Trampling on
This week's goodness is on Hebrews 10:26-31:
These verses are the sort where you read them and you think "That can't be right. I must have misread it." How can there be condemnation after Christ's sacrifice? He's paid the price for everything. What could we possibly do that would bring God's judgment on us after that powerful a sacrifice has been made?
There are two things, actually. The first is one people are familiar with, and that's the whole "Judge not, lest you be judged by the same measure" thing. Accepting the sacrifice for yourself but not for others will cause it not to apply entirely to you either. If you're a hardhearted person who loves to point out flaws in others and has no patience for them, but refuses to see your own faults, you may find yourself suffering needlessly as a result.
But that's not what these verses are talking about. These verses are talking about the other thing, which is sinning deliberately and consciously, after you've been given a chance to change, knowing it's wrong and just not caring. It's deliberate willful sinning, not accidental or ignorant sinning. It's the attitude that God can't punish you because of Jesus' sacrifice, so you're going to just do whatever you want and there's nothing he can do about it. The gate to freedom is left wide open, but you remain in your filth because you think it will always be open. It's looking God in the eye and doing what he told you not to do. You're almost daring him to strike you, testing his limits, challenging him to a showdown, a battle of wills, you versus the almighty. It's incredibly foolish, but people do it.
I thought of a parable about this: There was once a poor young man who was in search of a wife. He meets a beautiful girl, and falls in love with her. He sees her once a week and looks forward to their meeting. He begins to work two jobs to be able to afford to propose marriage to her, and after selling everything he owns, he has enough to buy her a ring. She accepts his proposal and his ring and he is glad.
Soon afterwards, however, she sells the ring at a pawn shop and buys a plane ticket to go marry a different man, whom she loves more, and never speaking again to the young man whose sacrifice it represented. All the while, she'd been manipulating him, stringing him along in order to get what she wanted, and when she had it, she had no need for him anymore. In many ways, the person who deliberately sins, after Jesus paid for it to stop, is like the woman who takes the young man's love for granted and squanders his sacrifice in order to betray him.
There's a certain contempt in rejecting someone's gift. In many cultures, it's strictly taboo to refuse something that's offered to you, even if you don't want it. If someone hands you a drink, you'd better at least have a sip, because not to do so would be to slap the face of the person who poured it for you. In Jesus' case, he gave everything in order that we could be free of stuff that's bad for us and bad for him. How much more evil and contemptuous would it be to refuse that precious gift, not even making a gesture of thankfulness for what it cost? To just turn your back on everything God hoped for your lives together, in order to do something he desperately wants you to stop doing?
That's not to say that all sin brings God's judgment. Jesus' sacrifice paid for our sins. We repent, he forgives, we move on in a different direction. It's good. If God told you to quit smoking cigarettes, for instance, and you have a bad day and find yourself smoking one of the awful things, that's not the thing Paul is warning us about. You made an honest mistake. Admit it, throw the rest of the pack out, and start anew, courtesy of Jesus' blood. It's a beautiful gift, and it'll save your life if you let it.
What Paul is talking about is where you know for certain in your heart that God said to quit smoking, and you don't care. You make no effort to change. You smoke during church. You talk others into smoking with you. You compensate in your mind by eating healthier, or exercising more, or only smoking light cigarettes. But the bottom line is you know what God wants you to do, and you do the opposite, rubbing his face in your disobedience. You've rejected his sacrifice that gives you the option of making a different choice. You've declared yourself to be like God, a sovereign who needs no sacrifice because he is without sin and its consequences.
(I use cigarettes a lot as my example, not because I believe they are particularly wrong, but because I'm lucky enough not to have ever gotten hooked on them, and I know that others have been completely captured under their spell. It's a great metaphor for other kinds of sin which are just really difficult to get out of on willpower alone.)
Paul is like "Dude! You know that God from the Old Testament? It's the same God! The one who destroys people utterly because of his need for holiness! Remember? Are you sure that's the force you want to be toying with for your own amusement?" There are two halves of God's nature which I think we need to understand. There's the motherly side, which wants to hug us and kiss our wounds and forgive us and say everything is going to be OK, and there's the fatherly side that wants obedience and discipline and good character, who wants to shape us into someone as good as him. We hear a lot about mommy God but not as much about Father God. (And that's just me trying to explain something I've seen in terms of two people. God is so big that he is actually made up of three forms, father, son, and spirit. God hasn't changed in eternity. He's just allowed us to see more of who he is. We'll probably even find that there's more to him than that.)
The point is that it is Christ's death that has opened the gate to freedom for us. It will not remain open forever. Our days on earth are limited. Are we going to tell him his sacrifice was useless and unwanted? Are we going to trample on it as we run into the waiting arms of sin, knowing it's there and just not caring? Are we going to walk up to the God of the universe, a God so awesome that people thought they were going to die just seeing a tiny shred of his overwhelming power and glory, and slap him in the face? Never! That's crazy!
So, like Paul says, please check yourself. If you've been pushing God's buttons, ignoring him to do what he doesn't want you to do, please stop now. Run to him while you still have time. It's a dreadful thing to fall into the angry hands of the living God. Better to run into his loving arms instead.
