whom it is farmed receives the blessing of God. 8 But land that produces thorns and thistles is worthless and is in danger of being cursed. In the end it will be burned.

Dig Deeper

Recently I was going to a location that I had never been to before and, unfortunately I didn’t have my GPS with me, so I had to try to figure out how to find the building I was looking for on my own.  I was looking for a particular road to turn on and couldn’t find it.  After a time I became convinced that I was heading the wrong way and so I turned around.  I talked myself into the fact that when I had turned onto the road that I was currently on that I had turned the wrong way, so I turned around and headed back the other way.  I had traveled almost a mile on that road so I had to go back the mile, then go through the intersection heading in the opposite direction and begin searching for the road that I wanted.  The problem that I didn’t realize at that moment was that I had been going the right direction in the first place.  In fact, as I found out later, the road I was looking for was only a few blocks beyond the point where I gave up and turned around to head in the other direction.    The reality was that I had given up on the right way, becoming convinced that it was not the right way.  I turned around and started in the wrong direction, thinking that I would find my destination in the other direction.  I could have headed in that other direction for hours and would never have found where I was going because I had already given up going in the right direction.

This passage in Hebrews must surely be considered among the more hotly debated and easily misunderstood passages in the entire Bible.  At the heart of this passage is the confounding statement that seems, at first glance, to be saying that once someone falls away from their discipleship that they can never be restored.  Is that what Hebrews was saying to his first audience?  Did he really intend to say that you get but one chance at this life in Christ and if you stumble away once, then don’t bother trying to come back?  Or was that not exactly what the author was driving across to his first audience?  When we take this passage within the entirety of the context of the letter and consider carefully what the author actually says, we will see that his point not all that different from the above illustration.

In the midst of a majestic section showing how Jesus is the superior high priest that God had always promised his people and that he was not just superior to the Aaronic priesthood but completely different from them, coming from the line of Melchizedek, the author of Hebrews broke in to face a harsh reality.  The deeper truths he wanted to teach them about the identity of the Messiah and how that worked out in their life of faith, he couldn’t because they had grown spiritually dull.  They had taken their eyes off of the important things like who Jesus was and what he was trying to accomplish in and through them, and were focusing on other things such as the persecutions that they were facing and the pressure to return to their old lives outside of Christ.  The author chided his audience as only a good friend could do.  They should be teachers who were delving deeply into God’s word, living it our in their lives, and sharing those truths with others.  But instead they were struggling with baby Christian issues like staying faithful.  How can you move onto maturity if you’re still struggling with basic things?  How can you learn to drive a car when you still haven’t learned to walk?

In challenging them, he urged them to leave the basics of becoming a Christian and mentioned six specific areas, calling them the elementary teachings, which was a way of saying the basic principles or the ABC’s of the faith.  The first area is the repentance that they entered into when they chose the life of Christ.  To understand the author’s line of thinking we have to realize that for them, repentance was more than just an act, it was a new way of life.  It was another way of saying “dying to one’s self.”  To enter into the repentance of Christ was to leave the way of life that led to death and go in the other direction towards the life of the age to come.  The second and third areas were inseparable from one another and deeply connected to the first: faith in God and baptism. To have faith was to demonstrate their repentance and embrace the life of Christ, trusting in it and entering into it.  Their baptisms were the point when they entered into that life of repentance (Some newer translations have changed “baptisms” here to “ritual washings” claiming that the plural state of the word might indicate that the author was referring to the different cleansing rituals of the Jews, but the simpler solution is simply to realize that he is addressing the community as a whole so to refer to instructions about their “baptisms” makes sense).  Closely on the heals of repentance, faith, and baptism came the fourth area, that of the laying on of hands, which probably referred both the early Christian practice of laying hands on a newly baptized person, accepting them into the community and the apostolic practice of passing on miraculous gifts of the Spirit through the laying on of hands.

The final two areas referred to the basic beliefs and core doctrines of the early Christians.  The resurrection of the dead, which was the great hope of the Christian faith and the “eternal judgment,” which would probably be better translated “the judgment of the coming age.”  The resurrection and the time when God would judge the present age while ushering in his eternal age were both future hopes but also realities that the early Christians believed they were to be living out now, showing the world what that age looked like (or at least of hint of that age).

