My dear Friend, I have been thinking much of the perplexities of your young friend, as you described them to me a week or two ago. I know not that anything I can say on the passage in Heb. 6 will meet the difficulties under which she labors; but God is able, even by the feeblest means, to speak peace, comfort, and deliverance to souls. May He speak to your friend.
Few serious people who read the Scriptures escape exercise of soul on the passage above referred to. Many suppose that it treats of true Christians, converted persons—and that it affirms the impossibility of such persons being restored from willful sins into which they may fall after conversion.
This is not, as it seems to me, the meaning of the passage. Nor am I aware whether your friend believes herself to have been converted.
If not, the erroneous view I have described, even if it were true, need not be a trouble to her. In that case, another question altogether demands her attention. In the gospel God has fully revealed his rich, free, spontaneous love to those who had nothing but sin to present to his all-seeing eye. Such was his love to us, sinners as we are, that he gave his only-begotten Son, to bear the sufferings and death without which we could not have been justly or holily forgiven. God loved us, and desired our salvation; but His holy hatred to sin, and the justice of His character and government, required that sin should be punished. How could sin be punished, and the sinner at the same time be saved? Christ’s death upon the cross is the all-satisfying answer to this inquiry. He bore the punishment due to sin, that any sinner, hearing of this fact, and relying on it as the sole basis of his hope, might have free, and full, and everlasting forgiveness. God raised from the dead the blessed Saviour, and having placed Him at His own right hand, He sent down the Holy Ghost, who witnesses in the gospel that all who trust in Jesus—all who believe God’s record of His Son—have forgiveness, and not that only, but eternal life. It is for your young friend to say, in the secret of her soul before God, whether she has thus trusted in Jesus—whether she has thus committed to Him her soul, with its vast, momentous, eternal concerns. If she has, God’s word declares, in passages too numerous to cite here, that, she is justified, has passed from death unto life, that she shall never perish, but be kept by the power of God, through faith, unto final and everlasting salvation. And as no one passage of scripture can contradict the rest, we may be quite sure that Heb. 6 contains nothing contradictory to the numerous declarations of God’s word; that all who have really, as lost sinners, believed in Christ as their only and all-sufficient Saviour, become thus the children of God, and are preserved by His power for mansions of blessedness on high.
Still, Heb. 6:4-6,4For it is impossible for those who were once enlightened, and have tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, 5And have tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the world to come, 6If 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) forms a part, and doubtless a needed part, of God’s word, and it behooves us to understand and ponder the warning it contains. It is connected with the close of chapter 5, in which the apostle upbraids the Hebrew professing Christians with their dullness of hearing, in that, when they ought to have been teachers, it was needful that someone should again teach them the first principles of the oracles of God. He exhorts them, therefore, to leave “the principles of the doctrine of Christ,” or, as in the margin, “the word of the beginning of Christ.” These expressions denote the glimmerings of truth as to Christ, contained in the doctrines and shadows of the bygone dispensation. In these the Hebrews had been reared from infancy, not knowing their import till visited by the full light of the gospel, here called “perfection.” The special danger to which these Hebrews were exposed was that of receding from the ground where the full light of the gospel had placed them, and of relapsing into Judaism, which, at best, did but contain “the word of the beginning of Christ.” The principles enumerated in verses 1 and 2 all formed a part of Judaism, and do not embrace one feature of Christianity as distinct from Judaism. The word “baptisms” is in the plural, and refers not to Christian baptism, but to Jewish washings. They were not, by relapsing into Judaism, to lay again these principles as a foundation, but leaving these, were to “go on to perfection”—the full revelation of God in Christ, as made known in the gospel. “And this will we do,” says the apostle, “if God permit.”
To understand the next verses, we have not only to remember thus the context, but must also bear in mind that these Hebrews were not all necessarily true converts, because for a time they had appeared and professed to be such. There might be among them those who, when put to the trial, showed they had never really known the grace of Christ, or heartily embraced His gospel. They might be outwardly enlightened, as surely all are who are favored with the full light of the gospel as compared with the darkness of heathenism, or the glimmering light of Judaism. They might have had their affections stirred, and tasted of the heavenly gift and of the good word of God. The stony ground hearers, in the parable of the Sower, had some such “tastes” seeing that they heard the word, and anon with joy received. Yet had they no root in themselves, but in time of temptation fell away. They might still further be either witnesses, subjects, or possessors of those miraculous powers so common in apostolic times, being made partakers of the Holy Ghost and of the powers of the world to come. Judas wrought miracles as well as the other eleven apostles. There will be many to say, “Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name, and in thy name have cast out devils, and in thy name done many wonderful works?” The reply to such will not be, “I once knew you, but you fell away.” No; “then will I profess unto them I never knew you: depart from me, ye workers of iniquity.”
The falling away, then, here treated of, is not any of those ordinary falls from which scripture and experience alike show the grace of Christ to be sufficient to restore us, but a total apostasy from Christ and return to Judaism. It is such an apostasy, moreover, on the part of those who, in addition to the ordinary privileges of professing christians, had the gospel of Christ confirmed to them by miracles of which they themselves were witnesses or performers. Evidently any one apostatizing under those circumstances would have to account for these miracles; and the way in which they were accounted for in early times by those who could no deny the facts, was by attributing them to magic, or the power of Satan. Now this would render the apostasy in question virtually, if not formally, the sin against the Holy Ghost. It consisted in attributing to Satan the miracles which Christ wrought by the power of the Holy Ghost. “Because they said, he hath an unclean spirit.” (Mark 3:3030Because they said, He hath an unclean spirit. (Mark 3:30).) This sin it is impossible to commit now that the miraculous powers of the Spirit have ceased to be manifested. How nearly any may approach to committing it, it is impossible to define. Every tendency to turn away from Christ points in that direction; and hence the solemn need to guard against all such tendencies. But the sin itself, of such apostasy as is here supposed, could only be committed in those days; and any who then committed it had never really passed from death unto life.
Having discharged his duty in warning thus against apostasy from Christ, the apostle instantly turns to the better hopes he had of most, if not all, to whom he wrote. “But beloved, we are persuaded better things of you and things that accompany salvation though we thus speak.” He comforts himself as to them, by recalling to mind, not their gifts, or miraculous powers, or knowledge, but the proofs they had given of love to the saints. “Hereby we know,” says John, “that we are passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren.” To believe in Christ and love one another are the two great gospel commandments; and no one ever obeyed these two, without possessing a life which cannot be forfeited—eternal life.
May your young friend have the happy certainty of this life, and be enabled to manifest it in following Christ, in whom, that is, in union with whom this life is enjoyed. “Because I live, ye shall live also.” “When Christ who is our life shall appear, we also shall appear with him in glory.”
Wishing you and your friend every blessing, believe me, dear friend, Yours truly, in Christ.