If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God. Anyone who rejected the law of Moses died without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much more severely do you think someone deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God underfoot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified them, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace? For we know him who said, “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” and again, “The Lord will judge his people.” It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
These verses are the sort where you read them and you think "That can't be right. I must have misread it." How can there be condemnation after Christ's sacrifice? He's paid the price for everything. What could we possibly do that would bring God's judgment on us after that powerful a sacrifice has been made?
There are two things, actually. The first is one people are familiar with, and that's the whole "Judge not, lest you be judged by the same measure" thing. Accepting the sacrifice for yourself but not for others will cause it not to apply entirely to you either. If you're a hardhearted person who loves to point out flaws in others and has no patience for them, but refuses to see your own faults, you may find yourself suffering needlessly as a result.
But that's not what these verses are talking about. These verses are talking about the other thing, which is sinning deliberately and consciously, after you've been given a chance to change, knowing it's wrong and just not caring. It's deliberate willful sinning, not accidental or ignorant sinning. It's the attitude that God can't punish you because of Jesus' sacrifice, so you're going to just do whatever you want and there's nothing he can do about it. The gate to freedom is left wide open, but you remain in your filth because you think it will always be open. It's looking God in the eye and doing what he told you not to do. You're almost daring him to strike you, testing his limits, challenging him to a showdown, a battle of wills, you versus the almighty. It's incredibly foolish, but people do it.
I thought of a parable about this: There was once a poor young man who was in search of a wife. He meets a beautiful girl, and falls in love with her. He sees her once a week and looks forward to their meeting. He begins to work two jobs to be able to afford to propose marriage to her, and after selling everything he owns, he has enough to buy her a ring. She accepts his proposal and his ring and he is glad.
Soon afterwards, however, she sells the ring at a pawn shop and buys a plane ticket to go marry a different man, whom she loves more, and never speaking again to the young man whose sacrifice it represented. All the while, she'd been manipulating him, stringing him along in order to get what she wanted, and when she had it, she had no need for him anymore. In many ways, the person who deliberately sins, after Jesus paid for it to stop, is like the woman who takes the young man's love for granted and squanders his sacrifice in order to betray him.
There's a certain contempt in rejecting someone's gift. In many cultures, it's strictly taboo to refuse something that's offered to you, even if you don't want it. If someone hands you a drink, you'd better at least have a sip, because not to do so would be to slap the face of the person who poured it for you. In Jesus' case, he gave everything in order that we could be free of stuff that's bad for us and bad for him. How much more evil and contemptuous would it be to refuse that precious gift, not even making a gesture of thankfulness for what it cost? To just turn your back on everything God hoped for your lives together, in order to do something he desperately wants you to stop doing?
That's not to say that all sin brings God's judgment. Jesus' sacrifice paid for our sins. We repent, he forgives, we move on in a different direction. It's good. If God told you to quit smoking cigarettes, for instance, and you have a bad day and find yourself smoking one of the awful things, that's not the thing Paul is warning us about. You made an honest mistake. Admit it, throw the rest of the pack out, and start anew, courtesy of Jesus' blood. It's a beautiful gift, and it'll save your life if you let it.
What Paul is talking about is where you know for certain in your heart that God said to quit smoking, and you don't care. You make no effort to change. You smoke during church. You talk others into smoking with you. You compensate in your mind by eating healthier, or exercising more, or only smoking light cigarettes. But the bottom line is you know what God wants you to do, and you do the opposite, rubbing his face in your disobedience. You've rejected his sacrifice that gives you the option of making a different choice. You've declared yourself to be like God, a sovereign who needs no sacrifice because he is without sin and its consequences.
(I use cigarettes a lot as my example, not because I believe they are particularly wrong, but because I'm lucky enough not to have ever gotten hooked on them, and I know that others have been completely captured under their spell. It's a great metaphor for other kinds of sin which are just really difficult to get out of on willpower alone.)
Paul is like "Dude! You know that God from the Old Testament? It's the same God! The one who destroys people utterly because of his need for holiness! Remember? Are you sure that's the force you want to be toying with for your own amusement?" There are two halves of God's nature which I think we need to understand. There's the motherly side, which wants to hug us and kiss our wounds and forgive us and say everything is going to be OK, and there's the fatherly side that wants obedience and discipline and good character, who wants to shape us into someone as good as him. We hear a lot about mommy God but not as much about Father God. (And that's just me trying to explain something I've seen in terms of two people. God is so big that he is actually made up of three forms, father, son, and spirit. God hasn't changed in eternity. He's just allowed us to see more of who he is. We'll probably even find that there's more to him than that.)
The point is that it is Christ's death that has opened the gate to freedom for us. It will not remain open forever. Our days on earth are limited. Are we going to tell him his sacrifice was useless and unwanted? Are we going to trample on it as we run into the waiting arms of sin, knowing it's there and just not caring? Are we going to walk up to the God of the universe, a God so awesome that people thought they were going to die just seeing a tiny shred of his overwhelming power and glory, and slap him in the face? Never! That's crazy!
So, like Paul says, please check yourself. If you've been pushing God's buttons, ignoring him to do what he doesn't want you to do, please stop now. Run to him while you still have time. It's a dreadful thing to fall into the angry hands of the living God. Better to run into his loving arms instead.
Comments
Post a Comment