Let Us Draw Near

Hebrews 10:19–39

Read Hebrews 10:19–39 before proceeding. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.

But we are not among those who shrink back and thus perish, but are among those who have faith and preserve their souls.

Hebrews 10:39

The Great Therefore

Hebrews 10:19 begins with one of the most consequential therefores in Scripture. Everything the writer has argued since chapter 5 has been scaffolding, and now the scaffolding comes down and the building stands revealed. We have a great high priest, seated at the right hand of God. He has offered Himself once for all. The new covenant is in force, sealed by His blood. The sins He died to put away are forgotten. And therefore, and here is the turn, we can draw near, hold fast, and spur one another on. The theology of the first ten chapters bears fruit in the practical life of the Christian community, and chapter 10 makes the transition explicit.

The passage before us is one of the richest in the letter. It contains three pastoral exhortations that have shaped Christian practice for two thousand years: let us draw near, let us hold fast, let us spur one another on. It contains the fourth and final warning passage of Hebrews, more severe in its language than any we have yet seen. And it contains a remarkable remembrance of the readers’ own past faithfulness, followed by a call to endurance that sets up the great chapter on faith that comes next. Three exhortations, one warning, one remembrance, one closing exhortation, all held together by the conviction that what Christ has accomplished changes everything about how His people live in the meantime.

Before we enter the text, it is worth saying a word about the warning. This is the fourth warning in Hebrews, and we have read the previous three together, in chapters 2, 3–4, and 6. The pattern of Lutheran warning-reading we have been building across this volume now applies again. The warnings in Hebrews are real. They are not empty threats or hypothetical constructions. They are addressed to the whole Christian community, and they press in on each hearer differently depending on that hearer’s spiritual condition. For the complacent, the warning comes as the sharp word that shakes them awake. For the anxious, the warning comes as the pastoral reminder that continuing in faith is what matters, and that the means of grace are the path of continuance. For all of us, the warning calls us back to Christ, not as a work we accomplish in ourselves, but as the priest we cling to with the confidence His priestly work has made possible.

So read the passage with the whole picture in mind. The warning is held between two pastoral walls: on one side, the great exhortations to draw near and hold fast; on the other, the remembrance of earlier faithfulness and the call to endurance. The warning does not stand alone; it does its work within a passage that is, from beginning to end, a call to keep going. And the passage ends with what may be one of the most defining sentences in Hebrews about the Christian identity: “we are not among those who shrink back and thus perish, but are among those who have faith and preserve their souls.” That is who the writer says we are. Let the whole passage land under that banner.

Three Exhortations

“Therefore, brothers and sisters, since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, by the fresh and living way that he inaugurated for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a sincere heart in the assurance that faith brings, because we have had our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed in pure water.”

Two things ground the exhortation. First, we have confidence to enter the sanctuary. Not might have, not hope to have someday: have. Present tense. Confidence. The Greek word is parrhēsia, which we met back in chapter 4, the boldness of a child with a loving parent. We have it. And we have it by the blood of Jesus, and by the fresh and living way He inaugurated for us through the curtain. The curtain is His flesh: His incarnate body, torn at the cross, opening the way into the presence of God. The temple curtain in Jerusalem tore at the moment of Christ’s death, and Matthew tells us this. The writer of Hebrews sees in that tearing the opening of the true and permanent way: His own body, broken for us, is the passage.

Second, we have a great priest over the house of God. We have spent seven chapters getting to know this priest, and now He is simply named: our priest, serving over the household of faith. On the basis of these two realities, the open way and the appointed priest, the writer issues his first exhortation: let us draw near.

