There is a big difference between being serious and being sad. The opposite of serious is flippant, and the opposite of sad is joyful. You cannot be flippant and sad at the same time. But you can be both serious and joyful.

The Book of Hebrews has a way of making us serious. It is not a sad book; it is a sobering book. It warns us against any glib or trivial attitude toward the Christian life. But it does this not to make us sad, but to make us unshakably happy in God.

In other words, Hebrews aims at deepening and strengthening the joy of our assurance in God. One way it accomplishes this is to warn us against false security.

Beware. There is a kind of happy feeling and excitement, it says, that will lead you to eternal destruction. By exposing such fleeting pleasures, it tells us to flee from their deceptions. A good example of this is Hebrews 6:4-8.

Before we examine that passage, let's look first at the flow of thought. The first two verses of the chapter begin by saying that instead of being stunted with having only elementary knowledge of salvation, the Christian must grow into spiritual maturity. Verse 3 then says, "This will we do, if God permit." Put another way, whether we can indeed do so depends ultimately on the sovereign God.

To illustrate our utter dependence on God, the next five verses describe a situation from which repentance and attaining maturity is impossible.

Hopeless Situation

This then is how the Bible describes that hopeless situation in verses 4 to 8:
 

For it is impossible for those who were once enlightened, and have tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, and have tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the world to come, if they shall fall away, to renew them again unto repentance; seeing they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh, and put him to an open shame.

The situation is this: Someone receives great blessings and has high religious experiences(1) he has been "enlightened"; (2) he has "tasted the heavenly gift"; (3) he was made one of the "partakers of the Holy Spirit"; (4) he has tasted the "good word of God" and (5) he has tasted "the powers of the world to come". In spite of all these blessings and experiences, however, this person then falls away. He turns his back on these great realities and goes after other things and pleasures. As a result, verse 6 says, he crucifies to himself the Son of God afresh and puts Christ to open shame.

Crucifixion afresh? What does it mean when it says that such a person crucifies to himself the Son of God again?

For one thing, Christ was crucified the first time to make His people pure and holy. Hebrews 13:12 says, "Wherefore Jesus also, that he might sanctify the people with his own blood, suffered without the gate." He shed His blood outside Jerusalem to sanctify us. But that's not all. The blood of Christ also prepares us to serve the living God. We read in Hebrews 9:14, "How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?"

So, when a person turns his back on purity and holiness and ceases to serve God, it means that he separates himself from the crucifixion of Christ. The blood that Christ shed on the cross thus has no effect on him.

Moreover, when a person chooses against Christ and returns to seek the things of the world and the lust of his heart, he is saying in effect that I agree with those who crucified Jesus because what He has to offer are not good enough for me. That puts our Lord to a public shame.

Willful rebellion. It is bad enough for a stranger to the faith to resist Christ. But here is a person who has been exposed to the Christian faith. He has been enlightened; he has been taught the difference between spiritual light and darkness. As a part of the congregation, he has tasted of the heavenly gift of Christian fellowship, and has partaken of the love coming from the Holy Spirit through believers. He has also heard the good news of Jesus Christ and about the heaven in which all believers will spend eternity.

And now, by falling away, he is effectively saying, "I find the things and pleasures of the world more attractive than what the cross has to offer." Rejection of Christ by such a person puts our Lord to much worse public shame than by any outsider could, who never tasted the truth.

Impossible renewal. Which leads to the conclusion that "it is impossible to renew (such a person) again to repentance". We see an illustration of this in Hebrews 12:16-17. There, we read:

Lest there be any fornicator, or profane person, as Esau, who for one morsel of meat sold his birthright. For ye know how that afterward, when he would have inherited the blessing, he was rejected: for he found no place of repentance, though he sought it carefully with tears.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that Esau genuinely repented and was rejected by God. The text says plainly that he found no place for repentance. In other words, he couldn't repent. He was so hardened that though he cried out for things to turn better in his life, he would not submit in his heart to God's terms. He was, as verse 16 says, a "profane person". This is what Hebrews 6:6 means when it says that it is impossible to renew this person again to repentance.

Such then is the terrifying prospect behind all the serious warnings of this book. Something important is at stake. The prospect exists that you and I who believe we are chosen and called and justified might slide into a slow process of indifference and hardening and eventually fall away and reject Christ and put Him to an open shame. We may actually come to a point where there is no return. Oh, how this warning should put you and me on an urgent pursuit of mercy!

Losing one's salvation?

If verses 4 and 5 say that this person was once enlightened, has tasted of the heavenly gift and has been made a partaker of the Holy Spirit and so on, and then verse 6 tells us that he cannot be brought back to repentance if he falls away, are we then to conclude that a person can become saved and then become hopelessly lost again? No, no. This is not what this passage is teaching. Rather, it is telling us that you can have the experiences of verses 4 and 5 and yet never have become saved.

