Hebrews 10:26-39
A Sermon
Scott Lindsay
We are continuing this morning in our ongoing series on the book of Hebrews, picking up a chapter 10 verse 26 and continuing through to verse 39 of the same chapter. As those of you who have been with us will know, in this letter the writer has been working very hard to persuade his wavering readers not to buckle under the ongoing pressure and persecution they are experiencing because of their newfound faith.
Judging from the content of the letter, it would seem that a significant number of his readers had either converted out of Judaism, or were at least familiar with it. Now that they were experiencing personal difficulties because of their conversion, the temptation, for at least some of them, was to abandon their professions of faith and return to their former way of life and practice.
However, as the writer of this letter has been at pains to show, for them to do so would be disastrous, on at least two counts. Firstly, it would be disastrous because they would be returning to a means of relating to God that was no longer legitimate. To be sure, the Old Testament system of temple, priests and sacrifices had been established by God himself and, for a long time, was the ordained means by which his people related to him.
But now things were different. With the coming of Jesus it became clear that the Old Testament system was not the ultimate goal toward which God was moving but was, instead, a shadow, a partiality, a promise of which Jesus was the fulfillment, and the reality, and the fullness. Everything in the Old Testament pointed forward TO, and was preparatory FOR the time when Jesus would come. Now that he had come, these former things were no longer necessary.
Accordingly, anyone who rejected Christianity in order to return to the Old Testament system was clearly misguided. To use a contemporary analogy, abandoning Christianity and going back to Judaism would be like a person trading in his house for the blueprint from which the house was built. It would be like a person giving up her car and replacing it with a photograph of her car. It would be like a person trading a real piece of chocolate cake for a crayon drawing of one. In short, it would be foolish. For that reason alone, leaving the faith would be disastrous.
But the greater disaster in their abandoning the faith was not just that they would be returning to an invalid system, but more importantly that they would be turning their back on Christ, abandoning their profession, and walking away from the only means that God had provided to address the sin that separates humanity from its Creator. That was an even greater disaster of immeasurable, eternal proportions.
Because of that, the writer of Hebrews has included in his letter not only numerous descriptions and explanations of how the salvation that Jesus brings is superior to anything they might find in the Old Testament system but the writer has also included in this letter a number of warning passages for his readers. He has told them on several occasions now of the dangerous consequences that awaited those that would drift away from their professions of faith and confidence in the Lord Jesus Christ.
We saw the first such warning in Hebrews 2:1-3. That was followed by warnings in Hebrews 3:7-19 and Hebrews 6:4-8. The passage before us this morning contains yet another stern, even frightening warning for the people of God. And that will be the focus of our study. Before we dive into that, however, let us pray and then we’ll read the passage together:
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. Anyone who has set aside the law of Moses dies without mercy on the evidence of two or three witnesses. How much worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one who has spurned the Son of God, and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace? For we know him who said, "Vengeance is mine; I will repay." And again, "The Lord will judge his people." It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. But recall the former days when, after you were enlightened, you endured a hard struggle with sufferings, sometimes being publicly exposed to reproach and affliction, and sometimes being partners with those so treated. For you had compassion on those in prison, and you joyfully accepted the plundering of your property, since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding one. Therefore, do not throw away your confidence, which has a great reward. For you have need of endurance, so that when you have done the will of God you may receive what is promised. For, "Yet a little while,and the coming one will come and will not delay; but my righteous one shall live by faith, and if he shrinks back, my soul has no pleasure in him." But we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who have faith and preserve their souls.
Now, the two things I want us to look at this morning are: 1) What this warning is and what it is all about and 2) what we are meant to do with a warning like this.
Firstly, what is this warning and what is it all about? What did the writer of Hebrews have in mind when he wrote these words? Well, for starters we have to say that we do not have any direct statements to go on. The writer does not tell us exactly what he has in mind, at least not in so many words.
However, while he does not say so directly, it seems to me that the writer has indirectly given us plenty of clues along the way such that we can, I think, form a pretty clear idea of what he has in mind.
The first clue comes from looking closely at the warnings previously given in this letter. In the first warning: chapter 2, verses 1-3, in the midst of a discussion about how Jesus is not a mere angel but is, in fact, superior to the angels, the writer cautions his readers not to drift away from what they have heard and so neglect the great salvation they have in Jesus.
In the next warning, chapter 3, the writer of Hebrews is showing Jesus superiority to Moses and, in the context of that discussion, he warns his readers to not be like those that rebelled against Moses in the wilderness. What was that rebellion? If you remember, there was a questioning of Moses’ leadership. Some of the people had had enough of things and made a point of saying so. They wanted to stop following in the way they had been going, to abandon their previous loyalties and commitments, to entrust themselves to the leadership of another.
In the third main warning, found in chapter 6, the writer of Hebrews sternly admonishes those who had fallen away from the covenant community of God’s people. If you remember from our study of those verses, the people in question who were in danger of falling away were not strangers to the Christian faith. They were not mere fringe dwellers, but were card-carrying members (professors) of the local church who had seen and experienced something of the goodness of God and who had heard and understood, cognitively at least, the significance of the Gospel and had been beneficiaries of the kindness and blessings that God, by His Spirit, showered upon the covenant community of His people. However, not all professors are possessors. It was mere professors and not possessors who were in danger of turning away.
