Text: Hebrews 10:26–39
Preacher: Pastor Brian Sauvé
Shrinking Back To The Soon-To-Be Missile Crater
We’re all familiar with the idea of taking a verse out of context, right? Probably the classic one is Philippians 4:13, “I can do all things through him who strengthens me.”
When combined with Isaiah 54:17, “No weapon formed against me shall prosper!!!” it becomes the ultimate football huddle prayer before the big game. We love to take verses out of context and make them into mantras for guaranteed victory in the sports arena. Or hitting that new personal best in weight room.
But take that verse in Philippians: In context, this verse isn’t a guarantee that Jesus is going to make you succeed in literally anything the you can call a “thing.” No, in context, it’s about Paul’s confidence that God will see him through hunger, persecution, or anything the world may throw at him for the sake of his witness. It’s basically Paul saying, “Even if they kill me for the sake of the gospel, I can face it through Christ.”
There is a sentence in our text this morning—the very first sentence, in fact—that is like that, except the effect is almost the opposite of the example I gave above. We often take verses out of context to make us feel good, but this sentence is one that will actually make you feel pretty terrible if you take it out of context.
So when we read that first sentence, I’m going to ask you to just hang on, be patient for a minute, and not jump too quickly to any conclusions. Let’s get right to it, then we’ll pray and get started. This is the Word of the Living God:
“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 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? 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.”
-Hebrews 10:26–39
I’m sure you saw it, that first sentence:
“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.”
-Hebrews 10:26–27
Here’s the question you’re probably chewing on after hearing that: Does that mean what it sounds like it means?
Now, the last thing I want to do is to teach you to face hard and thorny texts of the Bible by trying to wiggle out of them. But at the same time, it is easy for us to misunderstand and misapply Scripture. We’re weak, prone to error, all of it.
So back to that question: Does this text mean what it sounds like it means? If I were to take this sentence out of its context, can I universalize it—that anyone who sins deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth has made forgiveness impossible?
Let’s test it by inserting a sin:
“For if Karen deliberately goes on gossiping after receiving the knowledge of the truth…”
“For if Bob deliberately goes on neglecting prayer after receiving the knowledge of the truth…”
“For if Zack deliberately goes on lusting after passing joggers in his heart after receiving the knowledge of the truth…”
“…then for Karen and Bob and Zack, there no longer remains a sacrifice for their sins, but a fearful expectation of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume her.”
Does that work? Is that what he’s saying? I want you to see that no, that is not what the author of Hebrews is teaching. And the key to seeing that is by backing up a ways and seeing how this sentence functions in its context.
Backing up a Ways: Context is Key
Trying to understand verses 26–27 in isolation would be like trying to understand a wall-sized impressionist painting with your eyeball 2-inches away from the canvas. What we need is to back up a few steps—to at least chapter eight—and make our way back to chapter 10 from that perspective.
What do we see as we do that? Well, to oversimplify things a smidge, we see a case for the utter supremacy and superiority of Jesus Christ and his ministry in three parts. First, backing up to chapter 8, he made it clear that:
1. Jesus is the High Priest of a New and better covenant.
That was the point of chapter 8, which began by telling us that Jesus is a great, heavenly high priest, who has mediated a new covenant, and ended with Hebrews 8:13,
“In speaking of a new covenant, he makes the first one obsolete. And what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away.”
-Hebrews 8:13
This New Covenant which Jesus has mediated has made the Old Covenant obsolete. Why is that? Why has it made the Old Covenant obsolete? Well, because of what the Old Covenant and its forms of worship was supposed to be all along. Number two…
2. The Old Covenant was full of shadows that preached about the heavenly realities of the New Covenant.
In chapter 9 through the first half of chapter 10, we learned about that all of the furniture and vessels for worship in the earthly, Old Covenant Tabernacle were preaching something.
What were they preaching? They were preaching Christ. They were earthly copies of a heavenly reality, namely, that Christ would make a way into the true, heavenly holy place by means of his blood, his priesthood, his intercession, his exaltation and entrance into the holy places.
We’re need to go on a short tangent for a moment that is going to seem like a rabbit trail. But hang in there and trust me and you’ll see why it matters. We need to see a hidden premise that was obvious to the Jewish Christians initially reading this book, but which may not be obvious to us—something that changes everything: They knew that God was about to judge Christ-rejecting Israel by destroying the Temple, Jerusalem besieged, and not one stone left standing on another. Jesus had told them as much in Matthew 24 and Luke 21. Just one little snippet for you to see:
“And while some were speaking of the temple, how it was adorned with noble stones and offerings, [Jesus] said, ‘As for these things that you see, the days will come when there will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down…’
-Luke 21:5–6
He was clear that all of this would happen within one generation, within 40-years, of his speaking this prophecy, which was roughly 30 AD. So by 70 AD, according to Jesus, the Temple was a goner, along with the city.
