Hebrews 6

Today’s Passage: Hebrews 6

Here is the passage. Many a believer has come to Hebrews 6 with a knot in the stomach, and there is no use pretending otherwise, so let us walk it slowly and let it say what it says. The chapter opens where the last one ended. The readers have gone dull, they are still on milk, and the writer refuses to keep laying the same foundation over and over. So he calls them forward: leave the elementary things and go on to maturity. Then, to explain why going forward matters so much, he sets before them the alternative, and it is the most frightening paragraph in the letter. Five things are said about certain people, and every one of them sounds like the description of a Christian. Enlightened. Tasted the heavenly gift. Shared in the Holy Spirit. Tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age. And then, having fallen away, it is impossible to restore them again to repentance. A field is held up next to it: two fields under the same rain, one bearing a useful crop and blessed, the other bearing thorns and thistles, worthless, near to a curse, burned at the end. Do not hurry past that. The writer meant it to stop the breath of anyone who was drifting. But then, in the very next sentence, he says something you must hear with equal weight. He calls them beloved, and tells them he is convinced of better things in their case, things that accompany salvation. And from there the chapter climbs, through God’s memory of their love, through Abraham waiting patiently, through an oath sworn by God on His own name, all the way to an anchor that has already been carried inside the curtain by Jesus Himself. The warning and the anchor are in the same chapter, written by the same hand, on the same day.

As you read, hold this: The warning against falling away is exactly as severe as it sounds, and the hope it drives us toward is an anchor already inside the curtain, held fast by the oath of a God who cannot lie.

Hebrews 6:1–6 (BSB)

¹ Therefore let us leave the elementary teachings about Christ and go on to maturity, not laying again the foundation of repentance from dead works, and of faith in God, ² instruction about baptisms, the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment. ³ And this we will do, if God permits. 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 then have fallen away—to be restored to repentance, because they themselves are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting Him to open shame.

Start with the word therefore, because it ties this straight to the milk and the meat. “Let us leave the elementary teachings about Christ and go on to maturity.” He says let us, putting himself in the boat with them, which is how a good pastor moves people. And leaving does not mean despising. Nobody leaves a foundation by tearing it out; you leave it by building on top of it. Look at what is on the list. Repentance from dead works and faith in God, the front door of any real dealing with the living God. Instruction about washings, which in that world meant the whole question of ritual cleansing and how the baptism of John and the baptism into Christ differed from the rest. The laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment. Every one of those is true, and the writer will not have them relaid week after week as though the Christian life were an endless return to the beginning. Then verse three, which is easy to skip and ought not to be: “And this we will do, if God permits.” Even the going on is not something a man simply resolves and accomplishes. Progress is a mercy. He asks God’s leave to grow.

And now the sentence that has cost more sleep than any other in the letter. “It is impossible (ἀδύνατος) adynatos, pronounced ah-DOO-nah-toss. Strong's G102, impossible, without power to be done. Adynatos is simply the negative of dynatos, able or possible, the same root that gives us dynamite and dynamic. It means not-able, without power, and in this letter it is a hammer the writer swings exactly four times, always at a hinge in his argument. He says it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins. He says that without faith it is impossible to please God. He says here that it is impossible to restore such a person to repentance. And he says, at the end of this very chapter, that it is impossible for God to lie. Line those four up and you have the whole letter in miniature: the old sacrifices could never do it, faith is the only way in, apostasy leads where no one can be brought back from, and the promise of God is the one thing in the universe that cannot fail. Notice especially the first and the last of those, because they hold this chapter together like two nails. The impossible of verse four is meant to frighten anybody who is drifting toward the door. The impossible of verse eighteen is meant to steady everyone who has fled to Christ for refuge. The same absolute word does both jobs, and if you take the one seriously you have no honest way to weaken the other. for those who have once been enlightened.” Impossible. Not difficult, not unlikely, not rare. The writer chose the strongest word available to him and put it at the head of the sentence in the Greek, where it lands first and hardest. And he does not attach it to God’s ability. He attaches it to the outcome for a certain person: for such a one it is impossible to be brought back around to repentance. There is no softer way to translate it and we will not try to find one. A door is being described that shuts.

