Over the last two weeks we’ve been looking at the warning passage in Hebrews 10:26-31. It is indeed a frightening warning. We’ve noticed that this is a warning to an apostate, one who (1) willfully and (2) consistently (3) reject Jesus Christ and His sacrifice for sins, although (4) one has been exposed to the truth and convicted by the Spirit (vv. 26, 29).
This comes from Hebrews 10:26-31
26 For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, 27 but a fearful expectation of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries. 28 Anyone who has set aside the law of Moses dies without mercy on the evidence of two or three witnesses. 29 How much worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one who has spurned the Son of God, and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace? 30 For we know him who said, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay.” And again, “The Lord will judge his people.” 31 It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
In the process of going through this passage we have asked and answered several questions:
First, who is the apostate?
Second, what is his or her doom?
Third, why is this doom so severe?
Finally, today, how can the apostate be certain of such doom?
We saw that an apostate is not a normal sinner, but one who has been exposed to the gospel, likely more than once, and likely even has experienced Christian fellowship and the ordinances and gospel preaching for awhile, but yet they have turned their backs on Jesus Christ, returning to the Old Covenant sacrificial system, relying on their own works and the sacrifices of bulls and goats.
We saw that the doom itself was a “fearful expectation of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries.” Rejecting Christ makes us enemies of God and as enemies we will face judgment.
This doom is so severe because we have received the New Covenant person of Jesus Christ, the New Covenant gospel of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ, and the work of the Spirit, yet with all that we have turned our backs on Jesus Christ. Old Testament apostasy received the death penalty, while New Testament apostasy receives eternal death, a much more terrifying prospect.
So, today we are going to look at what our author says about the certainty of that doom.
There are those who deny eternal damnation. Progressive Christianity, led by people like Brian McClaren and Rob Bell, deny the very existence of hell or claim that the real hell is life here on earth, when life involves suffering. Others want to say that we are annihilated soon after going to the lake of fire. But Jesus emphasizes the “forever” aspect of eternal judgment (Mark 9:43-48; Matthew 25:41, 46), which we also see in Hebrews 6:2.
That certainty is found in vv. 30-31.
30 For we know him who said, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay.” And again, “The Lord will judge his people.” 31 It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
Just as God is faithful to keep His promise to save, so He is faithful to keep His promise of judgment.
In verse 30, in order to drive home the terror of judgment, the author quotes loosely from the Song of Moses in Deuteronomy 32:35, 36—“For we know him who said, ‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay.’ And again, ‘The Lord will judge his people’” (cf. Romans 12:19). The phrases appear to be proverbial and were undoubtedly understood by everyone in the church. Clearly, judgment is inevitable, and it is impartial. There will be equal justice for all.
In the gallery of Antoine Wiertz in Brussels, there is a collection of the most astounding and overpowering paintings—most of them exposing the brutality and horrors of war and the cruelty of conquerors, but some of them heralding the Empire of Peace and the triumph of Christ.
Walking down the hall where these awesome paintings hang, one is suddenly brought to a halt by a great painting entitled A Scene in Hell. With folded arms and familiar cocked hat on his head, there stands the figure of a man. There is no name given, but there is no need, for he is recognized as the Little Corporal from Corsica. On his shadowed face there is a look of astonishment, with just a trace of dread and fear, as he beholds what is all around him. By the light of the flames of Hell burning all about him, you can see behind him the ranks of the slain in battle. Little children stretch out clenched fists at the emperor. Mothers, with agony on their countenances, surround him, holding up the bleeding, amputated arms and legs of the slaughtered. On the faces of the children, the wives, and the mothers are depicted rage, horror, hate, and infinite pain and sorrow. The scene is macabre, terrible, horrible! Yes, and that is just what Wiertz meant it to be, for it is Napoleon in Hell! The artist’s moral imagination has tried to picture Napoleon with his just deserts, an equitable punishment for a man who caused so much pain. (Clarence E. Macartney, Macartney’s Illustrations (New York: Abingdon, 1946), pp. 163, 164).
God’s judgment will be based on what each has been given. Those with greater knowledge, such as the apostates in the Hebrew church and in the New England church in Jonathan Edwards’s day, will be judged with greater stringency. Judgment will have an equity impossible with men, however, because God knows the very thoughts and intents of the heart.