But wait, there’s more! Not only did he give them the time frame to expect this, he also gave them an explicit sign to know when to flee the city. Luke 21:20–21,
“But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come near. Then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, and let those who are inside the city depart, and let not those who are out in the country enter it…”
-Luke 21:20–21
Now, you might wonder at this sign, because it’s strange, right? “Jesus, you want us to wait until the city is surrounded… and then flee? Shouldn’t we flee before it’s surrounded?” No, and here’s why: The Romans came to crush the Jewish rebellions in Jerusalem in the late 60s. Vespasian came, along with his son Titus, to carry this out. They surrounded the whole city and everything, and it looked bleak.
But then, word came to Vespasian that Nero, the Emperor, had committed suicide. So they did something that almost never happens after surrounding an enemy city—they withdrew!
They knew that Nero’s death could mean massive upheaval in Rome—and they were correct. Nero’s death lead to what we now call The Year of the Four Emperors. So Vespasian returned to Rome and, long story short, took control of the Empire, the fourth of the four emperors, and the last one standing when the dust settled. He then sent his son Titus back, and Titus surrounded the city again and utterly destroyed it.
But meanwhile, the Christians listened to Jesus. After Vespasian’s initial withdrawal, they fled to a wilderness region known as Pella, and escaped the destruction of Jerusalem.
What does all of this have to do with Hebrews 10? Everything. It has everything to do with it, because Hebrews was written to the Jewish Christians around the early to mid-60s AD, and the specific temptation they were facing was what? To shrink back to the Old Covenant system of worship—which meant a return to Jerusalem!
So let’s stick the landing with the third part of his argument about the supremacy of Jesus and his New Covenant, which is developed in the second half of Hebrews 10, from verse 19 (which we looked at last week), through the end of the chapter:
3. Therefore, since we have confidence to enter the holy places through our great High Priest, we must not shrink back to the shadows to be destroyed with those shadows, but press on in faith and preserve our souls.
From Hebrews 10:19–39, the end of the chapter, that what is being argued. You therefore cannot understand this section, what we read in verses 26–39, in isolation, or as an absolute statement apart from its context.
What I mean is this: You can’t take the conclusion of verse 26, that “…if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth,” because if we do, “there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful expectation of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries,” apart from the context of the choice between the two covenants that the Hebrews were faced with.
They were tempted to leave Christianity to return to Judaism, but this would have been folly! It would have been to reject the actual sacrifice for sin, Jesus Christ, for the shadows that don’t actually take away sin.
If they do that, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but rather “…a fearful expectation of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries.” Not only was shrinking back to Jerusalem abandoning the only sacrifice that actually saved, it was also intentionally heading into a city that God was about to judge in fury and destruction
Let me read an illustration for you from a commentary on the book of Hebrews by Pastor Douglas Wilson that is especially understandable by us Utahns. He writes,
“An illustration I have used before is this: suppose the gift of prophecy were still operative today, and a prophet stood up in our church and predicted that within two years Salt Lake City was going to be destroyed by a giant meteor crashing into the earth. We know that our prophet is a good guy named Agabus, and so we know this is going to happen. Then, in a masterpiece of bad timing, a college student in our church with a Mormon background announces that his family has told him that if he forgets all this evangelical, born-again business, they will set him up in business (in Salt Lake City), get him a cute LDS wife, and really take care of him. For various reasons, let us say that our young man is wavering, and he is really considering it. Now of course, we are concerned about his soul. But our pleading with him is going to be greatly affected by our knowledge that he is contemplating moving to a city that is going to be squashed by a giant rock from space within a matter of months. We are not just concerned about judgment at the end of the world (though that is an important part of all this), but we are also concerned about temporal, historical judgment, about to happen, here and now.
This is exactly the kind of situation that the author of Hebrews was facing. Some Jewish Christians suddenly started to waver in their faith, and were thinking of going back to Jerusalem to worship, when that city was on the very threshold of her destruction. The whole Christian church knew of that pending destruction—Jesus could not have been plainer. The mid-to-late sixties was a bad time to take up the practice of sacrificing bulls and goats in the temple at Jerusalem.”
Walking Through The Text
So now that we’ve set the text in its context and put up some guardrails against coming to bad conclusions about what the author is saying, let’s walk through the text and follow the argument.
First, he gives us the broad theme of the passage in verses 26–27. We could summarize it by saying that…
1. Going back to the shadows is going back to where there is no longer any true sacrifice for sins, but only judgment (26–27).
