The Danger of Falling Away

Hebrews 5:11–6:20

Read Hebrews 5:11–6:20 before proceeding. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.

We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, sure and steadfast, which reaches inside behind the curtain, where Jesus our forerunner entered on our behalf.

Hebrews 6:19–20a

The Passage We Do Not Want to Read

We come to the passage most Christians, if they are honest, would rather skip. Hebrews 6:4–6 has caused more pastoral anxiety than any other passage in the letter, perhaps more than any other passage in the New Testament. Tender consciences have read it and despaired. Earnest preachers have used it as a whip. Whole movements have built their doctrine of perseverance around it. And in the middle of all the noise, the writer’s actual pastoral purpose has often been lost.

So let us read it carefully. Slowly. With the Lutheran pastoral habits we have been building through the volume. And let us see that the passage, for all its sternness, does not end in despair. It ends in one of the strongest affirmations of God’s faithfulness in the New Testament: the image of hope as an anchor for the soul, sure and steadfast, reaching inside behind the curtain, where Jesus has entered as our forerunner. The writer does not leave us terrified. He leaves us anchored. The passage that begins with rebuke ends with the most secure resting place the letter has yet offered.

Three movements shape the passage. The first is rebuke: the writer tells his readers they have become sluggish in hearing, slow to grow, still in need of milk when they should be eating meat. The second is warning: if someone truly departs from Christ after having known the reality of the gospel, it is impossible to renew them again to repentance. The third is confidence: the writer says, in the very next sentence, that he is convinced of better things concerning his readers, things relating to salvation. And the passage ends with the anchor.

Hold all three movements together. The rebuke does not mean his readers have fallen away; the warning is not a prediction that they will; and the confidence is not a casual reassurance after an empty threat. The writer is doing what a faithful shepherd does with a flock that has grown weary: he sharpens them with a warning, and then he strengthens them with the promise that made them his flock in the first place. Both are pastoral. Both are necessary. Both are what a shepherd does.

Slow to Learn

The passage opens with rebuke, though the writer is characteristically careful about how he delivers it. “On this topic we have much to say and it is difficult to explain, since you have become sluggish in hearing. For though you should in fact be teachers by this time, you need someone to teach you the beginning elements of God’s utterances. You have gone back to needing milk, not solid food.”

“Sluggish in hearing.” The phrase does not mean they cannot hear; it means the sharpness of their hearing has faded. Once they were alert. Once they received the Word with eagerness and let it do its work on them. Now, the writer says, they have become sluggish. Their attention has dimmed. They are still hearing the Word, but not with the edge of attention that lets the Word change them.

This is, perhaps, not a condition alien to any of us who have been Christians for a while. The fresh urgency of the early days fades. We have heard the same gospel many times. We have read the same Scripture passages. We have prayed the same prayers. And somewhere along the way, without our quite noticing, we have become sluggish in hearing: still present in the right places, still going through the right motions, but not letting the Word press in on us the way it once did. This is a real pastoral condition, and the writer is naming it. It is not a condition of final apostasy. It is the condition of a believer who has grown tired, complacent, or distracted, and who needs to be shaken awake.

He is sharp about it. “You should in fact be teachers by this time.” The implication is that his readers have been Christians long enough to have grown. They should, by now, be the ones passing the faith on to others, the ones whose depth in Christ is so settled that they can walk younger believers into the same depth. Instead, they still need to be walked through the basics. Still on milk when they should be on meat. Still repeating the first lessons when they should be teaching them.

What are the basic principles the writer has in mind? He names six in the opening verses of chapter 6: repentance from dead works, faith in God, teaching about ritual washings, laying on of hands, resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment. These are the foundational teachings of the Christian faith, the elementary doctrines every believer should know by heart. The writer does not say these teachings are unimportant. Of course they are important. He says that a mature believer should have them as settled foundation and should be building on them, not still laying them down again and again as though they had never been laid.

