Crucifying Once Again the Son of God | Hebrews 6:4-8

For it is impossible, in the case of those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, and have shared in the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away, to restore them again to repentance, since they are crucifying once again the Son of God to their own harm and holding him up to contempt. For land that has drunk the rain that often falls on it, and produces a crop useful to those for whose sake it is cultivated, receives a blessing from God. But if it bears thorns and thistles, it is worthless and near to being cursed, and its end is to be burned.

Hebrews 6:4-8 ESV

In my collegiate years, I lived from sophomore year onward with a few roommates in a rent house. It was a rat and cockroach infested duplex, where we kept an oar for giving the mice and rats caught in each morning’s sticky traps a mercifully quick death. But from that house, which we actually kept quite clean, we started a midweek Bible study that we called the Antioch Bible Study. Each week around thirty people would cram into our living room to read and discuss a portion of Scripture and to pray for one another (there was also a large indentation in the ceiling that we prayed would not collapse upon us during the study).

Yet as fun as those days were, we were the very definition of being all heart with very little maturity. For instance, after each study, we would break up into coed one-on-one time for prayer and accountability. In another instance, since we did not teach through books of Bible, we taught on Romans 9 and Hebrews 6 back-to-back. I can only pray that we did not butcher those two controversial texts too badly.

More than a decade later, that text of Hebrews 6 is before us, which I pray we will approach with much humility and fear. Yet although this passage has a reputation for being difficult to understand, I do not think that is the case. Mark Twain, who was a rather honest skeptic, famously said that he wasn’t bothered by the parts of the Bible that he didn’t understand; instead, it was the parts that he understood clearly that troubled him. In many ways, Twain was much more honest than we often allow ourselves to be. You see, like Romans 9, the verses before us are not hard to understand, but they are hard to swallow. Thankfully, although God’s Word here is a bitter medicine, it soon gives way to sweetness, which is very much the author’s intent.

IMPOSSIBLE TO RESTORE TO REPENTANCE // VERSES 4-6

We might first begin by noting how the author has strategically laid out his thought within verses 4-6. He starts by saying that something is impossible, yet he makes his readers wait until verse 6 to find out what exactly is impossible. Instead, he fills verses 4-5 with descriptions of those whom he is warning against, descriptions which could quite easily apply to any believer reading this letter. But then in verse 6, he gives the crucial phrase, but then have fallen away. Those apostates, ones who turn their backs on Christ and reject the Christian faith that they once claimed, are impossible to restore to repentance, since they crucifying once again the Son of God to their own harm and holding him up to contempt.

With that noted, the biggest question that is always asked about these verses is about whom the author is describing. Who are these apostates? Are they genuine Christians who have fallen away? From the descriptions given, many say yes.

Of those who draw that conclusion, one of two beliefs then proceed. Those who deny the perseverance of the saints readily set forth that a true Christian can fall away into final and ultimate apostasy.

Those who believe in the perseverance of the saints, that all whom God has justified will indeed be glorified, are forced to conclude that this warning is ultimately hypothetical. That seemed to be Spurgeon’s position. He said of the descriptions given: “If these people are not believers, who is?”

What would be the purpose then of warning against something that could ultimately never happen? Spurgeon goes on to explain:

“But,” says one, “if Christians cannot fall away, what is the use of putting this text in to frighten, like a ghost that does not exist?” If God has put it in, he has put it in for wise reasons and excellent purposes. It is put in to keep us from falling away. God preserves his children, but he keeps them by the use of means. One of these is to show what would happen if they were to fall away. There is a steep cliff—what is the best way to keep anyone from going near it? To tell him that, if he did, he would inevitably be dashed to pieces. The fact that we are told the consequences keeps us from it. A friend puts away a cup of arsenic and says, “If you drink it, it will kill you.” Does he suppose for a moment that we will drink it? No. He tells us the consequence and is sure we will not do it. So God says, “My child, if you fall over this cliff, you will be dashed to pieces.” What does the child do? He says, “Father, keep me. Hold me up, and I will be safe.” It leads the believer to greater dependence on God, to a holy fear and caution. This holy fear keeps the Christian from falling away.[1]

Both are problematic, but the first has far more flaws than the second. That view is often called Conditional Salvation, and it is rejected even by many Arminians. The problem with that belief, apart from its working around of many clear statements in Scripture, is that it ultimately places salvation within our own hands. Yes, we need Christ’s atoning death to forgive us of our sins, but if we do not stay faithful, we will not ultimately be forgiven. It is essentially the same thing as the Roman Catholic view of sacramental grace, for Catholics believe that saving grace is actually imparted through the sacraments. Thus, throughout church history, many have put off being baptized until their death bed because they believed that baptism wiped away all of their previous sins. Protestants who believe in conditional salvation are simply replacing baptism with repentance. Once I repent, all of my previous sins are forgiven, but forgiveness of future sins is predicated on future repentance.

