Post by bcool on Jan 21, 2014 7:40:51 GMT -6
“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” (Hebrews 6:4-6 KJV).
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” (Hebrews 6:4-6 KJV).
Our subject passage has become somewhat controversial in the church as you know. It is often used to support the dangerous doctrine that a born again believer can somehow break the seal of the Holy Spirit (Ephesians 1:13–14), transfer back to the kingdom of darkness (Colossians 1:13;See also Gal. 3:1–9), kick out the indwelling Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 3:16; 6:16,19; 2 Timothy 1:14; Romans 8:9,11,15;1 John 2:27; Ezekiel 36:27) and forfeit eternal life (John 3:15-18; Romans 6:23;1 John 1:2;1 John 2:25; 1 John 5:13; Titus 1:2, etc.) and thereby nullify Christ's finished work on Calvary. In other words, the erroneous doctrine suggests that there is something awful enough that a born again believer has done or is doing that it could literally undo all of God's salvation work on him. The very notion is blasphemous! What the author is actually warning about in this part of Hebrews, is falling away from grace. There are weak believers in Rome who either do not realize or do not trust that Christ finished all payment on Calvary's Cross. So they keep on trying to “help out” God by their own works by way of perpetuating the Levitical Offerings.
If you think that every single person who warms a pew in your local church is actually born again, you are blissfully uninformed. And if you think that those one or two (hopefully no more) that have yet resisted the call to Christ, are the only individuals in your church capable of awful sin (‘they ARE still sinners after all’), you are, it is sad to say, embarrassingly naive! You have not been swindled until you have been swindled by another born again Christian. Enough said. Now for the sake of argument, we should concede that it is in the realm of probability that some in this rebellious group of so-called “Christians” may not have trusted in Christ for salvation. But the context of our study passage (Hebrews 6:5,6) as well as the language used (6:4) make it obvious that the writer is discussing believers---born again believers who have fallen away. So I suggest we all deal with it.
‘I'd rather be red than dead!’
Try to imagine the fear that gripped these Christians in Rome as Nero set out on his rampage. Sadly some on very shaky foundation would wobble in their faith and fall away. They returned to something they could grasp, something they understood, something they could DO. They literally defected to Judaism. What seems apparent here is that their reaction to the tremendous threat against them was to deny their faith. Anyway, they could just go back to ‘doing’ for God. They could dabble in shadows, in religious rituals, even though all sacrifices of the Levitical Offerings were to cease (Hebrews 10:11,12). The lamb, which had been the center of the Levitical Offerings, had made way for the Lamb of God---Our Lord Jesus Christ!
Needless to say, there is nothing wrong with the text of the Authorized Version! But just for fun, if you wanted to paraphrase from the original Greek text, you would see something like this:
**And having tasted for themselves the noble word of God (or, "the good word of God", cf. Hebrews 13:9, “For it is a good thing that the heart be established with grace”), and God's (Lit., His) inherent abilities in the coming Age (reference to the Millennium). For those having defected (gone astray, ‘backslidden’, if you insist), definitely impossible to restore again [the Greek participle that follows is in the accusative case which can be understood in a temporal sense, "while" or "so long as"] while [even the KJV's "seeing" does not outright interfere with the sense of "while" here] they crucify again and again to themselves the Son of God, publicly exposing Him to ignominy.**
When once we have understood that our subject passage is a comparison of the power of God's spiritual system with the religion of Judaism, and that it speaks of abandoning the former, after having known it, its difficulty disappears. It seems inconceivable that any believer should want to dabble in shadows when he has the reality. Why should he want to put himself under the lesser authority of the Law when he has the higher authority of Jesus Christ, his own great High Priest, and the higher law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus? Yet this was precisely what happened in Jerusalem about 67 A.D., when born again believers of the Church Age returned to the Temple to repeat the animal sacrifices. The Word of God condemns their blasphemous activity as incompatible with grace.
The Apostle Paul dealt with a similar issue concerning the Galatians. “Christ is become of no effect unto you, whosoever of you
are justified by the law; ye are fallen from grace” (Galatians 5:4 KJV). The same error is repeated today when a believer leaves a church that emphasizes salvation (and for that matter, the Christian way of life) by grace through faith and joins one which teaches that receiving the free gift of eternal life depends on repentance, confession, faith, baptism, and church membership.
Brad