Now walk the five descriptions one at a time, slowly, and refuse to flinch at any of them. First, they “have once been enlightened.” The word means to have had light thrown on them; the truth was not hidden from these people, it was shown to them, and once here carries the sense of a decisive event rather than a passing glance. Second, they “have tasted (γεύομαι) geuomai, pronounced GYOO-oh-my. Strong's G1089, to taste, to experience for oneself. Geuomai means to taste, and in Greek it can run all the way from the smallest sample to the full experience of a thing. The Lord Jesus uses it in the strongest possible sense in this very letter, where we are told that by the grace of God He should taste death for everyone, and no one has ever tasted death more fully than He did. So it will not do to wave the word away as though it meant only a nibble and no swallow. And yet it is worth noticing, carefully and without pressing it too hard, that this writer chose this verb. When he speaks of his readers in the next paragraph, he does not say they tasted salvation. He says he is convinced of better things in their case, things that accompany salvation, which is a curious way to speak if the list he just gave already amounted to it. And nowhere in these verses does he use of these people the vocabulary he uses everywhere else of the saved. He does not say they were sanctified, or cleansed, or perfected forever, or that they had been brought near by the blood. He says enlightened, tasters, sharers. That observation does not solve the passage by itself, and honest readers have disagreed about how much weight it can carry. But it is there in the text, it is his own choice of words, and it deserves to be noticed rather than shouted down from either side. the heavenly gift.” Not read about it at a distance. Tasted it. Third, they “have shared in the Holy Spirit,” and the word for shared is the writer’s own word for a partner or companion, the same one he used earlier of those who share in a heavenly calling. Fourth, they “have tasted the goodness of the word of God,” which means they knew what it was to find Scripture sweet, to sit under preaching and feel it land. And fifth, they have tasted “the powers of the coming age,” the works of God breaking into the present, which for that first generation would have meant healings and deliverances seen with their own eyes. Read that list honestly. It describes people who were inside the room, not outside it. Whatever else you conclude by the end of this study, you are not permitted to conclude that these were merely nominal, uninterested people who had heard a sermon once.

Then the turn, and it is one word: they “have fallen away (παραπίπτω) parapiptō, pronounced par-ah-PIP-toh. Strong's G3895, to fall away, to defect from the path. Parapiptō is built from piptō, to fall, with a prefix meaning alongside or past, so the picture is of falling away from the road you were on, or falling beside the mark. It appears here and nowhere else in the New Testament, which is itself a sign of how carefully this writer chose it. In the Greek Old Testament its family is used of Israel acting treacherously, breaking faith with the covenant, and that background fits the paragraph exactly, because what is being described is not a stumble but a defection. And here is where you must be careful, in both directions. This is not the word for a bad week, a season of doubt, a shameful failure, a believer flat on his face in the dust. Scripture is full of those and full of restoration after them: Peter denied his Lord with oaths in a courtyard and was eating breakfast with Him on a beach a few days later. What is in view here is a settled, decisive turning away from Christ after having seen Him clearly, a going over to the other side. Anyone who has ever wondered whether some particular sin has put him beyond the reach of this verse has already, by the wondering, described something different from what the verse describes. .” Everything up to here has been light and taste and sharing, and now the whole thing is thrown over. And the writer tells us what such a falling away actually is, in language so severe it is hard to read aloud: “because they themselves are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting Him to open shame.” Hear what he is saying. To have seen Christ for what He is and then to walk away and side with the world against Him is not a neutral act of withdrawal. It is to take one’s place with the crowd outside the city wall and say, with them, that He deserved the cross. It is to hold Him up to public disgrace a second time. And where would such a person go for a fresh start? There is no other sacrifice. There is no second Christ to turn to when you have publicly shamed the first, and no further repentance can be manufactured for someone who has looked at the only remedy God has and called it worthless. That is why the door shuts, and it is a real door, and the writer will not open it a crack for the sake of our comfort. He wanted his readers to feel the cold coming under it, and if you feel it too, he would not apologize.