And so he says: “And this is what we intend to do, if God permits.” He will press on with them. He will not dwell forever on elementary things. He will treat them as adults, even if adult treatment is more than they are currently equipped for. This is one of the quiet marks of a good teacher: he does not stay endlessly at the beginner’s level because his students are beginners. He presses them, with care, into the next thing. That is how growth happens.

Impossible to Restore

And now the passage turns sharp. “For it is impossible in the case of those who have once been enlightened, tasted the heavenly gift, become partakers of the Holy Spirit, tasted the good word of God and the miracles of the coming age, and then have committed apostasy, to renew them again to repentance, since they are crucifying the Son of God for themselves all over again and holding him up to contempt.”

This is the verse that has frightened so many Christians. And before we press into its interpretation, it is worth saying plainly what Lutheran teaching has consistently said about it: this passage does not describe the struggling believer. It describes a particular and extreme condition: the state of a person who has known the reality of the gospel, truly encountered it, truly shared in its benefits, and has then, with willful and settled determination, turned away from Christ and joined the ranks of those who crucify Him afresh. It is the condition of apostasy proper, not the condition of a Christian struggling with sin, or doubting, or growing weary. Those conditions belong to the whole rest of the Christian life, and the gospel addresses them again and again. Apostasy, the willful, clear-eyed rejection of a Christ one has truly known, is a different thing.

Notice the description the writer gives. “Once been enlightened”: they have received the illumination of the gospel. “Tasted the heavenly gift”: they have received the gift of salvation and its benefits. “Become partakers of the Holy Spirit”: they have shared in the Spirit and His work. “Tasted the good word of God and the miracles of the coming age”: they have experienced, in some measure, what eternal life tastes like. These are strong phrases. The writer is not describing someone who was merely around the Christian community, an outward hearer who never truly believed. He is describing someone who has known the Christian reality. The warning is addressed to real believers, because real believers can fall.

And then, “have committed apostasy.” The Greek word is parapiptō, to fall aside, to fall away, and the context shows what kind of falling is meant. This is not drift. Drift is what the earlier warning addressed: the ship easing past its moorings unnoticed. This is departure, a person who has turned and walked away, who has said, in effect, “I know what Christ offered, and I reject it.” Such a person, the writer says, is “crucifying the Son of God for themselves all over again and holding him up to contempt.” They have not merely drifted from Christ; they have sided with those who crucified Him.

Why is it impossible to renew such a person to repentance? Not because God’s grace has run out, and not because God is unwilling to receive a sinner who returns. The impossibility lies in what the apostate is doing. Notice the tense: “since they are crucifying the Son of God.” The writer describes an ongoing, persistent repudiation. Repentance comes only through Christ, through His Word calling us back and His Spirit working sorrow over sin and faith in the promise. The apostate has rejected that very Christ, and so long as he goes on rejecting Him, he has shut himself off from the only means by which repentance comes. There is no second road back that goes around Christ. The writer uses an agricultural image in the verses that follow: ground that soaks up the rain and yields useful vegetation receives a blessing from God; ground that receives the same rain and produces only thorns and thistles is useless and about to be cursed. The rain was the same. The fault lay not in the rain but in the ground that refused it.

So Hebrews 6 does not deny that God can restore the fallen. It warns against the hardened repudiation of Christ in which a person rejects the only means by which repentance and restoration come. The Lutheran Church confesses both truths together. A Christian does not lose salvation through a sin that is confessed in faith, but persistent, impenitent unbelief is spiritually fatal. And wherever God grants repentance, the Church must not deny absolution. The Augsburg Confession says exactly this: those who fall after Baptism receive forgiveness whenever they return in repentance, and absolution is not to be refused them. It rejects the Novatians, who would not absolve those who fell after Baptism, and it rejects those who teach that a person once justified cannot lose the Holy Spirit (Augsburg Confession XII). Believers can fall away. The fallen can be restored. The warning is real, and so is the welcome home.