Draw near how? With a sincere heart, in the assurance that faith brings, because we have had our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed in pure water. Notice what the writer does and does not say. The sprinkling and the washing are not things we are told to do. They are things that have been done to us. In the Greek both are perfect participles: a finished act whose effect still stands, and we are on the receiving end of it. The language is sacramental and covenantal all at once. The sprinkling of the heart recalls the sprinkling of blood in the Old Testament covenant-making ceremonies, but now it is the heart that is sprinkled, cleansed at the level of conscience, not merely ritually purified at the level of the body. And the washing of the body with pure water calls to mind Baptism, the sacrament in which the Spirit joined us to Christ’s death and resurrection, washing away our sin and bringing us into the new covenant. Lutherans hear Baptism in this sentence, and rightly so. Baptism is not our pledge or our act of obedience; it is God’s own work, His Word joined to the water. The two cleansings the writer names, conscience sprinkled and body washed, are the realities by which Christians actually come to stand before God: the blood of Christ applied to the conscience through water and Word. We do not come to the throne on the strength of our sincerity. We come on the basis of what has already been done to us in Christ.

“And let us hold unwaveringly to the hope that we confess, for the one who made the promise is trustworthy.” The second exhortation. Hold on, and do not waver. The exhortation echoes chapter 4 (“let us hold fast to our confession”) and chapter 6 (“hold fast to the hope set before us”). It is a repeated Hebrews theme. Holding fast is not bare determination; it is the conscious, continual grip of faith on the promises of God. And the ground of the holding is not our own tenacity but God’s faithfulness. “The one who made the promise is trustworthy.” We hold on because He is faithful. When we are tempted to waver (and all of us are, at some point), the answer is not to manufacture more human determination. The answer is to remember who has promised, and on that basis to hold on.

“And let us take thought of how to spur one another on to love and good works, not abandoning our own meetings, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging each other, and even more so because you see the day drawing near.” The third exhortation. This one is about the community. We are not meant to draw near and hold fast alone. The Christian life is lived together, in the gathered assembly of God’s people, with mutual encouragement and accountability. And notice the practical specifics. We are to take thought, to think deliberately, about how we can spur one another on. We are to meet together regularly, not abandoning the gathering as some were beginning to do. We are to encourage one another. And we are to do all of this “even more so because you see the day drawing near.” As the second appearing of Christ approaches, the urgency of mutual encouragement grows, not diminishes.

It is worth staying with this exhortation for a moment, because it has remarkable contemporary relevance. The tendency in our own time to drift away from the gathering of the church, to think of Christian life as primarily individual, or as something that can be adequately sustained through podcasts and streaming services, is exactly the tendency the writer is naming here. Some in his own community were abandoning their meetings. He warns against it. The gathering of the saints is not optional equipment for the Christian life; it is the setting in which the Christian life is actually lived, because it is where Christ Himself serves His people. In the Divine Service He speaks His Word, declares His absolution, and gives His body and blood in the Supper. The Word preached, the sacraments administered, the fellowship of believers, the mutual encouragement of brothers and sisters: these are the ordinary means by which God keeps us drawing near and holding fast. To stop meeting is to starve the faith we are trying to keep. The writer saw it then. It is no less true now.

The Severity of Deliberate Sin

Now the passage turns sharp. “For if we deliberately keep on sinning after receiving the knowledge of the truth, no further sacrifice for sins is left for us, but only a certain fearful expectation of judgment and a fury of fire that will consume God’s enemies.”

This is the fourth warning passage of Hebrews, and it is in some ways the most severe. The writer says that for those who deliberately keep on sinning (willfully, knowingly, with settled persistence) after having received the knowledge of the truth, no further sacrifice for sins is left. Christ’s sacrifice, which the whole letter has been declaring sufficient, becomes inaccessible to those who deliberately turn from the truth they have known. Not because the sacrifice itself has lost any of its power, but because the one who rejects it has closed himself against the only means by which its benefits come.

Read the warning carefully, and notice what it does and does not describe. “Deliberately keep on sinning” renders a strong Greek construction. It denotes ongoing, willful, settled sin, sin that has become a way of life, not the particular failures that every Christian commits and confesses. The writer is not saying that a Christian who falls into sin and confesses it in faith loses salvation; that would contradict everything Hebrews has been arguing about the sufficiency of Christ’s once-for-all sacrifice. But neither is the warning empty. Our Confessions teach that the once-justified can lose the Holy Spirit (Augsburg Confession XII), and that when a Christian gives himself over to sin against his conscience and lets it rule, faith and the Spirit depart (Smalcald Articles III.3). Persistent, impenitent unbelief destroys faith. That is the condition the writer is describing, the same condition he described in chapter 6: the settled, willful apostasy of one who has known Christ and deliberately turned away from the only sacrifice there is. And the same article of the Augsburg Confession holds the other truth just as firmly: those who have fallen receive forgiveness whenever they return in repentance, and absolution must not be denied them. Wherever God grants repentance, the door stands open.