That was my understanding of salvation growing up. Between the ages of nine and twelve, I fell asleep repeatedly praying for forgiveness for fear that my final thought before sleeping would be sinful, and if I were to die in my sleep, I would go to hell. It was not until the summer between my freshmen and sophomore year of college that I truly beheld the wonder of Jesus’ once-for-all death. Yes, He died once for all His people, but He also died once for all my sin. Two thousand years ago, when He nailed my cosmic debt in His own flesh to the cross, each of my sins were future sins. Indeed, the beauty of the gospel is that all our sins have been atoned for through the substitution of Christ in our place. It is pitiful good news to proclaim, “Your sins have been forgiven… up this point, so don’t mess it up!”

No, if our justification is truly the legal imputation of Christ’s righteousness upon us through Christ’s work alone, then it undermines the gospel to claim that that justification can be removed by our own faithlessness. Indeed, under such an understanding, there is little use of singing, “He will hold me fast!” Instead, we should sing only about keeping our grip on Christ.

Indeed, the view held by Spurgeon, though less flawed, is still lacking. Instead, I hold that the author of Hebrews is here describing false converts. Indeed, the descriptions read so much like the description of a genuine Christian because these apostates were active participants in the Christian community.

They had once been enlightened and have tasted the heavenly gift. Charles Hodge notes the grammatical connection between these two phrases, saying, “The heavenly gift here means being enlightened, the receiving the light of true knowledge, and having tasted, means having enjoyed it. The two phrases then ‘being enlightened’ and ‘having tasted the heavenly gift’ are synonymous.”[2] That is, to some degree, they have tasted and seen the goodness of God’s truth; however, it seem that, crucially, they have not tasted and seen that the Lord is good.

They have shared in the Holy Spirit. Note that the author does not say that they have been renewed or indwelt by the Holy Spirit. Yes, they came for a little while under the influence of the Holy Spirit, but they were never made into a new creation by the Spirit.

They have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age of come. They may have rejoiced and delighted in the Scriptures, but they did so truly with the Bible’s Author. Living in the time of the apostles, many of them may have seen many great signs and wonders worked by the Spirit with their own eyes, yet the work never reached their innermost being.

These are all descriptions not of a regenerate follower of Christ but of an admirer and sometime participant of the Christian faith. Indeed, the fact that they then have fallen away is the proof of their false conversion. It is impossible to restore them to repentance because they have already scorned countless opportunities to repent. Their rejection of Christ means that they hold Him in contempt and spiritually join soldiers’ mockery and in the crowd’s scornful chant: “Crucify him.” Or as Richard Phillips writes:

To reject Christ after having come to knowledge of the gospel is to say, as the Pharisees did, that he should be put away, that he is guilty as charged, a threat and enemy worthy of death. To repudiate Christ is, in effect, to take up hammer and nails and beat them into his hands and feet, to make common cause with those who crucified him, to mock him like the soldiers who laughed and sneered, “He saved other; he cannot save himself” (Mark 15:31).[3]

ITS END IS TO BE BURNED // VERSES 7-8

In order to help us grasp this awful reality, the author gives us a mini parable in verses 7-8:

For land that has drunk the rain that often falls on it, and produces a crop useful to those for whose sake it is cultivated, receives a blessing from God. But if it bears thorns and thistles, it is worthless and near to being cursed, and its end is to be burned.

We are the land, and the rain represents the spiritual blessings that God showers upon His people. The proper response to tasting the heavenly gift and goodness of God’s Word is to produce fruit of righteousness. Indeed, the fruit of sharing in the Holy Spirit ought to be production of “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” (Galatians 5:22-23). Yet if a person is showered with such heavenly gifts and continues to produce “sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these” (Galatians 5:19-21), is that person not as deserving of God’s fiery judgment as a land that only bears thorns and thistles regardless how much cultivation it receives?