So what do we do with this passage? Let Lutheran pastoral instinct guide us. If this warning makes you afraid, and you find yourself asking, “Have I fallen away?”, do not try to settle the question by measuring your fear. Fear is not faith, and the intensity of your worry proves nothing either way. Look outside yourself. Look where the writer himself points before the chapter is over: to God’s promise, confirmed by His oath, “two unchangeable things,” in which “it is impossible for God to lie.” That is the anchor, and it is fastened in Christ, not in your feelings. If you still desire Christ, then repent, and flee to Him where He has promised to be found: in His Word, in your Baptism, in the Supper. Hebrews gives you no reason to apply this warning as a verdict against you. Receive the absolution and hold fast to the promise. The writer’s very next sentence was written for the one who flees to Christ.

We Are Convinced of Better Things

“But in your case, dear friends, even though we speak like this, we are convinced of better things relating to salvation.”

Read that sentence carefully. The writer has just said something severe. He has invoked the possibility of apostasy in language meant to sober his readers. And immediately, in the very next sentence, he turns and says, “But in your case, dear friends … we are convinced of better things.” He is not contradicting himself. He is doing what a faithful pastor does. He has warned. Now he is reassuring. The warning was necessary; the reassurance is equally necessary. Both belong to his pastoral care.

Let that shape how we hear the warning. The writer himself does not believe his readers are falling away. He believes they are tired, sluggish, distracted, in need of sharpening. The warning is medicine, not prediction. He wants them to feel the seriousness of what they have received so that they will not treat it lightly. But he is not prophesying their doom. He is pastoring them, warning where warning is needed, reassuring where reassurance is needed. This is the way Scripture typically works. And it is the way any faithful teacher today must work. Warnings and reassurances are not contradictory; they are complementary tools, meant to produce the same result: faithful endurance.

The writer then gives a reason for his confidence. “For God is not unjust so as to forget your work and the love you have demonstrated for his name, in having served and continuing to serve the saints.” The readers have a history. They have loved. They have served. They have cared for God’s people. God sees this. God remembers this. These works are not the ground of their standing before God; they are the fruit of the faith God has worked in them, and God does not forget them. He is not the kind of God who forgets faithful love even when the one who loves is struggling. The writer is not flattering them; he is naming what is actually true about them, in the sight of God, and encouraging them to let that truth strengthen them.

“But we passionately want each of you to demonstrate the same eagerness for the fulfillment of your hope until the end, so that you may not be sluggish, but imitators of those who through faith and perseverance inherit the promises.” “Sluggish” is the same word the writer used in 5:11; he is calling them out of the very condition he named at the start. The pastoral goal is a hope held firmly until the end. The Greek word behind “fulfillment” can also be rendered “full assurance.” Not anxious wondering; not endless self-examination; not the tormenting question of whether one is truly in the faith. Full assurance of hope. The writer wants his readers to have it, to hold onto it, to let it carry them to the end. And he points them to those who have gone before, the patriarchs and saints of the Old Testament, who through faith and perseverance inherited the promises. That inheritance is also for us. The pattern holds.

An Oath for Our Encouragement

The writer now turns to Abraham. “Now when God made his promise to Abraham, since he could swear by no one greater, he swore by himself, saying, ‘Surely I will bless you greatly and multiply your descendants abundantly.’ And so by persevering, Abraham inherited the promise.”

The reference is to Genesis 22, after the binding of Isaac, when God swore by His own name to fulfill His promise to Abraham. Abraham waited long. The promise of a son was given and delayed and held in tension for years. Isaac came late. The further promises of descendants as numerous as the stars of heaven were promises Abraham received by faith long before he saw even the first generation of his descendants. And yet he waited, and God proved faithful. The writer uses Abraham as the example of the patient perseverance by which the promise is received.