Hebrews 6:7–12 (BSB)

⁷ For land that drinks in the rain often falling on it and that produces a crop useful to those for whom it is tended receives the blessing of God. ⁸ But land that produces thorns and thistles is worthless, and its curse is imminent. In the end it will be burned. ⁹ Even though we speak like this, beloved, we are convinced of better things in your case—things that accompany salvation. ¹⁰ For God is not unjust. He will not forget your work and the love you have shown for His name as you have ministered to the saints and continue to do so. ¹¹ We want each of you to show this same diligence to the very end, in order to make your hope sure. ¹² Then you will not be sluggish, but will imitate those who through faith and patience inherit what has been promised.

Take the field before you take the comfort, because that is the order the writer wrote in. Two pieces of ground, one rain. The first “drinks in the rain often falling on it” and brings up a useful crop, and it “receives the blessing of God.” The second drinks the very same rain and sends up thorns and thistles. Those two words are not chosen at random; they are the words spoken over the ground itself when the world went wrong:

"And to Adam He said: “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat, cursed is the ground because of you; through toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it will yield for you, and you will eat the plants of the field." Genesis 3:17–18 (BSB)

So the bad ground is not merely unproductive. It is ground that has gone back to the curse under the kindest treatment heaven can give it. And the verdict on it is given without cushioning: “worthless, and its curse is imminent. In the end it will be burned.” The word behind worthless means failing the test, rejected after examination, the thing an assayer sets aside as counterfeit. And the burning at the end is not an image the Bible uses lightly. This letter will speak later of a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire, and it will say that it is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God, and it means it. God does not enjoy that, and neither may we; there is not one syllable of relish anywhere in these verses. But there it stands. The rain of God’s kindness is not a guarantee of anything by itself. What the ground does with the rain is the whole question, and the day comes when the field is looked at.

And now verse nine, and you must give it every ounce of the weight you just gave to the field, because the same man wrote both, one breath apart. “Even though we speak like this, beloved, we are convinced of better things in your case.” Stop at beloved. It is the only time in the entire letter that he uses the word, and he saves it for right here, immediately after the most terrifying paragraph he ever wrote. That is a pastor’s heart, and it tells you what the warning was for. He was not diagnosing them. He was frightening them awake. And then he tells them plainly what he actually believes about them: he is “convinced of better things in your case,” and the better things are “things that accompany salvation.” He is not hedging, and he is not flattering, because he goes on at once to give his reason, and his reason is not their talent or their record of attendance. It is God’s own justice and God’s own memory: “God is not unjust. He will not forget your work and the love you have shown for His name as you have ministered to the saints and continue to do so.” He has watched these people wash the feet of prisoners and share what they had, and he says that God keeps that in mind. There is real grace in that sentence for anyone who has served quietly and thinks nobody noticed. God is not unjust, and He does not forget.

Now be honest with the reader about the difficulty, because pretending it is simple helps nobody. Godly believers who love this Book and hold Christ as Lord have read verses four through six in more than one way. Some read the five descriptions as naming real participation in the covenant community and its blessings without asserting that the person was ever born again: light shone, gifts were tasted, the Spirit’s work was shared in as a companion shares in what is happening around him, and still there was no root. The Lord Jesus described exactly such a person Himself:

"The seed sown on rocky ground is the one who hears the word and at once receives it with joy. But since he has no root, he remains for only a season. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, he quickly falls away." Matthew 13:20–21 (BSB)

"They went out from us, but they did not belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us. But their departure made it clear that none of them belonged to us." 1 John 2:19 (BSB)

