It finally happened! We had a great studio session last week, and now the first of two new 20 Minute Bible Studies will be airing tonight on Sirius/XM Family Talk (Channel 131) at 8:30 PM Eastern, 5:30 PM Pacific.
Here’s a preview in the form of this week’s morsel.
Turning Away from God
For it is impossible to bring back to repentance those who were once enlightened—those who have experienced the good things of heaven and shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the power of the age to come— and who then turn away from God. It is impossible to bring such people back to repentance; by rejecting the Son of God, they themselves are nailing him to the cross once again and holding him up to public shame.
(Hebrews 6:4-6, NLT)
In wrestling with this passage, a listener wrote us to say he was unable to conclude the type of person described wasn’t a true believer (i.e. truly saved) at some point. These people are called “enlightened,” those who have “tasted the goodness.” Yet the listener also didn’t know what to make of the idea that it was “impossible to bring such people back to repentance” in light of the doctrine of eternal security (i.e. assurance or ‘once saved, always saved.’)
We agree this is a challenging passage. As always, we began our study by going to SPACE and considering the verses that come before and after the passage above, which does shed quite a bit of light on what the author of Hebrews is saying. Since this is just a morsel, though, we’ll share only the initial questions we asked that began to unlock these verses and help resolve the contradiction.
What is repentance?
Must a person be in a state of repentance to escape eternal hell?
What this ultimately comes back to is the difference between a milk understanding of the Word and a meat understanding. (Confused? Read this.) Spiritual newborns and those stuck in a state of spiritual immaturity can’t help but read every verse as being about whether a person’s spirit will go to heaven or hell. But mature believers understand that most of the New Testament is about whether a person’s soul will enter the Kingdom of Heaven — or end up in the place outside of it.
For more on Hebrews 6 and our answers to the questions above, check out the full 20-Minute Bible Study tonight! Don’t have Sirius/XM? No problem. Click below to stream the lesson on SoundCloud, or go here.
Until next time, may “the Word of Christ dwell in you richly.” (Colossians 3:16)