Without weakening the seriousness of the warning of these verses, I want to argue that it is possible for one to have all these blessings and yet not be born again. I will mention just five reasons, all taken from Hebrews:

1. Different fields. Right after the stern warning of verse 6, verses 7 and 8 explain:
 

For the earth which drinketh in the rain that cometh oft upon it, and bringeth forth herbs meet for them by whom it is dressed, receiveth blessing from God: But that which beareth thorns and briers is rejected, and is nigh unto cursing; whose end is to be burned.

The picture here is not of a field that had vegetation and fruit and then lost it. It is of two different kinds of fields: one is fruitful and blessed; the other is thorny and cursed. I think the point is: if we sat in a church with the light, the Spirit, the word and the work of God coming to us, blessing us and even shaping us in some degree, and then turned our back on them, we are like a field with only thorns and briers. The rain we drank (light, Spirit, word, powers) produced no life in us.

2. True believers. After holding out the real possibility that some in the church might become backsliders, God says in verse 9:

But, beloved, we are persuaded better things of you, and things that accompany salvation, though we thus speak.

The key phrase is "things that accompany salvation." The better things are things that always go with salvation. They belong to salvation. So, God is saying there that the "you" He is addressing have indeed become "saved" and therefore will not fall away and become a barren field. He is contrasting true believers in this verse against the people described in verses 4-8.

3. Perseverance. In Hebrews 3:14, God explains what it means to be partakers of God:

For we are made partakers of Christ, if we hold the beginning of our confidence stedfast unto the end.

Notice the phrase, "stedfast unto the end". In other words, only perseverance in faith proves that you have been made a partaker in Christ. Conversely, if you fall away from faith, then you never became a partaker in Christ.

We find the same true in Matthew 24, where the Lord Jesus is speaking of the time in which we are now living. He says in verses 12 and 13, "And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold. But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved." Only those who are stedfast unto the end shall be saved. Why? Because ultimately it is the faith of Christ that enables God's people to endure.

4. Saved forever. That a believer cannot lose his salvation is also evident in Hebrews 10:12-14:
 

But this man (the Lord Jesus), after he had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever, sat down on the right hand of God; From henceforth expecting till his enemies be made his footstool. For by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified.

The verb "are sanctified" at the end there indicates that the sanctification of believers is an ongoing action on the part of God. So, this verse declares that for those who are now being sanctified by the indwelling Holy Spirit with the word of God and are growing in holiness by faith, the offering of Christ on the cross has perfected that person for ever. Hence, churchgoers that fall away, instead of being continuously made holy, never had their sins atoned for by the death of Christ.

5. Promise fulfilled. Finally, let us consider Hebrews 13:20,21:
 

Now the God of peace, that brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant, make you perfect in every good work to do his will, working in you that which is well-pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ; to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.

It speaks here of an everlasting covenant through the blood of Jesus. This is the new covenant God had promised through Jeremiah and Ezekiel that He would put a new heart in us and cause us to walk in his ways. So, it is finally dependent on God: He is working in us believers that which is pleasing in his sight. He is fulfilling the new covenant promise to preserve us.

This means that Hebrews 6:6 would contradict the new covenant if it meant that people could be truly justified members of the new covenant and then commit apostasy and be rejected. That would mean that God has not fulfilled his promise of "working in you that which is pleasing in his sight." He would have broken his new covenant promise.

Never saved. For these reasons I conclude that if a person falls away and re-crucifies the Son of God, he has never been justified. He never had saving faith.

What it means to us

What does all this mean to us? To give it it's sharpest point, I'll be very personal. I have tasted of the word of God and have been touched by the Spirit of God. I have seen His powers and have been His instrument.

But suppose, over the coming years, I lose interest in spiritual things and become more fascinated with making money and writing Christless books; I buy the lie that a new wife would be exhilarating, that the children can fend for themselves, that the church of Christ is a drag, that the incarnation is a myth and that there is one life to live so let us eat drink and be merry.

If that happens, then know that the truth is this: John Piper was mightly deceived in the first fifty years of his life. His faith was an alien vestige of his fatherís joy. His fidelity to his wife was a temporary passion and compliance with social pressure; his fatherhood the outworking of natural instincts. His preaching was driven by the love of words and crowds. His writing was a love affair with fame. And his praying was the deepest delusion of allóan attempt to get God to supply the resources of his vanity.

The challenge. If this possibility does not make me serious and vigilant in the pursuit of everlasting joy, what will? The practical conclusion of this awesome truth is that if you are truly saved, you will persist in serving and loving Christ with great joy. I pray that you will not be flippant, but serious about Christ being your highest joy. If you really bank your hope on Him and in Him, He will not let you go. o

Dr. John Piper is the Senior Pastor at Bethlehem Baptist Church, 720 13th Ave. S, Minneapolis, MN 55415. Call 1-888-346-4700 for catalog of other resources by Dr. Piper.

---

Back To Top

Back To Previous Page