Listen or read the following transcript as R. C. Sproul speaks on the topic of the Perseverance of the Saints from Hebrews 6
The following unedited transcript is provided by Beluga AI.
We continue now with our study of eternal security and in the past couple of sessions we’ve looked at the cloud of darkness that tends to hang over this doctrine that’s designed to give consolation to us in the midst of our struggle as Christians and that has to do with the manifold warnings in the New Testament against falling away and in our last session we looked at the most severe of all those warnings, namely the warning of Christ to the Pharisees about the danger of committing the unpardonable sin.
But anytime we have a discussion of the question of whether a Christian can fall away and lose their salvation, the discussion sooner or later and most often sooner turns to a treatment of Hebrews 6. This is another section of scripture that we’ve already examined in the series we did on the hard sayings of the Bible, but again because this text is so central to discussions about perseverance I think it’s important for us today to look afresh at this text.
Hebrews 6:1 reads as follows,
1 Therefore let us leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity, not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God, 2 and of instruction about washings, the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment. 3 And this we will do if God permits. (Hebrews 6:1-3, ESV)
And then verse 4 begins the difficult segment,
4 For it is impossible, in the case of those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, and have shared in the Holy Spirit, 5 and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come, 6 and then have fallen away, to restore them again to repentance, since they are crucifying once again the Son of God to their own harm and holding him up to contempt. (Hebrews 6:4-6, ESV)
Now this text not only speaks in terms of those who fall away, but it gives somewhat of a graphic and vivid description of the state of these people prior to their falling away. And we are also told in this text that there is something impossible, and that is it is impossible that these people be restored again to repentance. So if there’s anything that speaks about an unpardonable offense or a way in which a person more or less cooks themselves forever, it is in this strong admonition at the beginning of chapter 6.
What do we make of it? How do we understand this text? I have to be honest with you and say I have vacillated myself in my own life in seeking a clear understanding of what is being described here. And that vacillation makes me less than dogmatic about my current understanding of the sixth chapter of Hebrews. And I want to admit at the outset that I find this an extremely difficult passage to deal with.
And part of the difficulty, as I’ve pointed out in the past, has to do with the lack of background information, which information, if we had, would go a long way to helping us solve the difficulty of interpreting Hebrews 6. And those unknown matters include, first of all, who wrote the book of Hebrews. Sometimes knowing the author of a certain work gives us clues to understanding difficult passages that come from their pen. More importantly, however, is to know what was the occasion that provoked this warning in the first place. Because we know that the author of Hebrews is concerned with a very serious sin that was enticing the Hebrew Christians to whom he is speaking. And we’re not sure exactly what that error was.
There have been several alternatives suggested by biblical interpreters. The two most frequent suggestions have been these. One, that the author of Hebrews is concerned in this epistle to write to those who are faced with radical persecution and who are in danger of denying Christ in the face of such persecution. He talks about those who received this letter, that they had not yet resisted unto blood the sin that so easily besets them. We know that in the early church, one of the most rigorous controversies that emerged was called the lapsi controversy. And that question dealt with those who lapsed in their faith under the threat of persecution.
Fox’s book of martyrs testifies to the ancient statement that the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the church. And we have the record of the heroic defense of the faith by many of those who were thrown to the lions, or who were killed by gladiators, or who became human porches in the gardens of Nero. Of those Christians who, when they were called upon to deny Christ, paid with their lives rather than deny Christ and His gospel. But the record at that point is not complete. We also have to acknowledge that there were those in the early Christian community who, when their lives were placed on the line, did recant and did deny Christ, even as Peter did initially.
Which makes me think this isn’t the issue, because Peter was restored after he denied Christ. But there are those who believe that what the author of Hebrews is writing about is giving an admonition to people who, after they know the truth, if they deny Christ now, in the threat of persecution, that there’s no hope for restoration. And there were those in the lapsi controversy who believed that those people who copped out under pressure should not be restored to fellowship in the church after the persecution died away.
And you can understand the passion that people would have in a situation like that. If you lived in a house where your father, for example, had kept the faith and was burned at the stake or thrown to the lions for his faith, while the next-door neighbor denied the faith and escaped that kind of torment, and then after the persecution was over, and the next-door neighbor wanted to come back into the fellowship of the church, the widow of the man who died would have a hard time dealing with that person, just as the people in Europe during the conquest of Hitler had great difficulty being reconciled with collaborators who worked with the enemy during the war.