And the condition of such a person, the writer says, is grave. He “has contempt for the Son of God, and profanes the blood of the covenant that made him holy, and insults the Spirit of grace.” These are not light phrases. The word behind “contempt” literally means to trample underfoot. The apostate has not merely wandered off; he has trampled the Son, profaned the blood, and insulted the Spirit. All three persons of the Trinity are named, and the offense against each is specified. This is why the writer speaks of a fearful expectation of judgment. To reject Christ after truly knowing Him is not a small thing. It is the most serious condition a human being can be in.

The writer then draws a comparison from the Law. “Someone who rejected the law of Moses was put to death without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much greater punishment do you think that person deserves who has contempt for the Son of God?” Under the old covenant, certain offenses carried the death penalty, testified by two or three witnesses, as the Law required. The writer says: if that was the consequence of rejecting Moses, how much more will be the consequence of rejecting the Son. The comparison is a lesser-to-greater argument, the standard rabbinical pattern. Christ is greater than Moses (we saw this in Session 4); the consequences of rejecting Him are correspondingly greater.

“For we know the one who said, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay,’ and again, ‘The Lord will judge his people.’ It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” This closing sentence of the warning section is one of the most sobering in Scripture. God is a living God: not a distant philosophical abstraction, not a benign grandfather-figure who winks at sin, but the living God whose holiness is real and whose judgment is real. For those who have known His Son and deliberately rejected Him, falling into His hands is a terrifying thing indeed.

Now, as in Session 6, we receive this warning with all seriousness and with Lutheran pastoral instinct. If this warning makes you afraid, if you find yourself asking, “Have I committed this sin?” then do not look inward for the answer, and do not ground your assurance in the intensity of your fear. Look outside yourself to the promise the writer set down only a few verses earlier: “the one who made the promise is trustworthy.” If you still desire Christ, repent, and flee to His Word and Sacraments. Hebrews gives you no reason to apply this warning as a verdict against you. Receive the absolution spoken to you in Christ’s name, come to His table, and hold fast to the promise. The writer knows the warning must be heard this way, which is why, in the very next verses, he turns to his readers with a remembrance of their faithfulness and a call to endure. The warning was necessary; the warning has done its work; now the encouragement comes.

Remember the Former Days

“But remember the former days when you endured a harsh conflict of suffering after you were enlightened. At times you were publicly exposed to abuse and afflictions, and at other times you came to share with others who were treated in that way.”

The turn is immediate. Having warned severely, the writer now turns to his readers and asks them to remember their own history. The former days, the days after they were first enlightened by the gospel, were hard. They suffered. They were publicly shamed. They faced affliction. And they endured. Some of them were directly the targets of persecution; others stood in solidarity with those who were, sharing in their suffering. This was their faith at work in its early form, and it was genuine faith. The writer wants them to remember it, not as a nostalgic backward glance, but as evidence that the faith they hold is real. If they endured then, they can endure now.

“For in fact you shared the sufferings of those in prison, and you accepted the confiscation of your belongings with joy, because you knew that you certainly had a better and lasting possession.” This is a remarkable memory. The readers had stood with fellow Christians in prison and shared their sufferings. They had accepted the confiscation of their belongings, and accepted it with joy, a loss that was very likely a direct consequence of their identifying with persecuted Christians. And they had done all of this because they knew something. They knew they had a better possession, a lasting one, one that the world could not confiscate. The backbone of their endurance was eschatology. They knew where their real inheritance was. And because they knew, they could let earthly possessions go.