Notice first that judgment is God’s prerogative. He says, “Vengeance is mine.” Vengeance belongs to God. This is a quote from the Old Testament, Deuteronomy 32:35. Vengeance is God’s prerogative. It is part of His government of things. Christians cannot play God or usurp God’s authority. We cannot govern the universe. If we take revenge on others, we assume God’s role of dealing with those who might persecute us. God’s justice is not retaliatory in nature, but He operates with perfect knowledge of the problem.
In Romans 12 Paul quotes this passage to argue against pursuing vengeance ourselves, as is our natural habit when we’ve been wronged. Instead, we should leave vengeance in God’s hands. When we “leave room” for the wrath of God to be exercised against those who hurt us, trusting that He will take care of these offenses, we keep Satan from getting a “foothold” (Ephesians 4:26-27) in our hearts and driving a wedge between us.
The second thing we see about God’s judgment here is that it is deserved. When God says, “I will repay” it reflects the fact that the sin committed deserved some kind of recompense.
Paul labored to show this truth in the first part of this letter to the Romans. Let me remind you of how he said it: “The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth” (Romans 1:18). Wrath does not come without warrant. It is deserved. The truth of God is known (Romans 1:19–20). And the truth is suppressed. And the fruit is ungodliness and unrighteousness. And on that comes wrath (Ephesians 5:6; Colossians 3:6).
He says it even more explicitly in Romans 2:5: “Because of your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed.” We are responsible. We are storing up wrath with every act of indifference to Christ, with every preference for anything over God, and with every quiver of our affection for sin and every second of our dull affections for God. (These last two paragraphs come from John Piper’s message, “God’s Wrath,” https://www.desiringgod.org/messages/gods-wrath)
“I will repay” is God’s promise to us. In Romans 12 it is God’s promise that God will deal with those who hurt us. Here in Hebrews it is a warning that we will receive certain punishment as repayment for our sins. You may wrong another person and somehow manage to escape his vengeance. But God will repay!
Even this fact can be a comfort to us. If someone has deeply hurt us, betrayed us, committed injustice toward us, we can be sure that one day God will repay. While God will bring judgment against the perpetrator, He will also bring comfort and reward to those who were hurt.
Paul Johnson, in his book Modern Times, details the Nazi war crimes against the Jews and other European citizens. His descriptions of Auschwitz where 25,000 Jews “were literally worked to death” and 2,000,000 were gassed with Zyklon-B, followed by “the ghastly search for gold and the removal of the teeth and hair which were regarded by the Germans as strategic materials,” then burned to ashes at the rate of “2,000 bodies every twelve hours,” defies the imagination. He explains the Nuremberg trial where German industrialists involved in the death camps were given remarkably light sentences and paid little reparations for those victimized. Then he asks the probing question, “But who is foolish enough to believe there is justice in this world?” [Modern Times, 415, 417, 422]. He is right. Vengeance belongs to the Lord; He will repay. That repayment may not be “in this world” or at this time, but it will happen. He says, “I will repay.” That is a promise.
The third thing we see here is that God’s judgment begins with “the people of God.” Some will consider that their involvement with the church at some point in their lives is adequate shielding from the wrath of God. But the next quote from Deuteronomy 32:36 explodes this deceitful notion: “The Lord will judge His people.” The implication in context is that the Lord discerns among his people. Just as in Old Testament Israel most of the people did not have circumcised hearts and died in judgment while only a remnant remained, so in the church today there will be many who seem to be Christians but the actuality is that the road to life is narrow and few there be that find it.
The visible church does not contain a pure body of genuine believers. As much as church leaders try, as closely as Scriptural principles are adhered to, absolute purity is impossible in this world. Tares will be found among the wheat. Goats are also a part of the flock of sheep. But the day will come when the Lord distinguishes between the wheat and tares, the goats and sheep. In that day there will be no more hiding or masquerading as Christians. What will that day expose about you?
Finally, we come to the grand statement of terror, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (v. 31). May we understand how dreadful and divine this is! You really don’t want to fall into the hands of the living God, not in this way.
Although the apostates had formerly been associated with God’s people, their rebellion has put them on the side of God’s adversaries (10:27). They will not escape. Leaving the fellowship and repudiating the sacrifice of Christ does not remove them from judgment, but rather, places them squarely in line for judgment! As Philip Hughes says (p. 426), “So far from escaping from God, the apostate falls into the hands of the living God: he abandons God as his Savior only to meet him as his Judge.” So the author concludes, “It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” He is trying, quite literally, to scare the hell out of them!