Then he makes a move that is perhaps the richest pastoral move in all of Hebrews. “For people swear by something greater than themselves, and the oath serves as a confirmation to end all dispute. In the same way God wanted to demonstrate more clearly to the heirs of the promise that his purpose was unchangeable, and so he intervened with an oath, so that we who have found refuge in him may find strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us through two unchangeable things, since it is impossible for God to lie.”

Stop and let that land. God, the writer says, wanted to demonstrate more clearly, more clearly than by promise alone, that His purpose toward those who have found refuge in Christ was unchangeable. And so He did what humans do when they want to make a promise unbreakable: He swore an oath. Humans swear by something greater than themselves to guarantee their word. God, having no one greater, swore by Himself. Two unchangeable things now stand together, the promise and the oath, and in both of them it is impossible for God to lie. The promise is secure. The oath is secure. Both are secure together. And the readers are the heirs of the promise.

Notice what the writer says of his readers: they are those “who have found refuge in him.” The Greek word pictures people fleeing for refuge, running to a shelter, taking sanctuary. This is what Christians have done. We are not people who strolled casually in; we are people who fled. The world pressed on us; we ran to Christ. And the writer says that such people, people who have fled to Him for refuge, have strong encouragement, from the combined promise-and-oath of God, to hold fast to the hope set before them. The hope is set before us. The encouragement is strong. The refuge is secure.

An Anchor of the Soul

And now the passage reaches its climax. “We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, sure and steadfast, which reaches inside behind the curtain, where Jesus our forerunner entered on our behalf, since he became a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek.”

The image is an anchor. An anchor holds the ship when the storm rages. An anchor does not guarantee that the storm will not come; it guarantees that the ship will not be swept away. The anchor does its work not by calming the sea but by holding the ship fast against a sea that does not calm. And the anchor of the Christian soul, the writer says, is hope, a hope that reaches inside behind the curtain.

The curtain in the tabernacle was the barrier between the Holy Place and the Most Holy Place, where God’s presence dwelt above the ark of the covenant. Only the high priest entered behind that curtain, and only once a year, and only with the blood of sacrifice. The writer is now drawing on that image to say something extraordinary. Our hope, he says, reaches in behind the curtain, into the very presence of God. It is not a hope tethered to some nearer object. It is not a hope grounded in our own performance or our own feelings. It is a hope that reaches all the way into the inner sanctuary, where God Himself dwells.

How? Because Jesus has entered there as our forerunner. The word was used in military settings for the advance scout, the one who goes ahead into territory that will soon be occupied by the force following behind. Jesus has gone into the heavenly sanctuary ahead of us, and He has gone there on our behalf. The same access He has, we will have. The same place He occupies, we will occupy. Our hope is anchored in Him, and because He has already gone in, the anchor holds fast in a place that the storms of this life cannot reach. The storm rages on the surface of the sea; the anchor is in bedrock beyond the waves.

This is the resolution of the passage. The writer began with rebuke: you have become sluggish in hearing. He moved to warning: the apostate cannot be renewed to repentance. He turned to reassurance: we are convinced of better things concerning you. He pointed to Abraham as the example of patient perseverance. He named the promise-and-oath that together guarantee God’s word. And now he lands here: you are anchored. Your hope is tethered to Christ in the presence of God. The storm may rage. The drift may tempt. The journey may be long. But the anchor holds.

And the last phrase: “since he became a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek.” The writer is about to take up, in chapter 7, what this means. He has already named Melchizedek twice in passing, in 5:6 and 5:10, and now he names him a third time. The third mention is the last before the full treatment. The writer has been preparing the ground. What kind of priest is this, who serves in the heavenly sanctuary forever, in an order older than Levi’s? We will find out in the next session.

Gathering the Threads

A long passage, difficult in parts, but woven together with great pastoral care. Three movements, and they belong together.

The first is the rebuke. The readers have become sluggish in hearing. They should be teachers by now; instead they still need to be taught the elementary things. This is a real and common pastoral condition, and the writer names it honestly. The Christian life requires vigilant attention to the Word. When we grow sluggish, we need to be shaken awake.