The writer is not idealizing their past. He is reminding them of what was true, of how the gospel actually worked in them under pressure. And he is doing so in order to press the exhortation: “So do not throw away your confidence, because it has great reward. For you need endurance in order to do God’s will and so receive what is promised.” Do not throw away your confidence. You had it before, under circumstances harder than the ones you face now. You have it still. Hold onto it. The reward is great. You need endurance, not because the work is still undone (Christ has done the work), but because the living out of the finished work takes a lifetime, and the lifetime will test you.

This is one of the mature pastoral moves of Hebrews. The writer does not shame his readers for any drift they are experiencing; he reminds them of what they have done before and asks them to do it again. The remembrance of past faithfulness is itself a spiritual resource. If God sustained us then, He sustains us now. If the gospel held us then, it holds us still. If we endured then, we can endure now. The pattern of endurance in the Christian life is not a one-time heroic effort but a repeated return to the same source: the same Christ, the same promises, the same Spirit who has been at work from the beginning.

My Righteous One Will Live by Faith

The writer now quotes a prophetic passage that braids together Isaiah 26 and Habakkuk 2. “For just a little longer and he who is coming will arrive and not delay. But my righteous one will live by faith, and if he shrinks back, I take no pleasure in him.”

Two great Old Testament passages woven together. The opening words, “just a little longer,” echo Isaiah 26:20. The rest comes from Habakkuk 2:3–4 in its Greek form: first the promise that he who is coming will arrive and not delay, and then the prophecy Paul quotes in Romans and Galatians as the foundational statement of justification by faith: “my righteous one will live by faith.” The writer of Hebrews sets the promise and the prophecy side by side. He who is coming will arrive; in the meantime, the righteous one lives by faith. The Christian life, between Christ’s first coming and His second, is lived by faith in the coming one who has already come and will come again. Faith is the mode. Faith is the means. Faith is how the life between the two appearings actually gets lived.

And the flip side of the prophecy: “if he shrinks back, I take no pleasure in him.” The writer is not adding to Scripture; he is quoting the prophets, and he is pressing their word into the situation of his readers. Shrinking back is a real possibility, and God takes no pleasure in those who shrink back. But here the writer makes one of the definitive declarations of Christian identity: “we are not among those who shrink back and thus perish, but are among those who have faith and preserve their souls.”

Read that sentence carefully. The writer does not say, “I hope we are not those who shrink back.” He does not say, “If we are careful, we may not be.” He says, “We are not.” He places himself and his readers together, and he names their identity. They are people of faith. They preserve their souls by faith. The shrinking-back is not their way. This is not bravado; it is pastoral clarity. The writer has warned sharply, remembered past faithfulness, called for endurance, and now he declares what is true of them as those who belong to Christ. They are of the faith-having kind, not of the shrinking-back kind. He says so, and he believes so, and he wants them to believe so too.

This is how the passage ends. Not in anxiety. Not in threat. Not in uncertainty. In a declaration of identity. We are among those who have faith. We preserve our souls by faith. This is who we are. And this identity-declaration is the setup for chapter 11. Having named his readers as people of faith, the writer is about to unpack, at length, what faith is and how it has worked in the saints who have gone before. The next session will read like a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, testifying that faith is the way we have always belonged to God, and that the way is still open, still sufficient, still alive.

Gathering the Threads

A rich passage, and its shape matters as much as its content. Five movements, held together by the logic of “therefore.”

The first is the three exhortations. Let us draw near, in the assurance that faith brings, on the basis of Christ’s finished work and our baptismal cleansing. Let us hold unwaveringly to the hope we confess, because the one who made the promise is trustworthy. Let us spur one another on to love and good works, not abandoning the gathering of the saints, encouraging each other all the more as the Day approaches. Three practical applications of the theology of chapters 1–10.

The second is the warning. For those who deliberately keep on sinning after receiving the knowledge of the truth, no further sacrifice for sins is left. This is the fourth and final warning of the letter, and it is addressed to the same condition as the warning of chapter 6: the deliberate, settled rejection of Christ after truly knowing Him. It is real, and it is fearful. But it is not a verdict to pronounce over the troubled believer who still clings to Christ. It describes the one who has turned away from the only sacrifice there is. And wherever God grants repentance, even to the fallen, absolution is not to be denied.