If all of this sounds frightening, that’s the point. Again, the exodus generation gives us a visible portrait of this spiritual reality. Although they received grace upon grace from God, they failed to enter God’s rest and died under His judgment because of their unbelief. For us, the author of Hebrews is still holding out this exhortation: “Therefore, while the promise of entering his rest still stands, let us fear lest any of you should seem to have failed to reach it” (4:1). The greatest proof that we have truly been justified in Christ is that we walk in faith with Him until the end. On the converse, the greatest evidence that we never truly believed the gospel is our failure to endure to the end. Of course, how we finish this earthly race is the key that distinguishes between two forms of apostasy, as Tom Ascol notes:

There is such a thing as temporary apostasy (backsliding) and it should be distinguished from final apostasy when the issue of perseverance of the saints is addressed. This final apostasy is not the loss of once-held salvation but the evidence of false conversion (1 John 2:19).

Peter and Judas are great examples of these two kinds of apostasies. Whenever Peter denied Christ, he repudiated his faith in Jesus. Indeed, while Peter’s bold confession of Jesus as the Christ was a highpoint for the apostle, he essentially recanted that confession three times by refusing to acknowledge even knowing who Jesus is. Yet Peter’s fall was temporary, and he was restored to repentance after Christ’s resurrection. Judas, on the other hand, fell away fully and finally. Indeed, Judas might be the best example of the kind of false disciple that the author of Hebrews is warning against:

Very likely all the characteristics in our passage were part of his experience, yet there was no way we can imagine him as regenerate, especially since the Lord called him “a devil” (John 6:70), “the son of perdition” (John 17:12 NASB), and one for whom “it would have been better… if he had not been born” (Mark 14:21). Jesus knew Judas’ condition from the beginning, though Judas fooled the disciples to the last![4]

That final apostasy and false conversion that Judas represents is what the author of Hebrews is describing for us. But if we find this present passage frightening, and many do call it the most frightening in all of the New Testament, we should keep in mind that “sadly, some false converts never apostatize outwardly form confessing Christ as Lord in this life, only to find their unrepentant disobedience to God’s commands betraying a false faith, a false conversion and an inward apostasy at the last judgment.”[5] That terrifying thought is warned by Jesus Himself in Matthew 7:21-23:

Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’

CONFIRM YOUR CALLING AND ELECTION

With a clearer understanding of this passage, let us conclude by making direct application or, as the Puritans called it, uses of the text. Obviously, this is a warning, so the author is ultimately intending to give us a portrait of a path that we should fear to tread and of persons we should dread becoming. Yet let us be more specific on how we might avoid falling away and holding up the Son of God in contempt.

First, “like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation—if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good” (1 Peter 2:2–3). This discussion of final apostasy and false conversion was not brought up by the author of Hebrews in a vacuum; rather, this dreadful state is precisely why he urged us on toward maturity in our previous text. Can those who have seemed mature in the faith be falsely converted and appear to have fallen away from the faith? Unfortunately, yes. Yet perpetual spiritual immaturity is a precursor to apostasy. As Paul warns in Ephesian 4, children are much more likely than the more mature in the faith to be tossed to and fro by every wind and wave of doctrine. John Piper summarizes how that process of maturing ought to happen:

1. First you drink in the milk. That is, you listen to the milk of the Word—the message of God’s promises in the gospel. You read them yourself in the Bible and you sit under the preaching and teaching of God’s Word. And you give heed. You are earnest and diligent to apply your heart and mind to what is being said. You are not passive and cavalier and indifferent—babes long for milk, and are incredibly focused when they are thirsty.

2. Savor and swallow and digest and be satisfied. This is crucial. If this doesn’t happen, the next stage of discernment will not happen. Here is the miraculous spiritual event of loving what once you hated. You love the taste of the milk: “Taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8). And when the promises of God and the God of the promises are tasted, the milk satisfies. And when it satisfies, it transforms your values and priorities, which leads to Step 3.