But that’s one possibility that’s been suggested that is in view for this admonition. The second most frequent possibility that is given is that the Hebrew Christians were being threatened by one of the most virulent heresies to attack the first century church, and one that is dealt with on the pages of the New Testament again and again and again, most emphatically in the book of Galatians, and that is the Judaizing heresy, a group of people that tried to get the New Covenant community to continue the practice of the Jewish observations of the Old Testament and the rites and the cultic practices, insisting on circumcision as assigned to be continued in the life of the church, and we understand all of that.
And the author of Hebrews, if he is dealing with that question, then that would give me one way of interpreting the passage. But let’s again look at what is said about those people for whom it is impossible to be restored. They are described in these terms. It is impossible for those. Who? Who are these people? For those who were once enlightened, have tasted the heavenly gift, and have become partakers of the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the good word of God and the powers of the age to come.
Now, of whom is the author speaking? What kind of person can be described as a person who has been enlightened, has tasted the heavenly gift, has partaken of the Holy Spirit, has tasted the good word of God and of the power of the age to come? On the surface, that certainly sounds like it’s describing a Christian person, a regenerate person, a person who has been spiritually reborn. And so, if that’s the case, then what the author is saying is that it would be impossible for a reborn person, a truly converted person, to be restored again to salvation if they have committed the sin that is in view here.
Now, I said that I have vacillated on this passage. There was a period in my life where I thought, along with many other commentators of Hebrews, that though this language is used of enlightenment and of tasting of the heavenly gift and so on, may suggest a person who’s authentically Christian, it doesn’t necessarily have to. It can refer to people who have been closely involved in the life of the church who were never converted in the first place. Because we understand that, as was the case in Old Testament Israel, so in the case of the New Testament Church, there is always the reality of the church as being what Augustine called a corpus per mixtum, a mixed body, containing within it what Jesus described metaphorically as the wheat and the tares.
That means the tares are those who never were converted, even though outwardly they are members of the covenant community. And so, you really have three groups of people with respect to the church that the Bible describes. There’s a circle, and we’ll call that circle the church, and then outside of the church there is the unbeliever. The unbeliever represents one category of persons, but unbelievers are not restricted to the areas outside the church.
There are people inside the church who are unbelievers. So you also have unbelievers who are not in the church, you have unbelievers who are in the church, and you have believers who are in the church. Now, what about the unbeliever who is in the church? Can it be said of that person that they have been enlightened? Well, at least to the degree that they have heard the gospel, they have heard the preaching of the Word, they are not in some remote area where special revelation has never penetrated. They’ve had the advantage and the benefit of light or enlightenment with the hearing of the Word of God. So, certainly to say that somebody’s been enlightened does not necessarily mean that they have been converted.
Now, what about the next description? They’ve tasted the heavenly gift. Well, this heavenly gift could refer to a metaphorical use. It may be something akin to the people of Israel in the Old Testament who fed on the manna every day that had been provided by God for them in the wilderness. They tasted of a heavenly gift, and they were unconverted. And likewise, in the New Testament sense, people who are unbelievers come to the Lord’s table. They taste, literally taste, the heavenly gift, and they still are not converted people. So, so far, I don’t think it necessarily requires us to understand this as a description of believers.
What about partakers of the Holy Spirit? Now, that sounds a little bit more difficult, because we think of partaking in the Holy Spirit being an experience that only comes to those who have been regenerated by the Holy Spirit and filled by the Holy Spirit. That would be the prima facie reading of that text. But, in a broader sense, anybody who’s in the middle of the life of the church where the Spirit of God dwells in a loose sense partakes of the benefits of the power and the presence of the Holy Ghost without necessarily receiving one specific work of the Holy Spirit, namely the work of spiritual rebirth or regeneration, have tasted the good word of God and the powers of the days to come.
So, you can see that some, as I did in the past, took this to mean that the author is describing people who are inside the church, but who are apostates, who then repudiate the gospel, but they cannot be restored. Well, I have a couple problems with this. The first problem is it would seem to me that Peter repudiated the gospel in one sense when he sided with the Judaizers, as did Barnabas, and they were restored. And so, I’m not convinced that that’s what’s in view here in the first instance.
Second of all, the one descriptive term about these people that troubles me the most is when the author says that it is impossible for these people who’ve tasted and partaken and all that to be renewed or restored again unto repentance. That little word again strongly indicates that there had been at least one previous repentance. And if we understand the primary meaning of repentance in the New Testament as that which is something that is provoked by the work of the Holy Spirit within us, not just outside of us, and if you’re reformed in your theology and see repentance as a fruit of regeneration and not the cause of regeneration, then you, among all people, have the tightest difficulty here, because if you’re reformed in your theology, you have to say that if it’s genuine repentance, it can only be describing a believer, a regenerate person.