The second is the warning. The apostate who has truly known Christ and deliberately turned away cannot be renewed to repentance while he persists in repudiating Christ, because he has closed himself against the only means of restoration. This is a severe word, and we receive it with all seriousness. But we also read it in its context: it is a warning aimed at the complacent, not a verdict for the tender. It does not deny that God restores the fallen; wherever God grants repentance, the Church speaks the absolution. And the troubled conscience is not sent to its own fear for comfort but to Christ’s promise. The writer himself makes this clear by his very next sentence: “But in your case, dear friends … we are convinced of better things.”

The third is the confidence. The reassurance is not a contradiction of the warning; it is the warning’s pastoral complement. And the reassurance rests not on the readers’ performance but on God’s character: His promise confirmed by His oath, both of them unchangeable, both of them impossible to be false. We who have found refuge in Him have strong encouragement to hold fast. Our hope is an anchor. The anchor reaches into the presence of God. And Jesus, our forerunner and high priest forever, holds the anchor fast.

So the passage that seemed, at first reading, to threaten us ends up anchoring us. The writer has not been trying to shake us off the ship; he has been trying to settle us more firmly on it. The warning is real; the anchor is more real. Both are the Word doing its proper work on us: the Law shaking what needs shaking, the Gospel strengthening what needs strengthening. And the destination of both is the same: the throne of grace, where the forerunner has gone on our behalf, and where we will follow.

For Discussion

1. The writer begins by saying his readers have become “sluggish in hearing.” What are the signs, in your own life or in what you have observed in others, that spiritual hearing has grown sluggish? What has helped sharpen your hearing when it has gone dull?
2. Hebrews 6:4–6 is the passage most often misread in the letter. Based on the discussion in this session, what is the writer warning against, and who is he warning? Where does the Lutheran tradition send a person who is afraid of having fallen away, and why does it point that person to Christ’s promise, Word, and Sacraments rather than to their own feelings?
3. Immediately after the severe warning, the writer says, “But in your case, dear friends … we are convinced of better things.” What does this quick turn teach us about how faithful Christian teaching should work? When have you heard warning and reassurance held together well? When have you heard them held apart badly?
4. God added an oath to His promise, the writer says, because He “wanted to demonstrate more clearly to the heirs of the promise that his purpose was unchangeable.” Why does God add an oath to a promise? How does it change the way we hear God’s promises to know that He has guaranteed them with His own name?
5. The writer describes Christians as those “who have found refuge in him,” a phrase that pictures people fleeing for refuge. How accurately does this describe your own Christian experience? What did you flee from? What did you flee to?
6. “We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, sure and steadfast.” The anchor does not calm the storm; it holds the ship fast against the storm. Where in your life is the anchor of Christian hope doing its work right now? Where have you seen it do its work in the past?

Looking Ahead

Session 7 takes up Hebrews 7 in full, the chapter in which the writer finally develops, at length, what he has been hinting at for three chapters now: the priesthood of Melchizedek and how Christ’s priesthood in that order surpasses the Levitical priesthood in every way. This is a dense chapter, but it is a chapter with a clear and important pastoral point: Christ’s priesthood is permanent, sufficient, and final. There is no further priest to come, no other mediator needed, no second sacrifice required. The priest we have is the priest we need.

Before next session, read Genesis 14:17–20, the brief Old Testament account of Melchizedek and Abraham, and then Hebrews 7 in its entirety. Notice what the writer draws from the Genesis account, what he draws from Psalm 110, and how he holds them together. Come with your questions.

Closing Prayer

Father of all grace, who gave us Your promise and confirmed it with Your oath: anchor our souls in the hope set before us. Keep us from sluggish hearing. Keep us from drift. Keep us from despair. And when the warning of Your Word shakes us, lead us quickly to the anchor of Christ, our forerunner and high priest, who has gone behind the curtain ahead of us and on our behalf. Hold us, Lord, until we are finally where He already is. Amen.