3. With a heart satisfied with God now, discern good and evil. There are hundreds of decisions that you must make day in and day out which are not spelled out explicitly in the Bible. What to watch on TV, political positions to take, investment strategies, vocation, insurance, retirement, business tactics, where to live, what to drive, whether to own a gun, how to discipline your children, what to wear, where to volunteer, how much to give, etc., etc.[6]

Second, “bear fruit in keeping with repentance” (Matthew 3:8). While a church full of self-appointed fruit-inspectors is an express road toward quarrels and divisions, we must not go to the other extreme by acting like fruit never reveals anything about the state of the tree. Jesus told us that false teachers would make themselves known by their fruit, and so will false converts. Of course, we should also remember that genuine Christians will be known by their fruit as well. Recall that in the Parable of the Sower the seed began to grow up in three of the four types of soil, yet fruit was only produced in the healthy soil. Likewise, how does verse 7 of our text note that a land will receive the blessing of the Lord? By producing a crop useful to those for whose sake it is cultivated. That is, by bearing fruit. While a crop and fruit are indications of healthy land and trees, neither are used by what produces them. A land’s crop and a tree’s fruit are produced for the sake of others.

So it is with the fruit of the Christian life. Being outside of time, God knows and has already chosen those who belong to Him, but we live in time; thus, we should “be all the more diligent to confirm [our] calling and election” (2 Peter 1:10). How do we confirm our calling and election? By practicing the “qualities” (fruits) that Peter listed earlier in that passage:

His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire. For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. For whoever lacks these qualities is so nearsighted that he is blind, having forgotten that he was cleansed from his former sins.
2 Peter 1:3–9

What are the fruits of the Christian faith? Peter’s list is faith, virtue, knowledge, self-control, steadfastness, godliness, brotherly affection, and love. Paul’s list from Galatians is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Are you growing in these things? Most importantly, are others benefiting from your growth in them? Growth is a sign of life, and fruit is a mark of health. As John the Baptist told the Pharisees and Sadducees,

Bear fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father,’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham. Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.
Matthew 3:8-10

Do not presume that because you attend church or even read your Bible that you are Christian. If you are indwelt with the Holy Spirit, then bear the fruit of the Spirit for the nourishment and refreshment of others.

Finally, this warning is intended to give us a holy and healthy fear but never despair. Indeed, Bunyan rightly depicted despair as a cruel giant who locks his prisons within his Doubting Castle. That is why the author will quickly change his tone in verse 9, offering a pastoral balm for fearful souls, and he will then exhort them “to show the same earnestness [that they had previously shown] to have the full assurance of hope until the end” (6:11). Hope requires belief in God’s goodness and promises, which is why in the text from 2 Peter above the apostle rooted our fruit in our being granted by God “his precious and very great promises.” Such hope ought to guide how we proclaim the gospel. As Phillips writes:

We always want to leave room for the sovereign power of God, remembering Jesus’ words to his disciples: “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible” (Matt. 19:26)… We are not able to restore them, but that doesn’t mean that God cannot. Indeed, as long as the gospel goes forth, we should never despair of its power to save anyone. The point here is not to deny apostasy as a real and terrible situation, or to soften the writer’s statement that true apostates are in a dreadful spiritual state. Rather, the point is that we should never stop reaching out to others with the gospel, even if they seem to have fallen away in the manner described by this passage.[7]

Such hope should also guide how we receive the gospel ourselves. If today you have heard this warning and fear that you are among those who have fallen away and crucified once again the Son of God, that very fear may be an indication that you are not too far gone. After all, even fear is a sign of life, however faint it may be. Indeed, since dead men feel nothing, perhaps the most fearful reaction to this warning is simply to feel nothing at all.

Brothers and sisters, as we come to our King’s Table, let us not be content with simply tasting and seeing the goodness of our God’s mighty gifts; instead, let us taste and see that the Lord is good. Looking to Jesus, the Captain of our salvation, let us make Asaph’s prayer our own:

            When my soul was embittered,
                        when I was pricked in heart,
            I was brutish and ignorant;
                        I was like a beast toward you.

           Nevertheless, I am continually with you;
                        you hold my right hand.
            You guide me with your counsel,
                        and afterward you will receive me to glory.
            Whom have I in heaven but you?
                        And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you.
            My flesh and my heart may fail,
                        but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

            For behold, those who are far from you shall perish;
                        you put an end to everyone who is unfaithful to you.
            But for me it is good to be near God;
                        I have made the Lord GOD my refuge,
                        that I may tell of all your works.
Psalm 73:21–28