The Apostle John (Revelation 6:12-17) describes the terror of God’s judgment as it overtakes kings and commanders, the rich and the poor. After a great earthquake, the sun turns black and the moon turns blood red. The stars fall to earth and the sky splits apart. Mountains and islands move out of their places. Hiding themselves in caves and among the rocks of the mountains, everyone cries out to the mountains and to the rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who is seated on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb,for the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand?”
In this context, doing so is the most dreadful judgment one could imagine. If eternal life and the joys of heaven defy our abilities to describe them, then we must understand that the converse is also true. Eternal death and the terrors of hell are also beyond our ability to describe. The writer doesn’t even try. He just says it is “fearful” or “dreadful.”
The Living God has cosmic-sized, power-laden hands and is dreadful indeed. He will not be tamed by our postmodern repulsion for Truth, nor by our aversion to the concept of judgment. We must adjust ourselves to him or face the consequences. The great foolishness of walking away from his gospel, judging Christ as insufficient, lies in this: He has no greater means for dealing with sin. This sacrifice, this work on the cross, is the best work for dealing with our sins, and all other means are by nature inferior. (George H. Guthrie, The NIV Application Commentary: Hebrews, 367)
King David, after he had sinned against God by counting the number of fighting men in Israel and Judah, evidently viewed falling into God’s hands as divine judgment, because when God commanded him to choose between three alternatives, his wise reply was, “Let us fall into the hand of the LORD, for his mercy is great” (2 Samuel 24:14).
Very possibly this exact passage was on our author’s mind and governed the form of the words he chose. However that may be, for the true believer there is nothing better than to fall repentantly into the hands of God. His hands are our hope!
That is the difference between David’s hope and the terrible judgment our author mentions here. David falls into the hands of God as a repentant sinner, whereas the one who falls into the hands of God here in Hebrews is a defiant, hard-hearted rebel.
That makes all the difference. You can choose either to fall into God’s hands as a repentant sinner, or fall into God’s hands as a defiant enemy.
But to fall into God’s hands will be dreadful for those who have rejected him because, as we have mentioned, divine judgment will be perfectly equitable. The lurid picture of Napoleon does make the point. The horrible truth is that everyone will receive what is coming to him.
This will be dreadful because it involves separation from God. Union with God’s nature is bliss, but separation from him is horror.
It will be dreadful because it is eternal. If one could travel at the speed of light for one hundred years until he escaped this galaxy, and then travel for three thousand years at the speed of light to reach the next galaxy, repeating the process one hundred thousand million times until he reached every galaxy—eternity would have just begun!
The dread of eternal separation and punishment is inconceivably painful. This is an excruciating doctrine. Jonathan Edwards’s metaphors in Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God were not too strong, for the Bible is true! Our lives do hang by a mere thread. Eternity gapes before each of us.
To “fall into the hands of the living God” in this context is, therefore, to have resisted His love, refused His salvation, despised the warnings of His Spirit, and to have persisted thus past the point where God can consistently show further grace” (William Newell). There’s no way around it, folks. He’s talking about hell. Eternal condemnation. Separation forever from the presence of God and His glory and His grace.
But this dreadful judgment is met by the wonderful arms of Jesus, which he extends to us. Those arms were stretched wide on the cross so that he might embrace us. He was not only our atoning sacrifice, but he propitiates our sins, turning aside the Father’s righteous wrath. Jesus today still has those same human, atoning, propitiating arms—and all we have to do is fall into them.
And when we do, nothing can snatch them out of His hands (John 10:28-30). There can be no more comforting words to the Christian than to know beyond doubt that Jesus Christ and His Father have a doubly strong grip on us and we will spend eternity with Him in glory.
Sometimes people will say, “I don’t believe in a God of judgment. My God is a God of love.” If you subscribe to that view, then your “god” is not the living God who reveals Himself through His Word! In one of the earliest records of God’s revelation of Himself, He said to Moses, “”The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness,keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin” [So far we can all cheer. “Yeah, that’s my kind of God!” But keep on going] “but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.”
Note carefully who is most in danger of committing this terrible sin of turning away from Christ: it is those who knew the truth about Jesus and who had associated with God’s people! It is not those who are notorious sinners. It is those who think, “I’m a child of Abraham! I’m not a sinner like the Gentiles! I keep the Law. I offer my sacrifices. Surely that’s good enough! I don’t need a crucified Savior and His blood to atone for my sins!” In other words, it’s the church-going religious person who does not see his need for the blood of Christ! I hope that is not you, my friend.
Grace Still Amazes 