The Danger of Falling Away

by Bruce Mills

Sometime back a good friend approached me, concerned that it might be possible that a true believer in Jesus Christ might be able to lose his salvation. His concern arose after reading one of the most misunderstood passages in all of Scripture, Hebrews 6:4-6. This passage says, “For in the case of those who have once been enlightened and have tasted of the heavenly gift and have been made partakers of the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the good word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away, it is impossible to renew them again to repentance, since they again crucify to themselves the Son of God and put Him to open shame.”

Admittedly this is one of the most difficult passages in Scripture to interpret properly. Numerous views have been postulated as to how to best understand this difficult passage. But the key issue to keep in mind is that whatever view one takes, it must be consistent with the rest of Scripture.

After studying this passage and the various views that have been proposed to explain it, I have concluded that the individuals who are discussed in this passage are those who were never genuine believers, but who participated in the activities of the church, understood the message of the gospel with full understanding of its impact on their lives, shared in the blessings which came from the Lord upon those who were genuine believers, and yet never genuinely trusted in Christ as Savior and Lord, but instead chose to turn their back on him.

While the terms used in Hebrews 6:4-6 can be used of genuine believers, they are terms which can also be used of those who participate in the fellowship of the church but who have never genuinely received the forgiveness that Christ offers and submitted their lives to His authority. They have been partakers of some of the benefits that the Holy Spirit gives, but only in a peripheral sense; that is, because of their affiliation with genuine believers, they have seen what the Holy Spirit does in the life of a true believer, they have understood the gospel with full comprehension of its implications for their lives, they have received the “overflow” of the blessings which come from the Holy Spirit’s work within a group of true believers, and they have understood the message of God’s Word and the power of the coming age. But despite having all those benefits and that full revelation of the truth, they reject and walk away from it to their eternal perdition.

So let’s go through and examine each part of these verses and see if we can determine what they mean.

First, it says that the Jews whom the writer is addressing were “those who have once been enlightened.” That term does not conclusively mean “born again” or “made righteous.” None of the normal New Testament terminology for salvation is used. The enlightenment here has to do with intellectual perception of spiritual and biblical truth.

When Jesus first began His ministry, Matthew’s gospel tells us that this was to fulfill Isaiah 9:1-2 which says, “The people who were sitting in darkness saw a great light.” All who saw and heard Jesus saw this “great light,” but not all who saw and heard were saved. They were enlightened, but they were not transformed by that light. They had natural knowledge; that is, factual knowledge about Him. They experienced firsthand the power of His message and His miracles, yet they rejected the truth of who He was and His claim on their lives. The light of the gospel had personally broken in on their darkness, but most of them did not genuinely believe in Him.

The same is true of those being discussed in Hebrews 6:1-8. They were enlightened but not saved. Consequently, they were in danger of losing all opportunity to be saved and, instead, of becoming apostates. They are just like those Peter discussed in 2 Peter 2:20-21— For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world by the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and are overcome, the last state has become worse for them than the first. For it would be better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than having known it, to turn away from the holy commandment handed on to them.

Next, the writer says that this group had not only seen the heavenly light, but had “tasted of the heavenly gift.” There is an interesting Greek word, horaō, which is translated in our English Bibles as “to see.” But the implication of this word is more than just “to see.” It is better understood as “to see with understanding”; that is, to see something with comprehension as to the meaning and purpose. In Hebrews 3:7-11, another warning passage which is parallel to the Hebrews 6 passage under discussion, the writer uses horaō in describing how the Israelites in the wilderness responded to the Lord. Here was a group of people who were led by God’s Shekinah glory in the cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night. They had the blessings of God given to them via manna from heaven and water from a rock. They were the beneficiaries of all of God’s blessings upon them. Yet the writer warns his Hebrew readers: “Today if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts as when they provoked Me, as in the day of trial in the wilderness, where your fathers tried Me by testing Me, and saw (horaō) My works for forty years. Therefore I was angry with this generation, and said, ‘They always go astray in their heart, and they did not know My ways’; as I swore in My wrath, ‘They shall not enter My rest.’”

So here was a group of people who were enlightened by God and received all of His blessing. They saw and understood His works for forty years! That means they understood that what they saw was God at work. They understood His purposes and meaning for them, and yet they still rejected His leadership and authority over them. And the sad result is that God killed all of them in the wilderness and none of them entered into His rest. After forty years, they still did not believe and trust Him; they only followed Him for the blessings He gave them.

And the writer of Hebrews concludes that warning passage in chapter 3 with these words: “Take care, brethren, that there not be in any one of you an evil, unbelieving heart that falls away from the living God” (3:12). That is the same message as that found in Hebrews 6:1-8. The writer is saying, “Don’t be like those who were enlightened and tasted God’s heavenly gift (a parallel to the manna), and partook in the pouring of blessings from the Holy Spirit (a parallel to the water from the rock; i.e., the Holy Spirit is often compared to water in the NT; examples: Luke 3:16, Acts 2:33), heard the message of God, and saw the demonstrations of His power, yet walked away. If you do, you will never be able to repent.”

