To Encourage You

Hebrews 10:26-28 “For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful expectation of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries.”

One of the reasons that I try to study every verse when I’m studying a book of the Bible is that every Word of God is true.  I avoid red letter Bibles and I also don’t make a habit of underlining certain passages in my Bible for that same reason.  I understand why some people do this, for there are some passages that have become especially precious to them. However, the truth is that every word of God is precious.  And it is sometimes in the very verses we tend to pass over or neglect that the greatest treasures of the Scriptures are found. 

It was the apostle Peter who, remarkably, said this about the apostle Paul’s writings: “There are some things in them (i.e., in Paul’s writings) that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures” (2 Peter 3:16).  He is telling us to not avoid things that are hard to understand, that don’t agree with our theology, or that bother us, for it was all given to benefit us.  Furthermore, it is often the more difficult to understand passages that the false teachers make a focus of their teaching, and if we don’t study these things for ourselves, we can be susceptible to the very serious and damnable errors of such teachers. 

Which brings us to the passage above, which is one of the more difficult passages in the Bible.  Many people, including me, have read this passage and been devastated by it. It seems to say that if we’ve heard the gospel and deliberately sin afterwards, there is no hope for us.  No wonder people avoid such passages!  But is that really what’s being said?  If so, how could David have ever been forgiven for his very deliberate, premeditated sin with Bathsheba? How could Peter have been forgiven when he deliberately denied the Lord three time? How could Manasseh, one of the wickedest kings in Israel’s history, have been forgiven for his murder of the innocent by way of child sacrifice, including that of his own son (2 Kings 21)? But all of these men WERE forgiven. So, what is the passage above from Hebrews saying? What does it really mean? 

Well, for one, we need to consider who the letter was written to. It was written to the Hebrews, i.e., the Jews.  It’s talking about the sacrifices of the Old Testament Law with which they were so familiar, and contrasting them with the sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ on the cross. The particular sin that the author is talking about is the sin of unbelief. It was the tendency of the religious Jews of that day, in response to the pressure being put on them by unbelieving Jews, like many of the Pharisees, to continue with their old sacrificial system and reject the only sacrifice that could ever truly forgive their sins.  If they, in unbelief, continued to trust the old system and reject the sacrifice of Christ, there truly was no hope for them, for “there is salvation in no one else (other than Jesus), for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).

So how does this apply to us today, for not even the Jews currently follow the practices of sacrificing animals on an altar?  Well, there are many things other than Jesus’ sacrifice that people or trusting in.  They may be trusting in their good works.  They may think that they are “as good as the next guy” and even “better than most” because of some good things they have done. They may even have given sacrificially to some person or some cause, i.e., they gave until it hurt and sacrificed something that they could have used for themselves. Surely God will accept them in the end! Correct? Others believe that their religion is just as good as the gospel of Jesus Christ.  While they don’t trust in Jesus, they trust in another way that some religious person has proposed is the way to God.  They have a faith in something; it’s just not faith in Christ.  And then there are those who are trusting in their own ideas. They refuse to put their faith in Christ, and, as such, they are believing that the alternative system of beliefs that they have come up with is at least as good or even better than the gospel. 

The verse above is telling us that if we are trusting in something other than the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross to deal with our sins, we are in league with the adversaries of God, and there is coming “a fearful expectation of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries.”  It’s unbelief that’s the deliberate sin that there is no hope for. It’s the deliberate rejection of the good news of the incredible forgiveness of God that is available to us because of (and only because of) what Christ has done that is the most dangerous sin of all. All other sins are forgivable – no matter how we may regret what we have done.  But if we deliberately reject the gospel, God is telling us very clearly that there is nowhere else to turn for any real hope.