So, those are the warnings we have seen thus far. While the details of each warning vary, the common theme that is present in all of them is this note of caution; to not drift away but to keep hanging on, to stay on the path they were on, to keep believing the things they had first believed, to keep following Jesus. That is the first clue as to how we should understand the warning of Hebrews 10.
The next clue comes from looking at the verses that immediately precede verse 26 of chapter 10. If you remember from our study of that section, which was verses 19-25, we saw how the writer of Hebrews, after many chapters of giving us “indicatives”, i.e., the theology or “theory”, so to speak - after a lot of that he transitioned into this last main section of the letter - the section we are in now, a section that is devoted to putting the “theory” or theology he has just laid out into practice.
And so verses 19-25 are the first part of that, and they taught us that, because Jesus truly is our Great High Priest, because he has fully accomplished what the Old Testament system, at best, only foreshadowed - because all of that is true, the writer of Hebrews says his readers are to draw near to God in Jesus and hold fast their confession of Jesus, and to encourage and stir up one another to love and good deeds done in Jesus’ name.
At least in verses 19-25, one of the primary means by which God’s people are to draw near to him is through drawing near to his people. They were to engage themselves with the community of those that professed Christ as Lord. They were to do this not just physically, not merely by “showing up” - although that was certainly a minimum sort of pre-requisite. But more than just drawing near physically, by showing up, they were to draw near personally, relationally, sacrificially, ministerially - serving their brothers and sisters by encouraging them and building them up and stimulating them to live in ways that accomplish good and so honor God.
That is the second clue. The final clue I want to draw your attention to is found in the verses that immediately follow the specific warnings we are looking at here in verses 26-31. Listen again to verses 32-39:
Hebrews 10:32-39 But recall the former days when, after you were enlightened, you endured a hard struggle with sufferings, sometimes being publicly exposed to reproach and affliction, and sometimes being partners with those so treated. For you had compassion on those in prison, and you joyfully accepted the plundering of your property, since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding one. Therefore do not throw away your confidence, which has a great reward. For you have need of endurance, so that when you have done the will of God you may receive what is promised. For, "Yet a little while, and the coming one will come and will not delay; but my righteous one shall live by faith, and if he shrinks back, my soul has no pleasure in him." But we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who have faith and preserve their souls.
Why are these verses here? What is the writer of Hebrews doing? Simply put, he is following up his harsh words of warning with a note of encouragement. After saying some difficult things that needed saying, the writer softens the blow by drawing his readers’ attentions back to their own recent history. He wants them to remember the time when they were new to the faith and when, as a result, they suffered hardship. He wants them to recall former times when some of them were slandered and humiliated publically and some even imprisoned because of their faith.
He reminds them of how, when that happened, those that were NOT imprisoned did not shrink back as a result of this but had compassion on those who had been imprisoned - going to them and caring for them during that particular difficulty, and putting themselves at risk by doing so.
Even further, he reminds them of times when they had their possessions stolen, their lands taken, and yet how they endured that hardship joyfully - Why? Because they knew and were firmly convinced that the material possessions they lost here - however great they might be - paled in comparison to the greater and eternal reward that awaited them in heaven.
In short, the writer reminds his readers that this is not the first time they have faced hardship. This is not the first time that they would have been in trying circumstances that would have tempted any man or woman to think about running away and throwing in the towel. They have been here before and the writer has seen them respond magnificently before - not shrinking back, not running away, not giving up, but pressing on, moving ahead, remaining steady, living by faith and not by sight. That is the fourth clue.
So, if we take all these “clues” together, what seems fairly obvious is that the thing that the writer of Hebrews has in mind - surely - as he “pens” this warning in chapter 10, the thing that he exhorts his readers NOT to do, at all costs, is to not give up, to not walk away, to not abandon their Christian profession and return to their former way of life and practice.
In other words, the “deliberate sinning” that the writer speaks of in verse 26, while inclusive and generative, no doubt, of many things, find its source in the primary, foundational sin of deliberately, conscientiously, knowingly abandoning one’s profession of faith and confidence in the Lord Jesus Christ. The deliberate choice to turn away from the faith has returned them to their former life - a life in rebellion, a life of rejecting him. That is the sort of “deliberate sin” that the writer has been talking about throughout this letter. It is the thing that is foremost in his mind here in chapter 10.
It is important to stop at this point and make a couple of important distinctions since these verses can be, and are, easily mis-understood and taken out of context. As you and I both know, because we are ALL recovering sinners, we are all quite familiar with the workings of the fallen heart. We can all sit here and recall countless times when we were in situations where we were tempted with a particular sin, where we knew exactly what was going on, where we knew what the right thing to do was, where we knew what God’s perspective on the thing was - and yet we gave into that temptation, we willfully, knowingly, deliberately did what we knew was wrong, and embraced our sin.