In fairness, that reading has to reckon with the fact that this writer uses his word for sharers of genuine believers elsewhere, when he says we have come to share in Christ, so the vocabulary alone does not settle it. A second reading takes the warning as itself one of the means God uses to keep His own people, so that the warned and the kept are not two groups but one: God preserves His children partly by putting a cliff edge in front of them and telling them the truth about it, and a soul that heeds the warning is being held by the very God who gave it. A third reading takes the sentence as stating a genuine impossibility and therefore describing a case that does not in fact arise, the way you might warn a child of what would happen if he let go, precisely so that he never does. This study will not settle which of those is right, and it would be dishonest to pretend that a devotional page can. But hear what all three have in common, and what Manna Praxis will not move from: there is no reading available in which a person truly in Christ is finally lost. The man who wrote this warning did not believe he was describing his readers, and he gave us his own guardrails a few pages later, twice:

"Therefore He is able to save completely those who draw near to God through Him, since He always lives to intercede for them." Hebrews 7:25 (BSB)

"But we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who have faith and preserve their souls." Hebrews 10:39 (BSB)

Able to save completely. Not partly, not provisionally, not as far as our grip allows. And we are not of those who shrink back, which is the same author, holding the same pen, telling the same congregation where he expects them to end up. So let the pastoral word be said once, plainly, and let it not cheapen anything that has gone before. A heart that reads this chapter and trembles is showing something the hardened do not have. The people described in verses four through six are not lying awake worried about verses four through six; they have gone, and they are not troubled about it, and that is the whole horror of the thing. Fear of falling away is not the disease. It is a sign of life, and the right response to it is not to sit down and take your own spiritual temperature all night. It is to do what the next verses say: get up, go on, and run to Christ, because there is nowhere else to run and He has never yet turned anyone away who came.

Which is exactly where the writer takes them. “We want each of you to show this same diligence to the very end, in order to make your hope sure. Then you will not be sluggish, but will imitate those who through faith and patience inherit what has been promised.” Notice each of you, because he will not lose one in a crowd. Notice to the very end, because that is the shape of the Christian life, not a sprint but a long obedience. Notice that the word for sluggish is the same word he used back in chapter five for ears gone dull, so the whole passage has been chasing one disease from both ends. And notice what he does not say. He does not say diligence will make you saved. He says it will make your hope sure, which is a matter of assurance, of a confidence you can feel and rest in. Then he points at people rather than principles: imitate those who through faith and patience are inheriting the promises. He is about to name one.

Hebrews 6:13–16 (BSB)

¹³ When God made His promise to Abraham, since He had no one greater to swear by, He swore by Himself, ¹⁴ saying, “I will surely bless you and multiply your descendants.” ¹⁵ And so Abraham, after waiting patiently, obtained the promise. ¹⁶ Men swear by someone greater than themselves, and their oath serves as a confirmation to end all argument.

Here is the man who waited. God promised Abraham a son, and Abraham was seventy-five, and then he was eighty-five, and then he was ninety-nine, and the promise did not move and neither did God. And the words the writer quotes come from the greatest moment of that long story, on the mountain, after the knife had been raised and the ram had been caught in the thicket:

"saying, “By Myself I have sworn, declares the LORD, that because you have done this and have not withheld your only son, I will surely bless you, and I will multiply your descendants like the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will possess the gates of their enemies." Genesis 22:16–17 (BSB)

By Myself I have sworn. Think for a moment about what an oath is for. When two men disagree, one of them swears by something greater than himself, by heaven or by the temple or by his own life, and the appeal to something higher settles it. The oath “serves as a confirmation to end all argument.” But when God swears, He runs out of higher ground before He starts. There is nothing above Him, no greater name to invoke, no court to appeal to, so He does the only thing left and swears by Himself. He puts His own being behind the promise. And note what the writer says Abraham did in the meantime: he “obtained the promise” after waiting patiently. The waiting was long and it was not comfortable and God did not shorten it, and the promise came anyway. That is the man we are told to imitate, and it is a great mercy that Scripture gives us a man and not a method. Faith and patience are what he had. Faith and patience are what the readers were running short of. Faith and patience are what God supplies to everyone who keeps coming to Him for them.

