Hebrews 6:1-6 seems to imply that if someone who was once genuinely converted loses that salvation they are not able to repent and return once again to the Christian faith, but how does that fit with stories of apostasy and restoration from Scripture and from the real lives of many Christians? Peter, for instance, confesses that Jesus is the true Messiah, denies him immediately before his death, and then returns to become a pillar of the earliest church. What then, does the Hebrew text mean?

The answer has to do with the historical context: threatened with persecution, at least some Christians in the church, who received the epistle of Hebrews, have been tempted to return to the safety of the currently-legal Jewish synagogue. The preacher of Hebrews warns them that by returning to an expression of faith that denies the salvific reality of the death of Jesus, they cut themselves off–however devout their synagogue worship will be–from that salvation, and by doing so they implicitly confess that the one-off sacrifice of Jesus was not good enough and that God must provide a different sacrifice. If they want to experience the grace of God, they must confess instead that Jesus is the God-man crucified for the sins of the world.

In other words, the text does not deny that those who apostasize are forever cut off from grace, but it does teach that those who apostasize can only return to God’s grace by believing in the crucified and risen Jesus.

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

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