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I want to welcome you to day two of our look through Hebrews chapter six. We're
going to look at verses four to eight today. These happen to be some of the most
difficult to understand verses in all of Hebrews, some of the most discussed
verses in all of Hebrews.

So I know you're going to enjoy today's study as we walk through this today. Let
me begin by reading these verses to you. Hebrews six, four to eight.

It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the
heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness
of the work of God and the powers of the coming age, if they fall away, to be
brought back to repentance. Because to their loss, they are crucifying the Son
of God all over again and subjecting Him to public disgrace. Land that drinks in
the rain, often falling on it, and that produces a crop useful to those for whom
it is farmed, receives the blessing of God.

But land that produces thorns and thistles is worthless and is in danger of
being cursed. In the end, it will be burned. Now as I read through those verses,
it's pretty obvious that there are some differing opinions on what these verses
mean, especially in the area of our salvation and how secure our salvation is.

But let me just say before we approach that subject and we're going to, that
sometimes we focus so much on the differing opinions of what these verses might
mean that we miss the meaning for our lives. So before looking at some of those
opinions, let's look at the meaning that we all agree on. And in a way, a deep
way, it's really a second component of hope.

If I want to have hope in my life, I've got to move on to maturity. We talked
about that yesterday. A second thing I have to do, if I want to have hope is I
have to have a healthy fear of falling away, a healthy fear of falling away.

Now, what does it mean to fall away? We'll talk about that in a minute. But at
one level, we all know it means I'm not serving the Lord anymore.

I'm not with God's people anymore. I've fallen away. And if you're one of those
people who thinks or you know people who think, you know, it doesn't really
matter how close I am to the Lord.

I mean, I can drift in and out of faith. I know I'm always going to come back
somehow, and you don't have a healthy fear of falling away. You don't have a
healthy fear of what the world might do to you.

You don't have a healthy fear of your own human frailty. And if you're that kind
of person who is always in and out and in and out, then of course you have no
real hope because there is no real consistency of faith in your life. And you're
also, if you don't have this healthy fear of falling away, you're not
recognizing the reality of faith.

If you can so easily let go of faith, I'll just not be around God's people for a
while. I'm going to do what I want to do to make money or to have pleasure or to
get popular or to be mad at God's people, whatever reason you have, if you think
I can just let go of it that easily, then you've got to wonder if you really
have it at all because true faith is not something you let go of that easily.
Now, I'm not talking about struggling with living a life of faith.

We all do that. I'm talking about completely falling away, not thinking about
the Lord, not praying, not looking at his word, not being around his people at
all. Just forget God.

I'm letting him out of my life. And with that in mind, having this healthy fear,
there are some good things to have a healthy fear of in life, and one of them is
falling away. It is really a component of hope.

We're so afraid of fear sometimes that we forget that there is such a thing as a
healthy fear, the awe of God, the fear of the Lord, the fear of falling away
from God's people, the fear of my own frailty. Have a healthy fear of falling
away. With that in mind, let's take a closer look at the meaning of these
verses.

The first word in verse four in the Greek language is the word impossible. And
understanding the importance of that word helps you to understand the meaning of
this passage. By the way, the writer of Hebrews uses the word impossible three
other times.

He talks about it being impossible for God to lie. He talks about how it's
impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sin. He talks about how
it's impossible to please God without faith.

Just reminding you of those truths shows you this is an important word to this
writer. So when he says it's impossible for people who've been enlightened,
who've tasted the heavenly gift, who've shared in the Holy Spirit, if they fall
away to be brought back to repentance, what is he talking about? Who is the
person who's being talked about here?

Well Warren Mearsby says there's three possibilities here. You could actually
make this into five or six, but let's just make this as easy as we can and look
at three possibilities. This could be a believer who has lost their salvation
that he's talking about.

Or others believe this is not a believer. Somebody who has never become a
believer. Maybe they were in church, but they were not a believer.

Or a third possibility people talk about is this is just a hypothetical
argument. This isn't really anybody. He's just using this as an argument, a
hypothetical argument to help the readers of Hebrews to understand the value of
faith.

Now I actually don't believe this is just hypothetical. It seems like he's
talking about some real people here. I also though don't believe he's talking
about a believer who can lose their salvation.

I don't believe that for three reasons. First the law of Bible study that you
always understand unclear passages in the light of clear passages. And this is
an unclear passage.

It's hard to get a handle on all that he means here as you talk about
enlightened and tasted the heavenly gift and shared in the Holy Spirit. There is
a sense of trying to understand, get your mind around exactly what those phrases
mean when it comes to having a life of faith. It does sound like it's, oh,
that's absolutely a believer, but you could also take those same phrases to
mean, no, it sounds also like it could be somebody who was in the church, but
never crossed the line to true belief.