Hebrews 6:17–20 (BSB)

¹⁷ So when God wanted to make the unchanging nature of His purpose very clear to the heirs of the promise, He guaranteed it with an oath. ¹⁸ Thus by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled to take hold of the hope set before us may be strongly encouraged. ¹⁹ We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure. It enters the inner sanctuary behind the curtain, ²⁰ where Jesus our forerunner has entered on our behalf. He has become a high priest forever in the order of Melchizedek.

Do not treat these four verses as a gentle appendix after the hard part. They are the answer to the hard part, and the writer has been driving at them the whole way. Look first at why God swore at all. He did not need to; His bare word has never once failed. He swore “when God wanted to make the unchanging nature of His purpose very clear to the heirs of the promise.” That is condescension of the tenderest kind. God knows the sort of creature He is dealing with, He knows how a frightened heart works, and rather than telling us to be ashamed of needing reassurance, He stoops and adds an oath to a promise that was already unbreakable, so that we might be “strongly encouraged.” Then the two unchangeable things: His promise and His oath, and between them a statement that ought to settle the soul of every reader who has spent this chapter frightened. It is “impossible for God to lie.” There is that word again, the same absolute adynatos that stood at the head of verse four. The impossibility that closed a door in the warning is the very impossibility that bolts a door open here. If you took the first one at full strength, you have no right to take the second one at anything less.

And see who this comfort is for. It is for “we who have fled to take hold of the hope set before us.” Fled is the word for a man running for the city of refuge with the avenger behind him, a man who has nothing to bargain with and no time to think it over, whose only qualification is that he is running to the right place. That is the only credential this verse asks for. Not a spotless record. Not a settled feeling. Not certainty about which reading of verses four through six is correct. Having fled, and taken hold. Then the picture the whole chapter has been climbing toward: “We have this hope as an anchor (ἄγκυρα) ankyra, pronounced ANG-koo-rah. Strong's G45, anchor, that which holds a vessel fast. Ankyra is the ordinary Greek word for a ship’s anchor, and it was a common enough emblem of hope in the ancient world; you can still find it scratched on the walls of the catacombs, cut by believers burying their dead. But watch what this writer does with it, because he breaks the picture in the most wonderful way. Every anchor in the world goes down, into dark water, out of sight, and the sailor trusts what he cannot see. This anchor goes up, and inward, through the curtain of the sanctuary, into the presence of God Himself, and it is made fast there. That curtain is the one Aaron could pass only once a year and only with blood, and behind it now stands Jesus, called here our forerunner, a word from the world of ships and armies for the scout who goes ahead so that others can follow. The old high priest went in alone, on behalf of a people who were required to stay outside. This High Priest has gone in ahead, on behalf of a people who are coming after Him. So when the weather is bad, and it will be, the question is never whether your cable feels strong in your hand. The question is where it is tied. It is tied inside the veil, to a Person, and that Person is not going anywhere, for the chapter ends by telling you He has become a high priest forever. for the soul, firm and secure. It enters the inner sanctuary behind the curtain, where Jesus our forerunner has entered on our behalf.”

And so the last word of this fearful chapter is a name and a promise: “He has become a high priest forever in the order of Melchizedek.” That is the very sentence the writer broke off from back in chapter five, when he said he had much to say and his readers were too dull to hear it. He has taken them through the alphabet again, through the warning, through the field and the fire, through Abraham’s long wait and God’s unbreakable oath, and he has brought them back to the exact place where he stopped, and now he can go on. Chapter seven is waiting. Bless God for a Shepherd who does that with His people, who will say the hard thing and then hold out His hand.