Verses 26–27,
“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.”
-Hebrews 10:26–27
Don’t go back to the shadow-covenant after you have received the better New Covenant. There is no longer any sacrifice for sin there, only the expectation of judgment. Don’t shrink back!
2. Both the blessings and the sanctions of the New Covenant are greater (28–31).
Verses 28–31,
“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 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? 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.”
-Hebrews 10:28–31
The Old Covenant had certain blessings with it. As Paul makes clear in Romans 9, the Jewish people were blessed by having the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, the promises, the patriarchs, and that they even got the blessing that the Lord Jesus was descended from their race in the flesh.
And the Old Covenant had sanctions, or punishments. One, which the author points us to here, is that if you set aside the Law and because a lawbreaker, you would be put to death on the evidence of two or three witnesses.
Now here’s his point: The New Covenant has better blessings than the Old—an immortal High Priest, forgiveness of sin, all of the things that we’ve already seen for the last few chapters. But it also has stricter sanctions: If you could be put to death for rejecting the Law of Moses, how much more would you be eternally put to death for rejecting and trampling underfoot the blood of the Son of God in favor of the blood of bulls and goats in the Jerusalem Temple? It’s an a fortiori, or a how-much-more sort of argument.
Don’t do it! Don’t fall into the vengeful hands of the living God! God is awesome and holy and powerful. He is terrifying if you stand before him as a rebel, as a covenant-breaker, as one who claims to be under the blood of his Son and then rejects that blood for inferior blood.
This is the text that Jonathan Edwards used to get his sermon, Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God—a marvelous gospel sermon, if you go back and read it—for a reason. The gospel is so glorious as to make rejecting it, especially after understanding it, the height of folly.
But he has encouragement to give to these Jewish Christians. Look at verse 32, if you would:
3. But take heart! (32–34)
Verses 32–34,
“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.”
-Hebrews 10:32–34
He’s saying, “Look, don’t give into this temptation after having walked through so many with fruitfulness and gospel-joy!” They had already borne much fruit of salvation. They responded to persecution—having their very property plundered—with joy! They had compassion on their imprisoned brothers.
He’s saying, “You’ve already shown that you know and trust in your greater, more abiding possession: Jesus Christ. Don’t go back now!” And so he concludes in verses 35–39,
4. Therefore, don’t shrink back to anvil where the hammer is about to fall, but press on in faith (35–39).
Verses 35–39,
“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.”
-Hebrews 10:35–39
Do you see it? Shrinking back here, in context, is shrinking back to the forms of the Old Covenant. It is a return to the shadow-Temple, the shadow-priests, the shadow-sacrifices. And it is especially foolish, since God is about to destroy it all in a just a few short months and years.
Translating the Principle
So that is, I’m convinced, what this text is and is not saying: It is not meant for universal application in a decontextualized way. It is not teaching that if you commit any intentional sin after salvation, that you are therefore lost and under deadly, eternal judgment.
It is rather a word to a generation of Jewish Christians facing a very specific temptation, which was especially foolhardy given their position in history.
But that doesn’t mean it is not for us, right? Not at all! The application may be different, as we don’t have a Temple to return to. But the principle is still there, right?
Don’t shrink back to the idols you worshiped when Christ found you! God is cleansing the earth; he is making a new creation. He is in the process of crushing and subduing all of his enemies, all idols, all false gods.
So what? So don’t make alliances with them, for one! Don’t make peace with your sin! Don’t make peace with that which God is going to judge in fire and wrath. To do so after coming to the knowledge of the truth would be utter folly.
So listen, here’s your one, big application today, Refuge, and we’ll leave it here:
Make war with sin. Hate it with perfect hatred. Tremble with joy and with fear before our holy and good Father, and by his Spirit, declare war on what he is warring against.
Don’t shrink back to the lusts of pornography, lust, abortion, homosexuality, and all other sexual perversions that your Lord is at war with. He is in the process of destroying those idols. Don’t cling to them.
Don’t shrink back to the folly of greed and selfishness and self-protecting autonomy. The Lord Jesus loves you and so hates them and so he is coming to cut them down. Don’t cling to them.
Don’t shrink back to the the evils of relativistic, law-unto-myself, follow-your-heart, manmade religion. The Father is putting it under the feet of his Son.
Make war with sin. And make war with sin by resting in Christ. “My righteous one shall live by faith… we are not those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who have faith and preserve their souls.”
Whatever you do, cling to the grace and the glory of your Lord and your Redeemer, for he is good and he is for you. Make war with sin by faith, meaning, make war with sin by resting in the finished work and superior pleasures of Christ, not the inferior pleasures of sin.