So these verses do not teach that a true believer can lose his or her salvation. Instead, they serve to warn those who, with full knowledge and understanding of who Jesus Christ is, what He has done, and have been the beneficiaries of His blessings by their association with believers, continue to reject Him as their Lord and Savior.

The Law and the Gospel

by Bruce Mills

I have been studying Romans 7:7-13 in preparation for teaching in my adult Sunday School class. As I have dug into this passage and read what great Bible teachers such as John MacArthur, Leon Morris, James Montgomery Boice, and Douglas Moo have written in their commentaries, I have been struck by the gravity of what Paul has to say in this passage as it relates to the gospel that is typically presented in our contemporary culture.

Romans 7:7 states, "What shall we say then? Is the Law sin? May it never be! On the contrary, I would not have come to know sin except through the Law; for I would not have known about coveting if the Law had not said, 'You shall not covet.'" Paul clearly states that man becomes aware of the gravity of his sinfulness through an examination of the Law. So it would seem that using the Law as a means of evangelism is extremely important.

I think we would agree that the typical attitude that most people have about their spiritual condition is to sort of shrug off any question about it with an answer such as, “Oh, I do some bad things but God couldn’t send a good person like me to hell. I think my good things outweigh my bad things. I’m very religious, I try not to do things that hurt or harm others,” and so forth. You’ve heard it all.

But when a person comes face-to-face with the full reality of God’s moral Law, sin is seen for what it really is, and that is what is absolutely necessary to drive a person to salvation. For evangelism, preaching, teaching, or witnessing to be effective, you must bring people under the tyranny of the Law. What leads to true salvation is an understanding of the absolute righteousness and utter holiness of God. And the Law of God expresses His perfect righteousness and holiness and puts a demand on every soul that if you break this Law in one place, you’re damned. What leads to true salvation is an overpowering, frightening sense of the implications of breaking the Law. Truth about righteousness and holiness and sin and judgment is what awakens the slumbering sinner.

You can’t just go to people sitting out there thinking they’re pretty good and say, “By the way, Jesus would like to come into your life and make you happy.” That’s the wrong approach. Long before you talk about what Jesus is prepared to do for the sinner, you’ve got to talk about the sinner’s situation.

Salvation is not about making you happy, salvation is about delivering you from the consequence of violating the Law of God. And the language of evangelism is the language of Law and sin and guilt and curse and judgment and fear.

Let me say it this way: the most necessary and the most successful evangelism is that which aims at a radical conviction of sin. And sinners will not become concerned about their sins until they are face-to-face with God and His holy Law. The great Bible teacher, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones stated, “The sinner is a monstrosity in God’s universe and he needs to be aware of it.”

Why is anybody going to change his life if he has no fear of God? We have to alarm the sinner. We have to activate his conscience by informing him about the truth; not by letting him have a conscience that responds only to a watered down morality that he has been taught by the world.

We have to take the sinner, turn him face-to-face with the Law, hold it up like a mirror, and make him see the standard of perfect righteousness. Jesus said, “You are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48). We have to preach righteousness and Law. That’s how people understand the awfulness of their sin, and they understand the consequence of their sin, and the helplessness in which they exist. When conviction of sin is absent, conversion is usually false.

We need to recognize that the initial objective for evangelism is not to get people to be attracted to Jesus. The initial effort in evangelism is not to get people to be attracted to the happy life of a Christian. Salvation doesn’t come that way. The objective is to bring upon the sinner a fear of the judgment of God upon him for his violations of God's holy Law that are going on all the time in his life. What we want to do is convict that person by the work of the Spirit and the Word through us so that he comes to a place of such conviction and fear and dread of divine wrath that he desires to flee to the rescue available in Christ.

And then, after a person comes to saving faith in Christ, the on-going, continuing exposure to the holy Law of God through the pages of Scripture is what drives the saved person toward sanctification. So I am convinced that we must preach the Law. We must preach the Law to bring sinners under conviction that they might be saved, and we must uphold the Law to bring Christians under conviction so that they might pursue the path of sanctification.

The whole effort of the Law comes down to this: it is to bring men to a sense of their sin so that they know they need to be saved and they know they need to be sanctified. As John MacArthur has stated, "It is to produce in them a permanent beatitude attitude in which they mourn over their sin and feel inadequate, unworthy, and weak."

Preach the Law to the lost. Preach the Law to the saved. It is the Law that drives the lost to justification. It is the Law that drives the saved to sanctification. Where there is absence of conviction, there is absence of repentance. Where there is absence of repentance, there is no salvation and there is no sanctification.