Now, I grant there is such a thing as a false repentance, the repentance of Esau that even the author of Hebrews mentions, but in this case, this would not be restoring again to a false repentance. He obviously means a true repentance, because that’s what he’s concerned about. Obviously, a person who had one false repentance could have another false repentance, and so when he says it’s impossible for this group of people to be restored or renewed again unto repentance, he must have genuine repentance in mind.
And if my understanding is correct now, then I say the only conclusion I can come to is that he’s talking about truly regenerate people, and he’s saying that it is impossible for a truly regenerate person if they fall away to be renewed again to repentance, since they crucify again for themselves the Son of God and put Him into an open shame. Now, what I hear the author saying is, if you do this, you’re finished. There be no renewal, there’s no possibility of restoration if you fall away to this degree.
In conclusion, I want to say two things as quickly as I can about that. If the author of Hebrews is talking about theJudaizing heresy, what we simply might be running up against here in Hebrews 6, is a very common form of argumentation that we find throughout the New Testament epistles. This is classically called the argumentum ad absurdum argument, where you take the premises of your opponent and say, “Okay, if your thesis is true or if your premises are true, let’s follow them out to their logical conclusion.” And the logical conclusion is absurd.
Paul does that in 1 Corinthians 15. If Christ is not raised, what are the implications of that? Well, now let’s look at the Judaizer heresy. If the Christian who has embraced the gospel of justification by faith alone and now turns back to trying to justify himself through the works of the law and through circumcision and that sort of thing, how could that person possibly be saved? Not by that method, because he has, in effect, crucified Christ anew.
I mean, Christ isn’t going to be crucified again. Christ is only going to be crucified once. And when He’s crucified, He becomes the curse. He fulfills the curse of the old covenant. Now, what if a person embraces Christ and then says, “Now I’m going to be circumcised and take upon myself the sign of the curse again?” What’s left for that person? He doesn’t have any way out. He’s now returned to that situation where he is under the curse of God, and he’s repudiated the finished work of Christ, and as long as he repudiates that, there’s no way for him to be saved.
Now, does that mean that anybody does, in fact, fall to this degree and goes to that logical conclusion, which conclusion would lead them to absurdity? I think not, and I take comfort by the end of this exhortation, where in verse 9 he says,
9 Though we speak in this way, yet in your case, beloved, we feel sure of better things—things that belong to salvation. ((Hebrews 6:9, ESV)
Whoo! That gets me off the hook, because here the author acknowledges that he is writing in a manner of speaking, a manner of speaking that is not your normal, everyday way of talking.
And he says, “you know, for the sake of argument, if you follow this heresy, it would lead you to an impossible situation, where you would have no grounds for salvation. But I’m persuaded of better things of you, I’m confident that you don’t do this thing, and that you do the things that do accompany salvation.” And when he says that, he’s suggesting that people who are truly saved don’t do this, and in fact, do the things that accompany salvation, and so rather than this passage taking away from our confidence and consolation of perseverance, I think it, in fact, strengthens it.
You’re listening to Renewing your Mind with Dr. R. C. Sproul. Stay with us. Dr. Sproul will be back in a few moments with some closing thoughts for us.
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Let’s join Dr. Sproul again for the rest of today’s message. As we finish up our brief reading of Hebrews 6, I remind you that after the author said that he was confident of better things of these people than that which he had warned them of, he says in verse 10, “For God is not unjust to forget your work and labor of love which you have shown toward His name.” That’s all the more confirmation that he’s describing true believers here, because God wouldn’t give that kind of promise to unbelievers.
“And we desire that each one of you show the same diligence to the full assurance of hope until the end that you do not become sluggish, but imitate those who through faith and patience inherit the promises.” This is the final exhortation of the author of Hebrews, and it’s my exhortation to you. What is behind this admonition, this warning, is a call to due diligence. He’s reminding his people that even though they have a hope for the future that they can rest in, that that hope that God has given them of the sureness and certainty of their salvation should not lead them to sluggishness in the living out of their faith.
That’s one of the great concerns that people have with the doctrine of eternal security, that if a person believes it, they’ll be at ease inZion, and they will relax and take it easy and not press into the Kingdom of God.
And here we have a unique joining of the warning with the promise and a further admonition to diligence.
