Hebrews and the Threat of Hellfire
Hebrews 10:26–31,
For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, 27 but a fearful expectation of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries. 28 Anyone who has set aside the law of Moses dies without mercy on the evidence of two or three witnesses. 29 How much worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one who has trampled underfoot the Son of God, and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace? 30 For we know him who said, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay.” And again, “The Lord will judge his people.” 31 It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
Our church has walked through some deep waters. In 8+ years together, we’ve had our share of hardships.
We’ve shared in sadness when members, and pastors, moved away. We’ve been devastated by cancer diagnoses. We’ve been caught off guard by accidents and hospital stays. We’ve mourned the loss of loved ones. We’ve grieved miscarriages and severe health challenges. We’ve wrestled with seemingly intractable tensions in marriages. We dealt with slander and false accusations. We endured a global pandemic with its uncertainties, anxieties, mandates, and masks. We’ve had members lose jobs, or not get them, for not affirming the trending pretense. We have suffered much together.
And in all the pain and challenges, nothing weighs heavier on our hearts than those handful who, through varying circumstances, have turned away from Jesus.
Chilling Warning
Hebrews 10:26–31 may be about as dreadful as it gets anywhere in the Bible, outside the book of Revelation. Make no mistake, the passage is frightening, and should be. For those who are not covered by the blood of Jesus, verse 27 threatens “a fearful expectation of judgment” and “a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries.”
Throughout the letter, Hebrews has compared old and new, first covenant and second. Typically it’s been from good to better. But here it’s from bad to worse. In the past, anyone who rejected the old covenant would “die without mercy” (verse 28). What about now, in the new-covenant era?
How much worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one who has trampled underfoot the Son of God, and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace? (verse 29)
This warning is even more severe than the famous one in Hebrews 6:4–6. Not only is this one hotter, with the threat of consuming fire, but it intensifies the characterizations of the apostates themselves, with three parallel clauses. In turning away from Jesus, they are (1) trampling him underfoot, (2) treating his covenant blood as nothing special, and (3) insulting the Holy Spirit.
Hebrews roots this chilling warning in a double quotation from Deuteronomy 32, and then captures the heart of it in a short, direct summary that is, at once, both an understatement and one of the most horrifying images in the Bible — and the one that inspired the title of Jonathan Edwards’s famous hellfire and brimstone sermon:
It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. (verse 31)
Please Don’t Walk
Dear brothers and sisters, first and foremost, please do not skip, neglect, or minimize the warning. It is real, not hypothetical. One way to know your faith is real is that you take biblical warnings like this seriously. You don’t ignore them, but you hear them, receive them, and imagine the horror of standing unshielded, in your sin, before the omnipotent God without the covering of Jesus’s blood.
Hopefully, as you read this, your heart is warm and soft to Jesus. You claim him alone as the covering for your sin. Your hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’s blood and righteousness. Maybe you can’t even imagine walking away from him. That’s good; you believe. Thank God, you believe.
However, humanly speaking, how do you know you’ll still believe five years from now? Ten from now? Will you still believe when you come to die?
The handful of Cities Church members who have broken our hearts, by walking away from Jesus, all once credibly professed faith in him. They once stood where we now stand. And none that I know of decided, all of a sudden, to run away from Jesus. Rather, one small step at a time, spread over time, they walked away. So slowly we could barely tell at first. That’s how walking happens: not all at once, but step after step after step. Each step seems small and almost effortless, but over time what a great distance you can move by the modest movement of walking.
Can the ‘Sanctified’ Be Lost?
Talking like this raises a question that people often ask about Hebrews 10:29. How can Hebrews threaten someone whose Jesus’s blood has “sanctified” (that is, “made holy”) with God’s judgment and vengeance and fire?
In short, the sanctified of 10:29 is like the sanctified of 9:13, rather than the sanctified of 10:14. Let me explain:
In the back-and-forth comparison between old covenant and new, Hebrews 9:13 refers to the first-covenant people being “sanctified.” They were objectively, externally, visibly designated as separate from the surrounding nations by the terms (and animal blood) of the first covenant.
However, in Hebrews 10:14, in light of the new-covenant blood of Christ, the meaning of “sanctified” echoes in another register — an eternal, final, heavenly holiness, rather than a temporal, provisional, earthly one: “by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.” This heavenly holiness is the one we have in mind when we talk about the doctrine of sanctification — that God, through his Son, and our union with him by faith, makes his new covenant people irreversibly holy, both in how he sees us (positionally) and what we really, increasingly become (progressively).
But in Hebrews 10:29, the focus is on the one who once professed faith, but now, by rejecting Jesus, shows their previous faith to have been false. Because they have abandoned Jesus, their former profession proves empty. And so, in such a context, their being “sanctified” is the external, visible, provisional setting apart, like 9:13, rather than the definitive and irreversible setting apart of 10:14. They were members of the visible new-covenant people and participated in church life — all seemed well for a time — but in the end, their faith did not persevere, and did not save.
Two Types of Sanctified
Not all “sanctification” language in the New Testament belongs to our “doctrine of sanctification.” For example, in 1 Timothy 4:5, Paul talks about our God-given marriages and meals being received with thanksgiving and “made holy,” literally, sanctified, “by the word of God and prayer.” And 1 Corinthians 7:14 speaks not of the decisive, salvific “sanctified” but a kind of external, visible distinction from the world, through marriage to a believer. It does not mean that the unbelieving spouse will be saved apart from faith in Jesus.
So too the “sanctified” in Hebrews 10:29 is not someone who was genuinely saved and then lost their salvation. Rather, their faith looked real for a while, and likely felt real. They professed it and became part of the visible church. There was “outward purification,” we might say. They were set apart from the world as a member of the church, baptized in Jesus’s name, shared with us at the Table, even practiced Christian morality. But in the end, their outward, visible sanctification proved superficial and fruitless, because their faith did not endure.
One step at a time, one small increment after another, their hearts cooled to Jesus, even as they continued to say he was their Lord. They walked, and moved, and walked away from the only one who can save.
By rejecting Jesus, however long the process, they showed themselves not to have been truly born again. True Christians do not come to despise Christ. Drifting away from Jesus doesn’t mean you were once saved but now lost, but that your former profession, however honest, was a pretense, as real as it seemed.
Am I Real?
How, then, do we know that our faith is real? For every member, pastor, and deacon, the answer is the same: keep trusting in Jesus. And if you ask, in Hebrews 10, how to keep trusting in him, verses 19–25 say to draw near, hold fast, and consider each other. We might expect perseverance in faith to focus only on our private drawing near and holding fast to Jesus. But Hebrews adds this striking corporate dimension. Consider each other. Be the church to each other. Don’t forsake meeting together. Be a means of God’s grace in your brother’s life, and help keep him believing, even as he is God’s means of grace in your life for the same.
Those with genuine faith will heed the warning of verses 26–31, and lean into the graces of verses 19–25. This is what we do together, and so much more, in covenanting to be the church to each other. We hold fast to Jesus together.