So the clear passages throughout the scripture, John 3. 16 or John 10, John 3.
16, God so loved the world he gave his only begotten son that whoever believes
in him shouldn't perish, but have eternal life.

Eternal is eternal. That's very clear. How do you take away eternal or John 10?

Jesus talks about his sheep hearing his voice and no one can snatch them out of
my hand. The clear passages are so powerful that they cause me to think I
wouldn't take this to mean that what Jesus said is not true, that what Jesus
says is not simply understandable. A second reason that I believe that this is
not talking about losing your salvation is the latter part of this chapter.

As we get into the latter part of this chapter, you're going to see that he
gives very clear assurances for believers that are based on the oath of God, the
promises of God, the unbreakable promises of God. So if he's talking about
losing your salvation here from to turn around and just a few verses later begin
to talk about the unbreakable oath or promises of God, does it make sense? A
third reason that I don't believe this is talking about a believer losing their
salvation is this phrase, it's impossible to renew them again to repentance.

If it really were a believer that lost their salvation, I don't know anyone who
would teach that that believer couldn't somehow come back to God someday. I
don't know anybody who teaches, hey, if you fall away, that's it. You never get
to return.

There's no chance you could ever return to Christ. So what is he talking about?
I believe he's talking about somebody who's not yet a believer, who's gotten
very close because I do believe that there are many who think they're believers,
who hope they're believers or who hang around other believers, but they're not
believers.

They've heard about Jesus, they've been convicted by the Holy Spirit, but
they're still depending on their own good works to get them into God's good
graces, to get them into heaven. And what the writer is saying here is if you
have the witness of the church, if you have the conviction of the Spirit and you
have the Word of God and that's not enough to get you to repentance, then
nothing is enough. Now remember, putting this in the light of those to whom this
was first written, they were struggling with thinking that maybe there's
something more, something better than Jesus.

So maybe we need to go out and go back to the log, maybe we need to go back to
the Old Testament and we'll find the something more, something better that we
needed that we didn't find in Jesus. And he's writing and saying in the
strongest terms, if you don't find it in Jesus, you're not going to find it
anywhere. That's the only way to find it, the only place to find it.

Now back to the meaning of these verses for our lives. I love what George
Guthrie says in his NIV commentary on Hebrews about the three things that we
agree on in this passage. Number one, we talked about already, it's a dangerous
thing to fall away from faith.

Never take that lightly. Never think you can fall away and somehow make your way
back. It's a very dangerous thing to fall away from faith.

And if you find yourself falling away because of some anger or some selfishness
or some doubt, realize what a dangerous thing it is. The second truth we all
agree on is there are those who appear to be in the community of faith who are
not truly in the community of faith. Just because I'm attending church, that
doesn't make me a Christian.

Just because I've been baptized, that doesn't make me a Christian. It's not a
matter of attendance or baptism. Those should be a response to what's already
happened in my life that Jesus Christ has saved me.

But it is so easy to attend church and still somehow expect that your good works
are going to get you closer to God. And it happens to so many of us. Maybe it's
been happening to you.

Maybe even hearing this right now, you realize I'm one of those people. Right
now, throw yourself on the mercy of God. He has mercy for you and forgiveness
and recognize that he's given you forgiveness in Christ.

And then a third thing that we recognize in these verses is that true faith and
spirituality has to be evaluated by fruitfulness. That's what the last part of
this passage is about as he talks about the land that drinks in the rain and
sometimes brings fruit and other land does not. That the only way you're going
to see in the end is by the fruitfulness of a person's life.

And we're going to talk about this a little bit more tomorrow, but it's a good
reminder to me of what happens to bring us hope in life. If I fall away and
there's no fruit in my life, then I know the scripture says there are some who
are saved, yet so is through fire. There's some who are saved.

They really did make a decision for Christ, but there's no fruitfulness in their
life. So you really don't know until you get to heaven. There's no evidence of
it now.

If I'm going to have hope now, the way to have hope now is to be diligent
through difficult times. And then you see the fruitfulness of what only God can
do in your life, and that brings hope, the kind of hope that we need in this
world. Now as we pray today, I want to take a moment to pray for my life and
your life that there would be this healthy fear in our lives.

Jesus we pray against unhealthy fear, the fear of this world or the fear of the
opinions of others, the fear of following you, the fear of taking a risk. We
don't want that kind of fear in our lives, but we want healthy fear in our
lives. The fear of what our lives would be like without you.

The fear of what our lives would be like without your people. The fear of our
own tendency to fall away so easily, to wander and drift so easily. And so Lord,
with that healthy fear, help us to stick close to you, stick close to your
people.

Help us to be faithful to you because we are staying close to your faithfulness.
We ask this in Jesus' name, amen. Tomorrow we're going to look together at the
power of diligence.