I don’t think the author’s point was, as is often times assumed, to criticize his audience for doing lessons about these basic things over and over again and never moving past these basic principles or salvation-type sermons.  Perhaps there was an element of that, but it seems more likely that the author was shaming them by pointing out that they were struggling with remaining faithful to the life of Christ into which they had entered.  His point would be like telling a teenager who didn’t want to do their homework that it was time to move past potty training and their ABC’s and get it together.  If they were mature spiritually they would not be struggling with such an idea of being faithful to Christ and would be moving onto to maturity in their life of Christ.  That they were struggling with being faithful demonstrated that they had never moved past a true understanding of the basic beliefs of the Christian family.  It was high time to move on to mature issues of Christian faithfulness.

This was important stuff, though, because one who has walked in the life of Christ and then turned the other way would not find repentance anywhere else.  The debates on this section usually fall somewhere in between two extremes.  One on end are those who do word gymnastics to claim that the author is not intending to say that someone can genuinely be a Christian and then walk away from their faith.  On the other extreme are those like 2nd century church leader Tertullian who erroneously began to argue that Hebrews was saying that if someone sinned after their baptism that they were excluded from Christ.  This led some to embrace the idea of putting off their baptisms until their death bed.  So what is the author trying to say here?  Is there a better middle ground that we can find that is closer to the author’s original intent?

I believe there is.  First, Hebrews describes the initial entry and walk in the life of Christ in five respects.  Those who have been enlightened (early Christian language for baptism and entering into the life of Christ); those who have tasted of the heavenly gift of the eternal life found in Christ; those who have shared in or “partnered” with the Holy Spirit and the transforming work that he begins in the life of each baptized believer; those who have eaten from the meal of obedience to the word of God and done the will of God; and those who have seen the transformational power of the life of the coming age.  At every stage it is clear that the writer is describing someone who had truly been part of the life of the age to come, a true Christian.  He is not, as some claim, describing a person who has only “dabbled” in Christianity.

Keep in mind that he was writing to a community where some had already abandoned Christ, denouncing him and returning to Judaism or other such beliefs.  Others were struggling with making that same mistake, so the author wanted to be clear what the result of that is.  We need to be clear that by using the term “fallen away” he was most likely referring to those who have fallen into apostasy, meaning that they denounced Christ and returned to their former way of life, thinking that they could still somehow be God’s people without Christ.  Once they have gone down that road their is no repentance.  In making the decision to abandon Christ and leave his people they were declaring that they could find another path to God, another repentance.  Hebrews is not speaking here of people who have grown weak in their struggle against sin and drifted off in their resolve to live a holy life.  He speaks of those who entered into the repentance found alone in the life of Christ.  Once they turn away from that and turn to another “repentance” that they supposed could be found in the works of the law or some pagan religion, all hope was gone.  There was no repentance except that found in Christ so if they denounced that and left, the idea that they could be brought back to repentance through some other means was a fantasy.  They couldn’t reject repentance and then somehow be brought back to it through another means.

Not only would leaving Christ and his people be turning around and looking for their destination in the wrong direction, it meant that they would be crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public shame.  In other words, they would be joining the ranks of those that had rejected Christ during his lifetime, putting him up on the cross of shame to die the death of one cursed by God.  They had to hear in the starkest terms possible and realize that they weren’t just taking a rest from a weary journey.  To leave the life of Christ because they no longer wished to suffer for him meant to join the ranks of the very ones who put him to death.  And that would be a true tragedy.

He finishes off the point by putting it in agricultural terms that would have been more familiar to those in the agrarian societies of the first century (and uses a great deal of imagery from Isaiah 5 as well).  Like land that takes in the rain and produces a good crop are those that remained faithful to the life of Christ.  But those that turned to other ways thinking that they could find repentance there, would be like land that took in the rain and produced nothing but thorns and thistles.  In the end, all that can be done is to burn out the land.  The warning that they are given to remain faithful to their life in Christ is stark and direct and should cause us to do a great deal of thinking ourselves, but it’s not all doom and gloom.  In fact, there was great hope on the horizon, and it is to that that the author will turn next.

 

Devotional Thought

The author of Hebrews strongly exhorted his readers to move past struggling with issues of remaining faithful to God and his people, citing those as the types of things that infants deal with, not mature Christians.  Have you truly settled those things in your mind and moved on to growing spiritual and continuing the process of spiritually maturing?  How does the author suggest being able to do so to those that are struggling with the basics of their faith?