The third is the remembrance. The readers endured hard struggles in their early days: publicly exposed, afflicted, sharing the sufferings of prisoners, joyfully accepting the loss of property. The writer reminds them that they have faith that works under pressure, and he asks them to remember what God has done in them before, as the ground for trusting what He will do in them now.

The fourth is the call to endurance. You need endurance, the writer says, in order to do God’s will and so receive what is promised. The Christian life is long, and endurance is the posture that gets us through it. Not heroic strength, not unbroken certainty, but the repeated return to the same Christ, the same promises, the same Spirit who has been with us from the beginning.

The fifth is the declaration of identity. We are not among those who shrink back. We are among those who have faith and preserve their souls. Faith, not shrinking, is the Christian way. And faith is what the next chapter will unpack for us: the cloud of witnesses who have gone before, showing us, by the way they lived, what living by faith actually looks like.

The pastoral shape of the passage is worth holding on to. Exhortation, warning, remembrance, endurance, identity. Not a linear march from one to the next, but an integrated whole, each movement feeding the others. The warning serves the exhortation. The remembrance serves the endurance. The identity serves the whole. And everything rests, finally, on Christ’s finished work. Draw near because He has opened the way. Hold fast because He is faithful. Spur one another on because He has gathered you into a household. Endure because He is coming. And know who you are: you belong to the faith-having people, preserved by His grace and kept to the end.

For Discussion

1. The writer roots his three exhortations in what Christ has already done: the opened way, the appointed priest. How does grounding practical Christian living in the finished work of Christ change its character compared to grounding it in our own resolve or duty? Where do you notice the difference in your own life?
2. “Not abandoning our own meetings, as some are in the habit of doing.” The warning against abandoning the gathering is as relevant now as it was then. What pressures in our own time tend to pull Christians away from the regular assembly of the church? What have you found most helpful in keeping faithful to it?
3. The fourth warning passage is the sharpest in the letter. Based on the pattern we have followed from Sessions 2, 4, and 6, how do we read this warning faithfully, without softening it, and without turning it into a verdict against troubled consciences? When the warning frightens you, where does it rightly send you?
4. The writer asks his readers to remember their former days of struggle and endurance. What role does remembering God’s past faithfulness (in your own life, or in the life of your church) play in keeping you faithful now? What would it look like to practice this kind of remembrance deliberately?
5. “You need endurance.” The Christian life requires endurance, not because Christ’s work is incomplete but because living out a finished work across a long life will test us. Where in your life are you most aware of needing endurance right now? What sustains you in the places where endurance is required?
6. “We are not among those who shrink back and thus perish, but are among those who have faith and preserve their souls.” The writer declares his readers’ identity with confidence. What does it mean for a pastor, or for a Christian friend, to declare your identity for you when you are tempted to doubt it yourself? Where have you needed someone to say, “this is who you are,” and where has that declaration done its work?

Looking Ahead

Session 12 takes up Hebrews 11, the great faith chapter. The writer unpacks, at length, what it means to live by faith, giving a roll call of saints from Abel through the prophets, each one named, each one witnessed by God as having faith, each one pointing to what faith actually looks like in the lived experience of God’s people. The chapter is long and the examples are many. We will not treat every figure in detail; we will select carefully and let the chapter’s cumulative force carry us.

Before next session, read Hebrews 11 in full. Notice the repeated phrase “by faith,” and count how many times it appears. Notice which figures get one sentence and which get a paragraph. Notice the summary at the end (11:39–40): all of them were commended for their faith, yet they did not receive what was promised, because God had provided something better for us. The chapter is not a gallery of heroes; it is a cloud of witnesses surrounding the Christian who is still running the race.

Closing Prayer

Lord Jesus Christ, our great high priest over the house of God: by Your blood You have opened for us a fresh and living way to draw near. Help us to draw near with sincere hearts in the assurance that faith brings, to hold unwaveringly to the hope we confess, and to spur one another on to love and good works as we wait for Your appearing. Where we are tempted to shrink back, remind us who we are: those who have faith and preserve their souls, not by our strength but by Yours. Keep us faithful to the end. Amen.